Group loyalty is a big part of politics on both sides of the fence, but as far as lefty pundit Marcotte is concerned, it’s become so inflated on the right that it often crowds out crucial things like “basic common sense.”

In a Friday Talking Points Memo column, Marcotte asserted that “conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe ‘their’ people can do no wrong and to assume ‘liberals’ are some subversive force out to destroy everything. It’s mildly amusing when Republican voters are mindlessly preferring religious nutcases” -- the Duggars -- “to a centrist liberal who probably gave them health care."

Anger, sadness, and disgust have been nearly universal responses to Wednesday night’s apparent act of racist terrorism in Charleston, S.C., but Jeb Lund doesn’t think such reactions make sense coming from conservatives.

In a Friday screed, Lund argued that the Charleston shootings shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given that “American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings political. The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.”

From her years at Yale Law School until early in her Senate career, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s liberal credentials rarely were questioned. Since then, many on the left have come to doubt that Hillary is one of them, for reasons that include her support for the Iraq war and her alleged coziness with Wall Street.

Rebecca Traister believes that it’s been twenty-five, not fifteen, years since Clinton started backing away from liberalism, but in any event Traister’s message to the doubters is that Classic Hillary is back. In a Sunday TNR piece, Traister rejoiced that Hillary the presidential candidate seems to have abandoned “power-appeasing, over-careful politics” in favor of “leftward shifts toward sanity.”

Given that Hillary is “recalibrating to the left,” Traister contended, America is “facing a test: How much more—if at all—tolerant is this nation of difficult, disruptive liberal women, and how willing is Hillary to really commit to being one again? These answers will matter a lot to those American[s] who liked original Hillary—and haven't much cared for the revised versions.”

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature may soon weaken protections for tenured professors in the state’s university system. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall believes that Gov. Scott Walker’s enthusiastic support for tenure reform is “driven in part by right-wing ideology and in part by the palpable animus Walker himself holds to people who managed to get an education.”

Marshall asserted that Walker sees tenure reform as an attack on the philosophical strain of liberalism that undergirds “empirical thinking and new ideas,” especially in the scientific realm, and opined that as regards the system’s flagship university in Madison, the effect of the reforms would be “pretty much like just lighting [the campus] on fire.”

For most people, humor and comedy are meant to provoke smiles and laughter. According to Salon writer Scott Eric Kaufman, however, conservatives aren’t like most people, since “their version of comedy isn’t intended to be funny, it’s just meant to be mean.” It enables them, he alleged in a Wednesday article, to conceal their “awful thoughts” in supposed jokes.

Kaufman claimed that right-wingers’ deep pessimism precludes a sense of humor: “The situation they believe themselves to be in is perpetually dire…All they see are enemies who need notches whipped into them. They possess, in short, the mindset of an embattled bully being forced to live in a world in which the meek are rising against him en masse, and so they react as any cornered animal of meager intelligence would — they lash out.”

How do you become a “conservative folk hero”? It helps a great deal if you believe, and your fellow right-wingers believe, that liberals are picking on you, contended The Daily Beast’s Ana Marie Cox in a Saturday column.

Cox defined conservative folk heroes as celebrities or demi-celebrities “whose fame is not dependent on a celebrity-generating skill (acting, singing) but on a set of beliefs.” Her examples included the Robertsons from Duck Dynasty; Joe the Plumber; Ben Carson; and the Duggar family.

Their renown, she wrote, is sustained in part by a “network of conferences, straw polls and candidate cattle-calls,” but moreover they “find their credibility increases not via leadership but through victimhood. All criticism by mainstream voices becomes proof of worthiness—and the case of Josh Duggar exposes just how self-defeating the raising up [of] these folk heroes via victimhood can be.”

Never mind the vast right-wing conspiracy, suggests Michael Tomasky in the June 25 New York Review of Books. What Hillary Clinton needs to concern herself with are 1) a possible vast mainstream-media conspiracy and 2) her and her husband’s propensity for shadiness and avarice.

In a nearly 3,800-word article that’s ostensibly a review of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash but in classic NYRB fashion is more about issues related to the book in question, Tomasky delves into topics including Clinton Foundation fundraising practices; the Clintons’ whopping income from speechmaking; and how they should clean up their act regarding both so that they don’t impede Hillary’s presidential campaign.

Tomasky also analyzes, and largely endorses, the idea stated in early May by Politico’s Dylan Byers that “the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate).” Tomasky specifies one extremely prominent northeastern liberal newspaper that’s “worth keeping an eye on” given its putative record of anti-Clinton reporting.

It seems improbable that the left might have too high an opinion of a Fox News personality, but it’s happened with Megyn Kelly, argued Jack Mirkinson in a Wednesday article.

Mirkinson noted that liberals have enjoyed several “extremely fun episodes in which [Kelly] made mincemeat out of (usually male) right-wing pundits,” but claimed that those instances have “helped obscure the fact that, far from being some objective oasis in a conservative desert, [The Kelly File] is usually just as right-wing and authoritarian as anything else on Fox News,” which in general he considers “a crude propaganda machine” peopled by “braindead hacks.”

Monday was a big day for journalists to suggest similarities between mass murderers and Republicans. Newsweek writer Nina Burleigh claimed that certain of Timothy McVeigh’s “militia ideals have gone mainstream” in the GOP, but Esquire's Pierce really put the ideological pedal to the metal when he likened Dick Cheney to one of the all-time worst genocidal maniacs, opining that Cheney’s relatively high current political profile is akin to “giving Pol Pot a late-night TV gig.” (As a lead-in, Pierce also called Cheney “the most inexcusable American who ever lived.”)

Pierce’s item piggybacked on a Washington Monthly post by Ed Kilgore, whose tone toward Cheney was not much less harsh than Pierce’s. After quoting Reince Priebus’s remark that Cheney is “a top fundraising draw, in high demand,” Kilgore sniped, “I suppose this is an example of what the church calls the ‘glamor of evil’ in the Easter baptismal renewal vows."