Most recently, the political left accused conservatives of dumbing down the President’s health care bill. It did not usher in “socialized medicine” and did not call for “death panels.” The conservatives weren’t completely wrong. The bill – both by its provisions and by anticipated responses to what are the almost certain ways in which it will fail to achieve its intended purposes – dramatically increases and centralizes public control of health care markets including decisions on what treatments are and are not “cost effective.”

But the folks on the left also had a point. Although one cannot expect mass political movements to be marked by the dispassionate and, we hope, carefully reasoned discourse to be heard in the court room or lecture hall, supporters of the health care bill argued (with some justification) that the over the top rhetoric obscured rather than clarified. Tea parties, they said and still say, are exercises in political hysteria and ignorance in which honest differences of opinion are turned into existential conflict and ordinary political opponents are portrayed as extraordinarily evil. Mass opposition to disfavored legislation and politicians is fine as long as it is accurate and temperate. This is what they say.

Except when they don’t.