David Brooks is worried about us. The right-wing pundit writes in The Weekly Standard that he thinks we're getting a touch overwrought. Republicans, he tells us, are so reasonable. And American politics is so evenly matched. Why on earth are we always flying off the handle?

ACROSS THE COUNTRY Republicans and conservatives are asking each other the same basic question: Has the other side gone crazy? Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids? Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican party, and the state of the nation today....

When conservatives look at the newspapers, they see liberal columnists who pick out every tiny piece of evidence or pseudo-evidence of Republican vileness, and then dwell on it and obsess over it until they have lost all perspective and succumbed to fevers of incoherent rage.

Well, maybe it's because I'm clinically insane, as Brooks helpfully suggests, but it seems to me that when I walk into a bookstore I see conservative authors who pick out every tiny piece of evidence or pseudo-evidence of Democratic vileness and then dwell on it and obsess over it until they have a New York Times bestseller. Conservative authors accuse liberals and Democrats of Slander, Bias, and Treason, and of being Useful Idiots. They write about The Dark Side of Liberalism and ask Why the Left Hates America. They call us The New Thought Police. They accuse the only Democratic president of the past generation of Dereliction of Duty and High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But we're the hysterical ones.

Brooks shakes his head in wonder as he observes that

if you listened to liberal rhetoric, you would think America was convulsed in a Manichean struggle of good against evil.

Whereas, by contrast, conservatives say reasonable things like this:

We know that the Left's malevolent campaign to undermine the notion of truth itself comes at a frightful price. Their malignant hold over the intellectual life of this country must be exorcised, and men and women who are willing to speak the truth offer our only hope of reclaiming our culture from the grip of a hedonistic, reckless and destructive descent into nihilism.

--Tom DeLay

How many different versions of Satan, the devil, have you seen in your life? I mean, the comic book devil with the red face and the horns, seen that one. We've seen the Satanic devil of the horror films. We've seen the devil portrayed as just an average man, a human being, in the movie "Rosemary's Baby". We've seen the comic devil of TV shows. We've even seen the smooth, tempting devil in Hollywood moves. Is Tom Daschle simply another way to portray a devil?

--Rush Limbaugh

Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.

--attributed to GOP adviser Grover Norquist, but reportedly first said by former House majority leader Dick Armey

... Oh, gosh, I'm probably being a silly overwrought liberal just by posting this, hunh? Whoops! Sorry.