One is the rightwingers are more willing to just make shit up and boldly lie. They don't have the more academic worldview of liberals/progressives (who tend to be better educated, anyway) that asks for footnotes, citations, evidence, etc. Rightwingers will go more on "gut instinct" (and we've seen where "gut instinct" has gotten us in seven years...), which generally means "Follow my prejudices and biases and damn the evidence".

Rightwingers are more willing to believe anonymous bullshit, esp. if it's something about bad about someone they don't like, no matter how outrageously or even impossible it might be.

They are LESS willing to believe anything bad about people they like (part of their black and white mentality - if Shrubby is "good", then he's good ALWAYS; if Obama is bad, then he's bad always. Shrubby could murder 30 kids on live tv broadcast around the world, and the righties would go, "Well, he didn't really *murder* them, he's still a moral Christian man" and they'd some totally irrelevant "pounding evidence" claim, like "Besides - would you rather have a French cheese eater in the White House? Yeah. There ya go.").

Rightwingers are more willing to engage in attacks on personality and behavior - liberals prefer to stick to debating ideas and philosophies.

And Democrats/liberals are - sadly - LESS likely when this nonsense shows up to come out and declaim it loudly and profusely and sledgehammerlike. Kerry totally fucked up when he didn't immediately come out and denounce the swiftboat ads. And other dems have failed in the same way. If Kerry had come out and alpha-dogged it, calling the swiftboaters liars and disrespecters of veterans and totally out of line and how dare they malign a military hero, he would have impressed a lot of rightwingers - they like the alpha-dogging. They might not have still voted for him, but it would have ended the swiftboating nonsense.

Sometimes I think if we'd just stand up for ourselves, we'd do a lot better - people like the bully, but only until the one being bullies stands up against the bully - then people like the underdog. But they don't care for an underdog that rolls and over and exposes its belly.