It's nothing personal

I'm not sure it makes me feel better about how the left has always treated us on the right, but at least we know now it really has nothing to do with us personally or even, apparently, what we believe.

Jim Geraghty at NRO asks:

How did we reach the point where Air America calls Hillary a 'whore'?

From Mark Steyn:

Indeed. Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is "a f***ing whore" and the second is "David Duke in drag" merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. The people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.

There's something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who've been on the receiving end of the left's vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you're all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left's Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.

Geraghty ends with this:

Hillary gets called a "monster" by Obama's surrogates; Hillary's surrogates wonder out loud if Obama ever sold drugs. Today Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell speculates that Americans know only half the story of Barack Obama. Day in, day out, in this race it continues.
Is there nastiness on the right? Sure. But it’s hard to imagine somebody being the equivalent hero to the right the way Hillary was a hero to the left, so suddenly and severely pitched overboard – no, that’s not it, denounced and demonized — when somebody else came along.

Last night I said to Cam, "I like our base." The right had a vocal, mostly policy-oriented fight earlier this year, and tempers did flare. But bit by bit, week by week, those on the right are either making their peace with McCain. And in some cases, some righties aren't; but you rarely if ever hear them calling McCain a "[badword]ing whore" on the airwaves. By and large, a sense of decency and respect permeates conversations on this side of the aisle. There are exceptions, obviously, but the GOP race (thankfully) never turned into this bile-strewn mess.

They may be the stupid party, but they're also the decent party.

Indeed.