From Jonathan Bernstein:
If you blinked, you missed it, but there were actually two very interesting lessons to be learned from a brief flap on Thursday in which PolitiFact hired, then fired, former Democratic congressman Alan Grayson to be a “reader advocate.” Twitter exploded with complaints, and PolitiFact backed down. They’ll search for some other Democrat to pair with Republican David Jolly.
It seems that Grayson’s extreme partisanship, failure to respect the truth, and other poor behavior — including accusations of domestic violence and physically intimidating a reporter — have made him a rare point of partisan (and media) consensus.
Lesson No. 1: There’s nothing inherently conservative or Republican about radicalism, norm defiance, and other types of behavior that make Madisonian democracy difficult. I talk about Republican radicals quite often because there are a bunch of them in Congress who matter a lot, but that’s an artifact of all sorts of things, not something for which liberals (or centrists, or people at any other point on an ideological scale) are somehow naturally immune.
Lesson No. 2: The impulses may not be particularly Republican, but the two parties are very, very different.