What Exactly is the Far Left Wing?

I've been pondering this lately, and it brought to mind an old post of mine. What is "far left wing" these days? And really, what is "far right wing?"  Rush Limbaugh (and thus, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Michael Savage) used to be far right wing. They were fringe. They were the equivelant of Morton Downey, Jr. But today? Sean Hannity is a prime time FOX "News" host. The rest (Hannity too) are the biggest ratings earners on AM talk radio.

What this odd change has brought is to bring the far-righty fringe into the mainstream, and to move moderates to the left. So who the freakin' hell are the left, and the far left now? Really, I wanna know. I'm a fan of several leftist personalities, from Randi Rhodes to Thom Hartmann to Rachel Maddow. But they're just left. Not far left, just left. Does anyone else see the bizarre skewing of the political spectrum?

ORIGINAL POST:

So I'm watching Meet the Press and FOX "News" Sunday on the DVR today, and I've heard that President Obama should "move to the middle" or "move to the right" in order to more effectively govern. It's counter-intuitive, since doing this is what his own party thinks he's already done too much of. Despite the ridiculous right-wing image of socialist/Marxist/Communist, the President has made countless gestures to "reach across the aisle" in the health care program, in fiscal policy and elsewhere. The President's descending approval ratings have as much to do with the left's disappointment in his timidity as they do with the right's over the top attacks.

So, I'm digesting this really annoying "conventional wisdom" talking point, and then I hear another one. Senator Evan Bayh--in trying to discount the move-to-the-middle point--said that "far left blogs" were upset with concessions already made to the right. Huh? Who is he talking about there? The biggest left-wing blogs I can think of are Daily Kos, Huffington Post, FireDog Lake, and Democratic Underground. I wouldn't classify any of those as "far left." I'd be willing to bet that Bayh (and every FReeper) would call this blog far left, even though I am a former Republican with a few conservative opinions.

Do some far leftist readers comment at blogs like these (and mine)? Probably. Is there occasionally a post that would be out of the mainstream, even for a solid Democrat? Probably. But by and large, all of those blogs represent merely the left, not the far left. None of them is as staunchly extremist as say FreeRepublic.com, the far right internet outpost. The weird part is, with the mainstreaming of people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck--extremist far right-wingers by any definition--anything left-of-center is now seen as "far left." It isn't. And I didn't like seeing a prominent Democrat furthering that misperception.