Medary.com

Lanny Davis, sensible Democrat extraordinaire, discovers to his horror that the left wing of his own party are totally nuts:

My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing--in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against "communists and their fellow travelers." The word "McCarthyism" became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right's fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a "communist" or "socialist" who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.

I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years--with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage--I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

As Mr. Davis notes in his OpinionJournal article, he is relating some of the milder invective tossed his way by the out-of-control leftists who are very close to taking over the Democratic Party.  You can get a taste of the rhetoric by browsing some of the discussions at Daily Kos or (especially) at Democratic Underground.  A reasonable person will see that the discussion there is light-years more nasty and mean-spirited than on sites such as Free Republic or Townhall.

At some point, sensible people on both sides will become weary of shouting at one another and start talking, again.