I think Rick makes an important point, but there’s something else to be added to the equation.

In the 1990s, the Mainstream media, Hollywood, academia and most of the elite cultural institutions considered “Clinton hatred” an undifferentiated blob of psychosis, ignorance, stupidity and bigotry. To hate Clinton was to admit to not being a serious person. Being called a “Clinton hater” was enough to make you entirely dismissable, your arguments and facts irrelevant.

That is simply not the case today. In academia, Bush hatred is considered not merely acceptable, but a sign of sanity (See the recent Hofstra conference on the Clinton Presidency, for example). In Hollywood, Bush hatred is a requirement. In the “objective” mainstream media, it’s still considered inappropriate to display such feelings openly (must not give the Huns an easy excuse to whine about liberal bias), but Bush haters are treated as important and respectable voices. One cannot simply write-off a “Bush hater” as someone totally ignorable. Democratic politicians — as Kathryn and Byron have noted here and elsewhere — can chummy up to Kos and Michael Moore without paying a price in the pages of the New York Times or on the nightly news. Michael Moore received hugs from leading Democrats at the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11 and he sat in Jimmy Carter’s box at the Democratic Convention. Howard Dean runs the party and he is the “respectable” face of the Bush haters. One could go on and on.

If even the most obscure rightwing website ran a “hate” poll of the sort the Daily Kos is running today during the Clinton years, we’ve be hearing about it on NBC News tonight and Frank Rich would get 6,000 words in The New York Times to ramble on and on about the Right’s “paranoid style” and whatnot.

Meanwhile, conservatives who did not partake in the conspiracy theories of the 1990s are lumped together with the fever-swampers. But, for some reason, E.J. Dionne and other liberal lights are under no obligation to denounce the lunatics on their own side.

It is a frustrating state of affairs.