Charles Krauthammer talks about "the unhinging of the Democratic Party," as it passes "from partisanship to pathology," and David Brooks describes Democrats as "caught up in their own victimization." In one of his last columns before his death, Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal located the "subconscious roots" of Democrats' anger in a crisis of self-identity, compounded by "inner doubts about their own moral position" after the Clinton scandals.

Hence the picture of the Democrats pitched into a fever of self-destructive rancor, as disdain for Bush gives way to "a hatred that is near pathological," in Krauthammer's words. Or, as Gillespie puts it, the Democrats have demeaned the presidency with "political hate speech" — "harsh, bitter personal attacks . . . unprecedented in the history of presidential politics."

That's a stretch even by accelerated modern standards of political forgetfulness. Most epithets that Gillespie has denounced as political hate speech — "liar," "phony," "hypocrite" — were common enough in Republican mouths during the Clinton years. And while it's certainly severe to describe Bush as "a miserable failure," it's hard to see how it demeans the presidency any more than calling the just-fired Jim Fassel a miserable failure demeans the position of head coach of the New York Giants.

Most of that can be excused as the routine partisan ebullience that you expect from someone in Gillespie's position. What's notable is the way the Republicans have appropriated "hate speech" to describe the Democrats' attacks on Bush. That's another example of the way political language has tended to drift from left to right over recent decades.

Conservatives use "hate speech" the way they use words like "diversity" and "bias," in the hope that the moral valence that the terms acquired in the context of civil rights will persist when the words are applied to partisan divisions, even if their meanings are altered in the process.

Originally, "hate speech" referred to speech that disparaged social groups on the basis of race, sex, religion and the like — an accusation that was more often leveled at conservatives than by them. By that definition, the mere expression of a personal antipathy to the president would hardly count as hate speech, no more than vandalizing a former spouse's car would count as a hate crime.