The Left's Passionate Disrespect

Michael Reagan, the conservative radio host, has issued a manifesto for a "New Reagan Revolution," which declares a commitment to expose Democratic corruption, "making sure that no stone is left unturned, every dark corner is filled with light, and every illegal act is paid for with censure, impeachment, recalls, investigations, and jail time for every criminal we expose in Washington, D.C."

Matt Stoller is shocked! shocked! that Reagan is mobilizing for politics by other means so soon:

Anyone who thinks that the left is somehow equivalent to the right in terms of its commitment to anti-democratic norms is wrong. The left is passionate but ultimately respectful, the right does not believe that a Democratic President should be opposed through normal constitutional channels since Democrats are by their very nature criminals. It's almost a bit embarrassing; those on our side who claimed Bush should be impeached were roundly and are still roundly mocked by most Democratic leaders, even after eight years of radical lawless policies and torture planned by high level Bush officials in the White House. And yet, today, a conservative movement icon has called for impeachments of unnamed Democrats (though we can assume Obama is one of them), and the new administration hasn't even named a single cabinet member to even go through Senate confirmation, let alone taken office.

I've written a lot about the balance of grace between left and right, but note Patrick Edaburn's little experiment he performed as a commenter on two top partisan blogs, Daily Kos and Redstate. Edaburn was harassed as a commenter by both sides for dissenting from the party line, but he has special words for the Kos community:

The responses to my comments were divided between the reasonable but opposed and the outwardly hostile (IE using language that I can’t repeat here). In this aspect Red State did a bit better than Kos ....

However, the degree of censorship from the sites themselves were strikingly different. Both sites required registration to post comments.

When it came to Red State I was able to use the same account for as long as I wanted, at least from the point of view of the web masters. I did have to change once or twice because of trolls but otherwise my comments were not limited by the site.

By contrast, I had to re-register on Kos so many times I lost count. Once you started expressing a view that was not in line with the views of the web masters you were banned. I find this a very disturbing attitude for a site that quite properly condemned the Bush administration for their overreaching civil liberties restrictions.

Censorship? The left is ultimately more "respectful"?

At least Stoller's not cursing about it.