Good points, but don't you also mean to include Clinton supporters taking on and defending their fellow Democrat?  That's conspicuously absent from your diary.

mmod for any reconciliation.  I'm still waiting for the Holy Annointed One to apologize for those cracks about the 1990's.  That to me was THE most offensive thing I heard in this campaign.

I think that the McCain supporters might be more clever, and get the camel's nose under the tent flap with statements like:

"I notice that there are a lot more very virulent Obama supporters that give a lot of us a very bad name"

Then they could move Clinton supporters to their side. Ya. That's it. And then they could make them feel comfy and then tell them that voting for McCain would really be voting for Hillary. Ya. That's it.

Hmmmmm. (Looks suspiciously around him, seeing his fellow bloggers for seemingly the first time.)

Most of the worst offenders on the Obama side have been nurtured under the slash and burn netroots world and have developed very bad mental reflexes.  They are much like the zealous young Gingrich followers of the nineties.  Gingrich himself knew it was time to stop most of that when the job of governing came along but he realized that once the monster is fed, trained, and released, it doesn't go so quietly back to the cage.

The worst Clinton supporters are of a slightly different circumstance.  First, they are on the losing side and they're are still not happy about what has happened and what may be developing.  Second, they have spent months as a disrespected minority on the netroots and they have developed a very strong sense of resentment.

We'll see, at the very least, two varieties of troll:

1. Anti-Clinton crowing from a supposed Obama supporter.  They'll demand that "Clintonistas" fall into line and that their candidate is a loser, etc.  They'll use the most heinous rhetoric about Clinton imaginable.

2. Supposedly disgruntled Clinton supporters that are planning on not voting for the Democratic nominee in the general.  The subvarieties will be:

a) Nader
b) Green
c) Stay home
d) McCain

Now, the (d) people will be easy to weed out, but we have to develop strategies for outing the rest of them.  

For the Nader and Green party supporters, the weak spot is Iraq.  Even though the real-life Green/Nader voters are for pulling the troops out immediately of both Afghanistan and Iraq regardless of the regional reprecussions, from a logical standpoint, they have the power to help a candidate that will get the soldiers out of Iraq and hopefully finish the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan so we can get out of Middle Eastern quagmires.  

If they're trolls, they probably won't be able to actually debate the merits of these positions; they'll be a charicature of anti-war activists.  Real Nader/Green people will have talking points about how it won't matter if we get out of there or not, since the Democrats are just the same as Republicans and will still be engaging in warlike policies in the near future, and that Obama wants to increase the size of the military (no wingnut troll will be able to admit to themselves that a Democrat will be good for the military enough to actually write it).

For the people who are going to stay home, well, folks that honestly are tempted to do this are still probably Democrats and can be lured to voting downticket.  It's their call whether they want to vote for the presidency or not.  Trolls will say that they'll stay home no matter what; that a party that nominates Barack Obama deserves to lose.  

So there are strategies for outing these people, we just have to understand how to seperate the sincerely disaffected folks from the agent provocateurs.

as you can tell by the comments already posted, this contentiousness will take more than reason to get past.

I think the end of the primary, and a decent amount of time to lick wounds will be needed before reconciliation.

I have found the best approach is to try and stay out of the pit when it gets really bad.  There are a few names you will always see spewing absolute vitriol.  But I've noticed with time, there are really only about ten users who continuously participate.  They will all be gone before long.

A good reminder for all of us, in such a heated primary season.

Recc'd up!

I've been saying this for months. Too many anti-Clinton comments are just the same-old-same-old that the right-wingers have been spouting about the Clintons for decades. By pretending to be Obama supporters, it gives them cover to spout this trash to an audience of Democrats.

Democrats should be too smart to fall for these GOP tactics.