We can debate whether it's more important to have "real" reconciliation or to win the election.

Let me address the charge of using peer pressure. I don't think it's exerting peer pressure to take the view that words sometimes have a price. There can be honest disagreements about which words exact what price, and what price is too much to pay.

Take an analogy from the private realm. My limited but checkered experience in relationships leads me to believe that only one side has to be offended for the whole thing to collapse. The same experience leaves me in no doubt that honesty is at times destructive. For example, you can end up in divorce court for making the true point that your wife has spent more money on a home renovation than you had to spend, and that you face serious financial consequences. Your wife's reply may be in these exact words: "But it's our home!" Shortly thereafter, you face a choice between a) continuing an objective discussion of your family's financial distress and who is to blame, and b) deciding you love your wife and want to stay married even if her carelessness in not adding up the cost of change orders she signed, in her enthusiasm for creating the perfect home, happens to leave you in dire financial straits - something that was not her intention. She is at fault, but do you really want a divorce? You would in some sense be justified in saying, "We're getting a divorce. We'll sell the house to pay off our debts. It's all your fault. You'll never do this to me again." Then you'll both be living in reduced circumstances but, by God, you were right!

I'm assuming as we move back to politics that the goal is not to ensure that the division of the Democratic Party lasts through the November election - that we want reconciliation, not a divorce judge's certification that one party was very, very, very wrong.

It comes down to weighing the virtues of certain types of discussions per se, and the reality that your words actually affect the way other people feel and think and, ultimately, the way they act. Like you, I believe that objectivity in discussion has value. However, so does objectivity about the emotional, practical and very real consequences of saying certain things, however true, in certain situations.

Is it peer pressure to make such an analogy from personal experience to the political?

I hear you loud and clear on this one. I focused on the electoral college crap they were pulling Sunday(see Time Russert is an Idiot) but this crap is endemic to all the "news" networks. They won't get the message that we are sick of this crap until we stop watching and they start going out of business.