There's a simple cause of all this.

Salon publishes Camille Paglia. Matt Drudge links to her article, and hoards of Drudge (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Beck, et al) fans follow it. The charade is that Paglia is some sort of "liberal", and the schtick is hey, look even a big liberal like Paglia thinks Rush Limbuagh is right (quoting Limbaugh verbatim there) and so on.

That's a large part of why Salon letters fills up with comments starting with "You Libs" (or "You Lib's" more often) and so on. It's also why Salon letters, while fun to read and take part in, are not a serious discussion of any sort but always devolve into mud-slinging of the type you see only in the worst wide open sort of unmoderated forum. The editors do seem to delete the worst offenses (at least they mention doing so, but of course the posts are deleted so how to know, but I take them at their word on that one).

It's a shame because it ends up with extremes, with only those with the stomach for it from the left coming on to battle the hyper-right wing "you lib's" spewing right wingers (honestly, have you ever heard a progressive call oneself a "lib"? I always feel like replying by referring to "You conservs...".) (Unlike "cons" or "necons" which the neconservatives actually do call themselves. Or did).

And now, my keyboard is running out of parentheses so I'll be off.

Oh except only to add that it's a shame, because an actually and honestly conservative voice here, instead of the hideously dishonest and appallingly right wing Paglia, would be refreshing and a good addition. I think we have to simply admit that Salon is much more interested in a kind of wild tabloid (a word they proudly use to refer to themselves, and always have) atmosphere than a serious forum.

By the way, anyone who thinks this is some new degradation of Salon, they've published Paglia since nearly day one.

One of your last points is the crux of this, for me:

Obviously, mass rage can entail its own excesses and, and if unchecked, can lead to mob rule, a form of majoritarian tyranny (as Armando notes, its isolated, unrepresentative excesses (death threats!) are already being exaggerated to discredit the underlying anger itself). But we are far, far, far away from the point where unchecked public sentiment plays too great of a role in how our political institutions function.

...

It's a typical trick of the right wing machine to take something and exaggerate it to the point of absurdity, as a way of fear mongering using the imaginary.

The other recent example of this of course is the charge of Socialism and Communism anytime anyone talks about moving one smidgen away from the extreme opposite.

Any time there's any proposal to limit the extreme form of deregulated laissez faire capitalism, the right wing voice box starts yelling en masse "Socialism! Communism!"

Anyone who's lived in Socialist countries knows how absurd it is to claim that if we start putting any regulation at all into effect to counter the financial wild west atmosphere we've allowed it to become, we've instantly crossed all the way over to a system where there is no private ownership at all.

In the case of the angry mob fears, there is no better demonstration of the right wing coordinated and arranged attack. All over the place, the phrase was suddenly "pitchforks". No fewer than three pundits used the word pitchforks in their headlines in one newspaper, the Washington Post, in the space of one and a half days, that is, two one day, simultaneously, and one appearing the next morning. There were others in the NYT and of course in the WSJ and elsewhere. "Put down the pitchforks!" the headlines blared. "Look out for pitchforks." And so on.

Two points are worth noting here, the first you've covered, that is the utter hypocrisy of this charge when it's corporations that are the objects of anger, compared to the way anger at the unions was tolerated and encouraged.

The second is that the wording itself (Pitchforks!) appearing, in lockstep, everywhere, confirms that there really is a coordinated right wing machine and it still plagues us, giving the less-informed or casual news reader the impression of "hearing everyone saying the same thing" which therefore must be true, rather than realizing that this is a conscious effort by one small group to give exactly that impression, by blasting one phrase or even one word out through many compliant enablers in the media all at once.

That matchmaker show was one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen, I was captivated in a morbid curiosity sort of way for a couple of episodes, but then I couldn't take it anymore.

Living abroad you hear a lot of flack about how the US is populated by mostly shallow, uncultered near-illterates, idolizing nothing but money or what it can buy, including status objects masqureading as women, or vice versa, money drawers masquerading as men. Especially over the last eight years you heard this, and you spend a certain amount of time trying to gently defend your homeland, saying oh come now, that's just a stereotype.

Then you see a show like this and you want to throw up your hands, actually, you just want to throw up. And give up forever trying to defend anything. I still believe that we're mostly nothing like that but just the fact that these people exist and, if you went by what you see on this show, they seem to expect that pretty much anyone they meet will be like that also.... yikes. Terrifying. Well-described.