Anthony--by saying the liberals are worse than the conservatives on tolerance, personal freedoms, I don't mean to deny that the conservatives might be worse overall for liberty given, e.g., war etc. (although, most previous wars were democrat wars). I suppose I am thinking more of the personal attitudes of individuals I know and see, and the actual domestic policies they advocate.
The rabid liberals I know, and see, are completely irrational and simply hate Bush even though he is very similar to Kerry. An anti-war, Dean type democrat, I can respect; but a pro-war-Kerry supporting one is just ridiculous in accepting Kerry while going apoplectic about Bush.
They support affirmative action and antidiscrimination and other ridiculous laws that actually penalize people for voicing their views, and they don't even recognized "commercial" free speech, so they are worse on free speech. Some of them are advocating a draft for egalitarian reasons. They are worse on taxes. They are worse on federalism. They are better on almost nothing: do they support drug decriminalization? No. They are only better in minor areas no one cares about, such as making sodomy legal once more, a type of criminal law that is rarely enforced.
People like Michael Savage are so incoherent they are hardly conservative. Savage is just a pure idiot; he is the Morton Downey Jr. of talk radio. Like Bill O'Reilly, he has no philosophy at all, no coherent set of views.
I find it kind of amusing to observe and classify various famous people, like Hollywood types, try to enunciate their little political views. For example, you have people like, say, Bill Maher--he is obviously very intelligent; but he is also very uneducated. He tries to go a long way with moxy and the fact that as uneducatd as he is, he is smarter than most of his guests. Then you have people like Al Franken and Michael Moore, who are both stupid and ignorant.
Then you have O'Reilly, who is moderately intelligent but probably slighly more knowledgeable than Maher, but who has sort of a grab-bag philosophy. Maher is a grab bag too, but a bit more coherent--sort of left neo-libertarian-ish. What is O'Reilly? I have no idea.
Then you have your blowhard conservatives, like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and I don't know, Tony Snow. Actually Rush is more coherent and smarter and educated than those in his crowd; basically a moderate-to-neocon type Republican. You have your fairly "honest" commentators, like, say, Andrew Sullivan, or Michael Kinsley. Then you have Ann Coulter--she is very intelligent and pretty well educated, at least, and certainly stands up to liberals; I think of her as the Frankenstein monster created by liberalism's outrageous, ridiculous excesses; in a sense, she represents the red America that voted against the condescending, coastal snots and opponents of normalcy of the Democrat party.
At the bottom (or top?) of my hate pile are people like the lefties on Capital Gang--Mark Shields, Margaret Carlson, and worst of all, the execrable, smug, evil, knowingly-liberal Al Hunt. And James Carville. These people are smart and educated, and promulgate failed leftist claptrap with no apologies.
In the end, whether you hate liberals or Democrats more (woops, Republicans) is probably not objectively provable. To paraphrase the great Woody Allen, the heart hates what the heart hates.
