Last week, both conservative and traditional media outlets did their best to turn some hateful and inappropriate statements about Vice President Cheney by anonymous commenters at liberal blogs into a broad commentary on the left in general. As Glenn Greenwald predicted, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz devoted his column to the “scandal”:

But as Greenwald (and Arianna) pointed out:

Stray, anonymous comments prove nothing. And those who rely on them to make an argument — especially without bothering to make any effort to prove that they are reflective of anything — should be presumed to have no argument at all. That is why they are relying upon such transparently flimsy and misleading methods to make a point.

During a WashingtonPost.com chat on Thursday, a reader confronted national political reporter Lois Romano about the coverage: “Selectively quoting anonymous posters from any political blog is shoddy ‘journalism’ at its worst. What does Mr. Kurtz have to say to defend himself on this?”

Romano had nothing to say about Kurtz. Instead, she bemoaned the “new viciousness in the process often generated by the blogs,” and likened herself and other reporters to Cheney, complaining that “we are not spared” the “nasty, vulgar e-mail” produced by “liberal blogs.”

Romano: We are watching the blogs, and just this month The Post assigned a young reporter to cover Internet campaigning. There certainly is a new viciousness in the process often generated by the blogs. You need to know that we as reporters are not spared — if we write an article the liberals blogs do not like we will be inundated with nasty, vulgar e-mail — which has no impact on our coverage.

While “liberal blogs” are lumped together with a tiny unrepresentative sample of anonymous commenters, the hate speech by leading figures of the conservative movement is ignored: today’s Post coverage of the Conservative Political Action Conference makes no mention of Ann Coulter’s inflammatory “faggot” remark.

Megan McArdle versus Spencer Ackerman in a cooking competition. Will WIlkinson and Ezra Klein are also featured. Julian Sanchez delivers a hilarious introduction.

Joe Klein’s “you might be a left-wing extremist if…” list is quite revealing. A number of his items are somewhat strawmannish substantive positions. Many of them, however, rather plainly have nothing whatsoever to do with extremism of any sort. To wit:

1. Dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
2. Regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

I mean, there’s a term for people who express left-of-center views in a vulgar manner and it isn’t “extremist” — it’s vulgar. The sentiment “that asshole Bush ruined the balanced budgets of the 1990s all for the sake of his fucking tax cuts” is perfectly centrist. Similarly, whether or not you tend to mock people you disagree with about matters of religion is just a matter of politeness. But rudeness has no ideology. Under certain circumstances, of course, it’s important to maintain a certain standard of politeness, but there’s no reason to elevate this to a core ideological point.