Yeah, folks voluntarily living in rigidly structured authoritarian societies where enforcing conformity is swift and brutal usually have more pleasant, less hostile conversations as a rule, in my experience.

I agree with Jay. Also, all of their candidates pretty much suck for them, so I'm pretty sure they've realized flaming is useless.

A year or so ago, before McCain lost the last remains of credibility he had left, he was on the daily show and was asked what he thought of cheney trying to defend torture.  of all people who knew torture wouldn't get you what you want, mccain would be that person.

he would not, jon stewart tried three times, he would not take the bait.  he said it three times, "we disagree, dick cheney is doing what he honestly believes is best for america and he and i respectfully disagree."

and that was it.

we're incapable of that.  we must call each other cowards.

look at how the dlc refers to the netroots.  it's sad.  it reflects very badly on them that they have to make snide comments about people's patriotism, and shit like that.

now people are gonna love i said that.

people aren't gonna love this:

now look at how feingold (before reid and he struck common gound over the last couple weeks) described other dems in congress who disagreed with feingold about the war.  it wasn't that other dems disagreed with him, 2 years ago he would not have had the maturity to simply say "harry reid is doing what he honestly believes is right for america, and on this issue, we disagree."  no.  he had to say things like "dems crawled in their foxholes."

and shit like that.

you are right.  there is a stark contrast here.

republicans disagree.  democrats not only disagree, they smear each other.  everything follows from a fundamentally flawed assumption:  all liberals secretly agree on everything.  any disagreement stems from a lack of resolve or a selfish malignant motivation.

it's sad.  on this issue we, all of us, are worse than the republican party.  i've even done it too myself.  the tendency to believe that everyone can see exactly what you see in the world but they lack the resolve to say so is a distinctly liberal progressive thing to be prone to.

i don't know why.  probably precisely because most of the time we are basically right.  about everything.

all i know is this war for the soul of the democratic party is CRUSHING the soul of the democratic party.

I find that they seem to offer the most timid support for a candidate and often with an apology at the same time (to those that may not agree).  

They are so used to having the candidate determined for them, and being told what to think by Rush and Hannity, they seem almost afraid to vocalize support until the outcome is certain.  I image that is how it was in the U.S.S.R. back in the day too.

Let's get a bit hip about this. These 'freeper' sites are presumably really more aptly deemed neocon sites. Snake pits! Mind you now there are good hearted 'conservatives', who I call paleos, who always have 'no-comment' sites. Examples:

http://www.theinternationalforecaster.co m/

http://www.infowars.com/

These folks are horrified of the neocon scumbags.

I think the progressive sites are largely infested with tons of stealth neocon 'trolls'. Also, they have a lot of rather cynical political junkies, and legions of screaming 14 year-olds to boot.

One must be acutely aware of the prevailing conditions if one wants to have a progressive site that enables commenting.

Are you kidding me. Whenever there is a slight dissent on FreeREpublic, I see a lot of snide attacks on that guy.