Most conservative bloggers would answer “yes”, something I have long maintained as well.  And when you couple that with their tendency to threats and hate speech, such as the Dick Cheney Death Wish craze,¹ it paints a fairly clear picture.

And many would say who cares, it’s free speech, right?  Of course.  And profanity is not a necessary component of rudeness either.  Is an insult given in a profanity free way any less an insult? 

But excessive profanity is distracting.  It clouds the substance of a debate with an emotional response, quite often.  And personally, I think excessive use is childish.   It is usually coupled with ad hominem attacks which are also fairly juvenile.

Newsbuckit decided to answer the question of who is the worst potty mouth:

The Net’s not always a kid-friendly place; there is plenty of foul language out there. And of course, the blogosphere is no different.

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to “dirty” language? Which side produces the most profanity-laceed diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:

I propose an exercise to be performed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous ‘7 Dirty Words.’ [Click this link for the list of expletives.]

And this is what I found, using what I deemed — through a mix of TTLB and 2006’s Weblog Award lists — to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn”t account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn’t make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Again, not a big shock.

Here is his methodology and results:

How did I get this result? I searched Google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:

site:xyz.com “search term 1″ OR “search term 2″ OR “search term 3″…

Nine search terms total — the seven profanities as single words, and two of those as their own two-word variations. I then added the individual site results together and compared them. The results are below.

 (click the thumbnail for the image)

A challenge to the results was made and answered:

Update @ 9:16am: Great point by reader Joe.

What? No Democratic Underground? No IndyMedia? No FreeRepublic? No Townhall? No FrontPageMag?

And thus, the numbers:

Democratic Underground: 947,000

IndyMedia: 206,000

FreeRepublic: 4010

TownHall.com (minus HH blog): 156

FrontPageMag: 11,800

It only gets worse… 1537788-to-37285. 41-to-1. Holy mackeral.

So the trend is clear.

Does it really mean anything?  Not really.  The issue of whether to be polite or not, or what manner of standards to maintain on a blog resides solely in the hands of the respective bloggers. 

And people can vote with their mouse by not trafficking pages where they are offended, so I dislike attempts to censor the bloggers.  Let the reader beware.

But it does show something intrinsically different about the two sides, and how they prefer to communicate, doesn’t it?

 Also at PoliBlog (TM), Confederate Yankee, NewsHog, GINA COBB, Blue Crab Boulevard, WILLisms.com, Classical Values, La Shawn Barber’s Corner, Bob Krumm, Wizbang, Whiskey Fire, Riehl World View, Ace of Spades HQ, Don Surber, Jules Crittenden, TBogg and INSTAPUTZ

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