Via Sister Toldjah, John Hawkins has an excellent column on the difference between liberals and conservatives.
It takes a lot more integrity, character, and courage to be a conservative than it does to be a liberal. That's because at its most basic level, liberalism is nothing more than childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues.
Going to war is mean, so we shouldn't do it. That person is poor and it would be nice to give him money, so the government should do it. Somebody wants to have an abortion, have a gay marriage, or wants to come into the U.S. illegally and it would be mean to say, "no," so we should let them. I am nice because I care about global warming! Those people want to kill us? But, don't they know we're nice? If they did, they would like us! Bill has more toys, money than Harry, so take half of Bill's money and give it to Harry.
The only exception to this rule is for people who aren't liberals. They're racists, bigots, homophobes, Nazis, fascists, etc., etc., etc. They might as well just say that conservatives have "cooties" for disagreeing with them, because there really isn't any more thought or reasoning that goes into it than that.
Now, that's not to say that conservatives never make emotion based arguments or that emotion based arguments are always wrong. But, when you try to deal with complex, real world issues, using little more than simplistic emotionalism that's primarily designed to make the people advocating it feel good rather than to deal with problems, it can, and often has had disastrous consequences. Liberals never seem to learn from this.
This reminds me of when Ann Coulter called the Republican Party "the grown-up party." Sister Toldjah wraps it up this way:
Simple translation: all the good things in this country that happened were the result of liberal policies ‘for the people.’ Anything bad that happens is the result of ‘conservative interference.’ Liberals would rather ‘feel good’ about what they do and drone on and on about how they did it out of the goodness of their hearts rather than acknowledge that their ideas were wrong. That’s not a great recipe for learning for your mistakes, but then again, when you can’t acknowledge you’ve made a mistake, it’s not hard to understand why you wouldn’t ‘learn’ from it.
This could apply to a variety of stories, but the Amandagate story fits best for its proximity to the present. If you take a look at Pandagon, you can see that Amanda is still busy blaming everyone but herself for what happened to her. Some liberals never learn.
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