Or Conservatives and Liberals (if you still consider the Democratic Party liberal) this one huge difference is:
If the tables were turned and Democrats came up with some ridiculous shit like these birthers, the Republican Party wouldn't even honor it with a response, other than to demand that Democrats universally condemn the birthers within their midst.
We take the time to repeatedly offer these lunatics facts that they'll never, ever accept. They aren't fact based.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
The senior adviser to Bush referred to in this article is generally understood to be Karl Rove.
This is what we've been up against and we're still trying our best to reason with these sociopaths. Rove is correct in this regard, this approach will never work with people like Rove and today's Republican Party. In essence, Rove's statement is more a confession of guilt than a boast.