Deification and Related Types of Exaggeration on the Right

I've long wondered why the right wing has deified Reagan. I started thinking about this more after the righties started trying to move W into the pantheon, too. (Well, deifying W may be too big a stretch even for them, but they have radically exaggerated his alleged virtues, referring to him as, among other things, "churchillian," believe it or not.)

My default guess about such things is that they are characteristic of extremists generally rather than one end of the political spectrum in particular. And, since the right seems to have moved farther right than the left has moved left, this would explain their greater propensity to canonize their leaders. But I'm not sure. So one question is: are conservatives really worse than liberals in this regard? Liberals do seem to have a warped and radically exaggerated opinion of JFK's virtues, though I'd guessed that this was a psychological reaction to his tragic death. But maybe not. On the other hand, despite Clinton's excellence as a president, liberals didn't seem to have any inclination to deify him, seeing him rather clearly as the complex character he was.

And speaking of Clinton, there's the bizarre phenomenon of seething, frothing-at-the-mouth Clinton hatred to be explained as well. It seems that the right has a tendency, more pronounced than that of the left, to exaggerate the virtue of their own leaders while exaggerating the vices of their opponents.

But this doesn't seem to be limited to their opinions of leaders. Although the right and the left each seem to have low opinions of the other in general, again this tendency on the right seems more pronounced. It is not uncommon for those on the right to attribute to liberals every imaginable vice, including contradictory ones--liberals are stupid, yet they are effete intellectuals; they are wimps yet vindictive and prone to the use of political violence; they are overly-emotional, yet heartless and soulless, etc. It is even common now for prominent voices on the right to characterize liberals as traitors.

So, is the conservative mind more inclined to these types of exaggerations? Or is relative extremism, rather than conservatism, the culprit? Or is the left really as bad as the right? WTF is going on here???