The Left thinks, incorrectly, that it has almost no choice except to demagogue and mislead. In their way of thinking, they *need* for the Senate to require 60 votes to do anything, because that requirement prevents the effects of the voters' conservative shift from going into place in national policy.
After all, to get 60 Senators to agree on something, you've got to be more Moderate than Conservative (well, for the time being). So any means to reach that end is attractive to the Left at the moment.
But what the Left hasn't fully grasped is that all of their misleading and demagogue has shifted national sentiment against Democrats. More specifically, national sentiment has shifted against the Left (there are, after all, a few moderate or even conservative Democrats).
So the Left's solution of demagogue and misleading is akin to a drug addict's solution of getting high: they always need to do just a little bit more than they did the last time, and each time that they do it, the effect is still a little less than for what they had hoped.
Attacking Secretary Rice?! Senator Boxer challenging the 2004 electoral college vote?! Filibustering circuit court judges?! Demanding that 60 Senators agree on a mere UN Ambassador?! The "Hitler" Pope?!
By this point in time, the Left has gone far off the deep end. Cynthia Tucker, an Editor for the Left-leaning Atlanta Journal Constitution, went so far this weekend as to claim that Congressman DeLay, who voted to fully fund federal election monitors for modern enforcement of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, was a "serious threat to American democracy."
Like a strung out junkie willing to use *anything* for that next high, the Left now embraces the most extreme hyperbole and vitriol as if it was their new best friend.
Needless to say, such addled behavior won't play very well with the American public at large over the long term.
Republicans continue to seize the high ground and earn the public label of being the "adults in the room" as we ignore or respond at our leisure to these wild-eyed antics of the Left...whereas the Left is obtaining a reputation of being untrustworthy, unstable, and unhinged.
You can only mislead the Public for so long, after all, before the backlash grows substantially in size. Ian Duncan Smith will probably live to regret his own role in this inevitable downfall of the Left, too.