We’ve been documenting the extreme hatefulness (racism, antisemitism, hate speech, conspiracy theories, you name it) that is overwhelmingly common among left-wingers and Obama supporters for years, and the New Republic’s James Kirchick points out the abysmal hypocrisy of the media—where this vitriolic nastiness has been completely ignored in their rush to demonize the McCain campaign: Who are left-wing haters to point fingers at John McCain?

Since 9/11, major anti-war rallies have included people holding signs and puppets comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Leftist writer Naomi Wolf, who has expressed fears that the feds were monitoring her children’s letters from summer camp, recently published a book titled, “The End of America,” which likens the Bush administration to a fascist junta.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann spews over-the-top, hateful rhetoric in his “Special Comments” on a regular basis. He has said that the Bush administration threatens America with a “new type of fascism,” referred to the GOP as the “leading terrorist group in this country” on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and has said that Fox News is “worse than Al Qaeda” and “as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.”

Have the journalists now bemoaning the low tactics of the McCain campaign and its supporters never set eyes upon the wildly popular Huffington Post? That Web site hosts countless angry rants, many examples of which are too vulgar to document in a family newspaper. In 2004, Nicholson Baker wrote a novel imagining the assassination of President Bush. Last week, Fox’s “Family Guy” depicted Nazis donning McCain-Palin buttons.

If these fringe (and most of them are hardly fringe) individuals don’t speak for American liberalism writ large – as most “respectable” liberals will tell us when confronted by the examples enumerated above – then the stray hecklers at McCain-Palin rallies cannot represent American conservatism.

(Hat tip:Nacy)