If you only take offense when the president of your party is compared to Hitler, then you're part of the problem.

We need to punch back against the extremes of both the left and the right and define the terms of the debate ourselves.

Right now, politics follows the rules of talk radio - using conflict, tension, fear, and resentment to find new recruits.

I believe that the far-right and the far-left can be equally insane - but there's no question that in the first years of the Obama administration, the far-right has been far crazier. In part, this comes from parties being out of power - without the responsibility of governing to ground them, the activists and the ideologues take over.

When people tap into this politics of resentment, it usually ends ugly.

A wingnut is someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum - the professional partisans, the unhinged activists and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They're the people who always try to divide rather than unite us.

It's important to remember that Bush Derangement Syndrome on the left - comparing him to Hitler, calling him a terrorist and a tyrant - preceded Obama Derangement Syndrome on the right.