Only if the response was littered with stupid shit and faulty reasoning to excuse a party from being discriminatory, homophobic, and immune to logic. I have my own opinions that I've come to based on life experiences and trying to be as informed as I possibly can. I find that one thing that is the same for both sides is a lot of people aren't informed. I find more conservatives, particularly when it comes to the media, have no real interest in the truth. These hearings and practically all of Fox News' programming is proof of that so I wouldn't call it anecdotal. They want an enemy, they want someone to be angry at. That way they can point and go "This is the problem with America!". That person or thing becomes the focal point and the lies spring up from there. If we let the right wing media tell it, the mainstream media is lying to the average american. Yet the right wing media DOMINATES the mainstream media. They ARE the mainstream media. Yet you could hear that sentiment in the hearings, over and over, that "The American people want to know!" phrase. It reminds me of when reporters write things like "Opponents say... blah blah blah" without actually citing opponents. Instead it's the way for the reporter to introduce a contrarian viewpoint, a lot of times it's their own.
Anyway, it's hard not to go off on a tangent about this and not include the media. I think the big issue here is critical thinking. People who take their news from Brietbart or the Blaze and taking it as fact are the issue. These sites are dumbing down public discourse because they do not require anyone to stop and actually THINK about what is being said. The same as from a super left wing organization. I saw something the other day from some blog called ifyouonlynews.com and they had this clip about Jeb Bush being speechless when asked about 9/11 and Benghazi. He wasn't speechless, he stuttered a bit, but the way they worded it, and the editorial content in the article made it seem like Jeb was complete fuck stick who couldn't string together 5 words to make a sentence, let alone answer the actual question. And what they wrote wasn't true. The same way Glenn Beck talks about people being rounded up into FEMA trailers, Breitbart saying the government is going to start chipping us so they can track us, or Sarah Palin talking about death panels. Anyone who stopped and said "... wait a second" in regards to any of this would see it's bullshit. The fact is this kind of "news" reporting creates a side who's members treat it like dogma. It basically turns politics into the NFL. It's "Go team" and it allows the obstruction we've seen take place over the last 8 years.
All these sites and news programs traffic outrage.
In regards to if both sides are the same, per my previous comment, I could see that flying in the 70s and 80s. Even in the 90s to an extent. But there has been one group of politicians who've led us into two wars, exploded the deficit, who don't want to raise minimum wage, who want it to be okay to discriminate against people based on their sexual preference, who want christian laws to supersede federal law, who want to let the banks do what they want even though they crashed our economy, who wanted to let the auto industry die, who don't want people to have access to healthcare, who want to regulate a woman's reproductive system, but do think a corporation is a person. It's pretty disproportionate.
