Good post. To your first paragraph, looking for consistency in people to separate the thinkers from the partisans is helpful. Let's find out, who's standing on principle and who's just shilling for a political party.

I got called. Left wing "libtard" many times during those last years of Bush being president. Now I'm getting called a racist right winger for criticizing the government.

That doesn't make any sense at all. It's an oxymoron. The key concept is that PARTisan relates to a PARTy. Especially someone who knee-jerk instinctively defends their party and depends on the party's talking points to have an opinion instead of thinking for him or herself. So independents can't be partisans, which means we're living in times where partisans are so partisan that they falsely accuse independents of being "the real partisans."