“Democrats had a knife, and the GOP had a gun,” writes New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, remarking in particular on what he views as disgraceful Republican abuses of power in North Carolina. Having lost the governorship, the GOP used the lame-duck period to pass laws taking power and patronage away from the victorious Democratic governor-elect.

Leonhardt’s broad point about general Republican excess is being made by many a liberal writer. It is a revisionist history put succinctly by Greg Sargent, a liberal blogger at the Washington Post, that the “GOP shreds our norms in [the] quest for power and Dems don’t.”