It's getting fractious out there and many of us are tired of it

Darius, the issue at hand is the apparent hypocrisy in various people (of both parties, BTW) calling for a change in tone after the Giffords shooting. The main beef from conservatives is that they refuse to be lectured to by those who also engage in heated rhetoric. Here's the thing: this appears to be a conflation of two separate issues. After the Giffords shooting, many of both parties choose to see this as a sign that our rhetoric really had gotten out of hand, and it was time for bboth sides to cool things down. This was good, although it's clear that Loughner's murder spree was motivated by general lunacy, rather than any coherent ideology. Certain media types, a lot of them Left-of-center, missed this, and blamed the rhetoric of certain conservatives. This was wrong, and stupid, and conservatives have grounds to be pissed about that. I feel the need to say "certain media types," because there is a tendency by some top paint with a broad brush.

Now, I think it ought to be clear that the tone of political discourse, on both sides, has gotten fractious, to use Simon's word. This was true before the shooting, and true after--those media types proved it when they engaged in their stupidity. Palin and others had grounds to outarged over the attempts to link them to the shootings, but took things to far when they engaged in the same stupidity.

The problem is, there were certain people who chose to poison the debate further, and there were those who tried to at least try and change things. Members of both parties. Now, the Right chose then, and still chooses to conflate the whole thing, and continues to see the whole civility camapign as an attempt by ther Left to silence conservatives, and a hypocritical one, due to past statements by the Left. This conflation is itself an attempt to further poison the debate, by a)ignoring the Right's own history of heated rhetoric, b)doing so while playing the victim, and c)blaming the entire Left for the actions of a few.

And that is my point: You, and a apparently a lot of conservatives don't believe both sides need to cool down--you argue that it's the Left that needs to cool it. FWIW, those on the Left who have a reputation for rhetorical bomb-throwing feel the same way about the Right, and also rejected any equivalence. The examples of violent rhetoric by liberals that are continually trotted as proof that the whole thing is bunk, miss the point: Guys like Kos or Krugman never bought into the civility pledge, and probably never will.

Biden's mistake is that he didn't call out his colleagues. If conservatives don't want to be subjected name-calling, then the only sure-fire way to stop it is to strive for a better tone, and call out those on their side that take things too far. Same for the Left. However, if you're going to rewrite history, and stoke up fake outrage, as if only the other side's hands are dirty, then spare me. It's boring.