From Little Green Footballs, this post links to a Guardian article. In it we find the following:

Because, while the Democrat supporters had right on their side, the Republican supporters were far, far better at fighting dirty. Conservative mega-sites such as Freerepublic.com galvanised their hundreds of thousands of visitors into an army of amateur attack dogs - ready to yap and snap the moment a foolish journalist wrote anything bad about Bush. Woe betide any TV reporter who didn't check his facts properly before claiming that George W didn't finish his national guard service.

Oh the injustice of being a Guardian reporter. Thousand of people reading your work, expecting all of the facts to be checked properly. And then they have the audacity to point it out if you get something wrong. Will the horrors never cease?

Look, denial of service attacks are fighting dirty. Rigging online opinion polls (something the Freepers do sometimes do) would be fighting dirty if anyone took these things seriously. But debate, response and criticism are not fighting dirty. Sometimes I get the impression that the left would be much happier if those mean Republicans stopped reading their newspapers and left them to themselves.