Worse Than Stupid Bigots

According to the screeching liberal chorus, conservatives are stupid bigots. That's bad enough. But now the left claims conservatives are callous! My seconds will soon call on their seconds; I'll be waiting in Weehawken New Jersey at dawn.

The unforgivable insult is in Thursday's New York Times, which reports (bulletin from the front!) conservatives are under-represented in academia:

[A] national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.

In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans.

No argument there. But the Times insists the imbalance isn't bias:

One theory for the scarcity of Republican professors is that conservatives are simply not that interested in academic careers. A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches linguistics and is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views. "Unlike conservatives," he said, "they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about."

Of course, we've seen this movie before, in February from Robert Brandon, chair of the Philosophy department at Duke, and last year from federally funded nut-jobs at Berkeley. But when the "conservatives are cruel" meme is paraded in the former "paper of record," you can be sure liberals still are utterly unhinged Bush's re-election.

Lefties never grasp that conservatives are equally interested in justice and societal improvement. They self-righteously presume that because the left is committed to "the little people," conservatives politicians must have opposing goals, typically greed. Remember the debates on welfare reform? Republican proponents were vilified as cheap and uncaring. Dems doubted the sincerity of arguments that eliminating perverse incentives might be best for welfare recipients. As today's reduced welfare rolls have proved. . .

Since WWII, Republicans rarely controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House, as they do now. Republicans have a 50-year head-start in cooperating with the opposition. The Dems, by contrast, still act as if they're the majority. Plus, they're clueless, says NRO's Cathy Seipp:

One of the election lessons for Democrats is that while the Left doesn't understand the Right, the Right can't help but understand the Left, because the Left is in charge of pop culture. Urban blue staters can go their entire lives happily innocent of the world of church socials and duck hunting and Boy Scout meetings, but small-town red staters are exposed to big-city blue-state values every time they turn on the TV.

Translation: liberals don't look beyond their own noses--or their own states. The posh cocktail parties are blue-state only; red staters are merely "fly-over America." So their vision of Republicans was lifted from Hee-Haw.

Lefties tout non-judgmental "multiculturalism." Yet they despise (and are ignorant of) 51 percent of Americans. Conservatives aren't heartless, prejudiced or idiots. Liberals insisting otherwise should be prepared to defend themselves on the field of honor.