Ah, so THAT's why I'm not paid to do this.

A short while ago, I engaged very briefly in debate with PJ of Reading, Writing and Ranting about namecalling on the right versus the left. My position was that rhetoric on many left-wing blogs is no more or less obnoxious than rhetoric on many right-wing blogs, but I didn't make my point terribly well and, for lack of figuring out a better way to say what I was trying to say, I dropped the subject.

Well, I've just discovered that Matthew Yglesias made the exact point I was groping around for back in June, here. I missed it at the time because I thought that Matthew's TypePad blog was going inactive when he moved over to Josh Marshall's TPM Cafe thing, but now I see that Matthew's been blogging in both places, as well as producing content for TAPped. Busy guy, that Yglesias fellow. Anyway, here's what he had to say:

I'm less certain that this is really true, but I think you see different kinds of viciousness from the left and the right. Your rightwingers are much more likely to say something substantively scummy about someone else -- flinging around casual accusations of treason and so forth. Your leftwingers, by contrast, are much more likely to engage in workaday meanness -- name-calling and so forth. This stems, I think, from the stylistic dichotomy between Atrios and Instapundit. Glenn's a really master of the artfully worded slander -- "they're not anti-war, they're on the other side" and so forth -- while Duncan has a much blunter approach -- "InstaHack," etc.

Of course, it's not at all hard to find the same kind of thing in Right Blogistan -- just check out Emperor Misha, Kim Du Toit and the like for regular examples of that sort of thing -- but anyway, there you go. In any case, I find it hard to differentiate between strongly implying that people on the Left are traitors (or to state it outright) and calling Barbara Bush a "bitch". Maybe that's my own personal failing, but I don't think so. (Especially when Mrs. Bush once referred to Geraldine Ferraro, then Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States, as being something that "rhymes with rich". I wonder what word she was groping for, there....)

:: In another vein, I wrote again last week about right-wing blogs blocking left-wing blog referral traffic (along with a way to get around it!), noting that I've never yet heard of a liberal blog blocking referrals from a right-wing blog. In comments to that post, Lynn Sislo noted:

I've haven't mentioned this before because I've been trying to remember the name of the blog in question. I definitely remember two or more years ago there was a far Left wing blogger who started blocking incoming referrals. I remember it well because the Right wing blogoshpere was all in a tizzy about it at the time.

Well, I've been around a while, and I don't quite remember anything like that. But I did get my memory jogged earlier today, and I recall way back in November of 2002, James Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review did something that I suspect is what Lynn's remembering: he announced a new policy regarding his blogroll. In short, he would no longer allow on his blogroll any blog that maintained a blogroll link of its own to Little Green Footballs. This really did have the right-wing up in arms at the time (witness this Steven Den Beste post on the subject, and scroll down to all the follow-ups, including one to Lynn's old BlogSpot blog!), and in all honesty, I even agreed that this was a goofy thing for James Capozzola to do.

Of course, in retrospect it's clearly even less important than it was at the time; with the rise of RSS aggregators and services like BlogLines, blogrolls have become a lot less important over time. I almost never surf other bloggers' blogrolls, and when I find new blogs to read, it's mainly by following links from the many blogs that I read already (like Lynn's) or by doing searches on Technorati or Google's new BlogSearch for posts about stuff that interests me. In fact, as of this writing, I couldn't tell you if a single blogger on my blogroll had LGF on its blogroll or not. If a major blogger, right or left, made such an announcement today, the response would probably be a big yawn -- especially since, when you get right down to it, Capozzola merely announced publicly the type of thing that we all practice tacitly anyway (while I don't specifically look at blogrolls, the possibility that a blog written by someone who would blogroll LGF would hold my attention is probably pretty low). But at the time, it actually was a fairly big deal.

The major difference between what James Capozzola did back in 2002 and what some right-wing blogs do now is in the direction it goes. For all the bluster directed at Capozzola at the time, there's a substantial difference between deciding whom you, as a blogger, are going to link and whom you, as a blogger, are going to allow to link to you. So while I wasn't wild about what Capozzola did, I don't think it's equivalent to referral-blocking.