I know it's hard to ignore the sorts of things that you are citing -- the slurs and insults and attacks. But you have to.

You have no way of knowing who these people are, or what their real agendas are, or who they are really working for. If you allow yourself to be swayed into disliking Candidate A because Candidate A's supporters are acting like asshats on Internet forums, then you are allowing yourself to be owned by anyone with an interest in taking down Candidate A.

You could maybe do some research and figure out that some of them are sock puppets or freepers in disguise, but it's not worth the effort. Even that small effort means that they are making you waste your time.

Just ignore them. Don't base your judgment of any candidate on what some faceless person of unknown identity says on the Internet. Base your judgment on what the candidates do and say themselves. Otherwise, you're letting yourself be fooled.

Let me get this straight.

Rush and other operatives are urging Republicans to register as Democrats in the primaries in order to vote for Hillary, because they would rather have her as an opponent in the general election.

ShawnM and others would have us believe that this is a reason why Hillary is the best candidate.

There is a total disconnect there. The only way ShawnM's arguments work is if the Republicans are working an elaborate double-blind. That is, they secretly know (like ShawnM does) that Hillary is actually the stronger candidate, and they would rather run against Obama, but they are pretending that they think Hillary is weaker, and all this voting for her is supposed to boost Obama so they can beat him in the general.

Yes, thousands of Republican voters are voting for Hillary because secretly they know Obama is the weaker candidate. Yes, that makes sense.

There are two or three people who are hijacking just about every thread here to thump on the same points over and over. Right now it's MI and FL, over and over and over. Probably all the same person, and probably someone trying to sabotage Hillary by making her supporters sound like asshats.

When there's a clear pattern of this behavior, the editors should step in and start deleting off-topic posts.

...to be played over video clips of bombs falling from the sky onto Tehran.

Nice work, ladies...

I'm just confused that the exclusion of vegetarians from the study was even worth mentioning. Would a vegetarian possibly believe that cloned animal meat was more OK to eat than non-cloned?

I'm really curious -- if for some reason Hillary weren't in this race at all -- if it had been Obama vs. McCain ever since, say, Super Tuesday -- what would you be saying here?

Would your dislike of Obama have led you to support McCain all this time, despite the fact that his positions are farther from Hillary's than Obama's are?

...this article has prompted two types of letters in response: Those that agree with it, and those that prove it by example.

Has Salon given up on Editor's Choice stars today? There's a lot of chaff here.

Thanks to the Anonymous option being removed from the letters, it's possible to see that almost all of the people defending Airborne here are writing to Salon letters for the first time.

It almost looks like people are coming here and signing up just to defend the product. One of them is even named "airborneuser".

I smell a rat. Or maybe a flock of sock puppets.

Thank you all for your work on behalf of John McCain and the Republican Party.

...and if you don't think the Republicans have a hand in all this infighting, you're deluded. They have everything to gain from getting the two Democratic camps pissed off at each other.

Don't fall for it.

"the Obamateur"

- ShawnWM

"Spoken like a true Hilarite"

- 6Stringer

Those are only a couple of quotes I grabbed from this thread. I know they're not the best, but anyone who's been following this thing has seen a lot worse from both sides.

The best strategy for the Republicans at this point is to make both Clinton and Obama supporters so pissed off at each other that the projected 10-25% of them will stay at home, or vote for McCain, if the other candidate gets the nomination.

So please, PLEASE, if you are not a Republican agitator, stop attacking the other candidate's supporters.

And if you are going to keep attacking them, then you are a tool of the RNC, plain and simple.

Ha ha ha ha ha! Lookout Iran! Lookout Roe v Wade! Once the circular firing squad is done, it's bomb bomb bomb time!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

- I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

Amazing that highly visible public figures are still committing plagiarism at the level of a college freshman. Not even: high-schoolers are aware that with the number of armchair fact-checkers surfing the Web every day, clumsy plagiarism is bound to be found out and exposed. Especially if the original author is still alive and able to read. Why is it that these right-wing Luddite bumblers still don't get it? If you're going to plagiarize, be discreet, ferchrissakes.

Y'know, even if every single "Obama supporter" and "Hillary supporter" acting crazy and insulting to the other camp were a real supporter and not a Republican troll playing divide-and-conquer, it would still be counter-productive to add to the bitterness on both sides by attacking each other.

Stop the circular firing squad, please. Why would a supporter of either side want to "purify" the party by insulting and driving away the half of the party that supports the other candidate? Then we get President McCain. I think that's what a lot of the Anons want, honestly. Is that what you want?

If I promise to vote for Hillary if she wins the nomination, will you stop slagging on Obama supporters?