Nothing pleases me more than to have hard facts support something that I've known in my heart for years. I've written before about the sheer meanness of the left--the death wishes of Michael Moore and Dave Lindorff for people who disagree with them politically--this would be called fascism if a conservative said it; as it is, they are feted. And no one can read the Kos Kiddies without thinking that these people are meaner than a stepped-on rattlesnake. The Goracle's cries of Armageddon while he enjoys his mansion and SUV, and anything that has issued from the shrieking gob of Our Empress. All epitomes of meanness.

Now Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, has done some fascinating research that George Will has reported on, and the results are delightful.

Briefly, liberal households earn about 6% more than conservative ones. But conservative households give 30% more to charity. Today I watched some of Fox News Channel and found a conservative and a liberal asked about this study, and the smarmy liberal Ellis Hennican gave it his best shot: liberals, he allowed, were the people who had been the ones who made the advances: fighting racism, discrimination, equal rights, and in general he as a liberal took credit for everything good that had ever happened, as though without liberals we'd still be in caves. There wasn't much else that Hennican could do other than spin like a dreidel--the numbers were culled from impartial statistics but he did give it a yeoman try. Utter rubbish of course but an interesting try. It occurred to me that reading the transcript of the closing speech to the jury of Jeffrey Daumer's lawyer would be interesting too.

So now we have proof. Liberals puff themselves up, wreathed in self-righteousness, and spend a good deal of time radiating their self-importance, patting each others' backs, and telling each other how good and fine they are, how noble their sentiments are, and therefore how worthy they are. In between bites of fair-trade tofu.

And then these liberals sneer at the conservatives who do not spend their time puffing out their chests, but spend more time working with people, giving much more money, which they have less of by the way, and even giving more blood. Binding feet and washing wounds versus the pharisaical bleatings of the liberals. Useful things. Helpful things. Things of substance in the here and now, and incidentally things that one does oneself, and doesn't force someone else to do.

Let's see. Telling each other how good and worthy you are or helping people? Who is actually doing the good work? Saying that you're helping people by talking about your good intentions is the same thing as saying you'll start on your diet tomorrow but right now those M&Ms need to get on your inside and fast. Or saying that you know you need to diet but tomorrow you'll make someone else will do it for you and those M&Ms are still winking at you and taste even better since you've figured out a way to eat them while blaming someone else.

Liberalism, properly understood (don't you love the sucker punch in that phrase?), means, or meant, the willingness to let others alone--not interfering with them because of their sex or color or sexuality on the grounds that there is no reason or right to do so. Liberalism now has degenerated into a political stance of uttering platitudes in stained-glass attitudes, which are the code words, for the great liberal washed, those who "get it," those who are dripping with compassion and solicitude for others. Personally I think that they're mating calls too.

Actually these are people who are so morally lazy and frivolous that they believe in wholesale compassion--throwing people into groups by the characteristic du jour. If you're black, you have certain attributes; if you're female you have other ones; and if you're gay you have your own needs, which are just like the needs of all other gay people. Yeah. I have had more than one astonished look when a liberal found out that I am conservative and that I also like men. That places me off the reservation, you see, and it is a direct affront to him.

It shows up his moral laziness. Why should he be expected to deal with me as an individual when he's already bought a hundredweight of approved compassion wholesale? Knowing me as an individual would take time. I'm gay and therefore a liberal and artistic and love show tunes. Actually I'm conservative and a mathematician and loathe Barbra Streisand, and this is a terrible thing to do to a liberal: confounding his worldview, and making him do the hard work of thinking of individuals outside his own little approved clique, for that cuts down on the time that he has to bask in his own self-regard. For if I am not a liberal gay man then I might actually come into focus as an individual. Then I am no longer a known quantity, predigested, classified, and ignorable.

I challenge the comfort of his pious bigotry. I challenge his egocentric view of the world, masked, he thinks, by the birdlime of easy wholesale compassion.

For make no mistake: liberals are as bigoted in their own way as David Duke--he cannot stand blacks but to do that most disagreeable man credit, he did at least pretend to reform. When a liberal is confronted with evidence that challenges his worldview, he merely shouts louder, for the cognitive dissonance makes him angry and the essential childishness of liberalism results not in lucubration but in pitching a temper tantrum. The rare liberal who has been mugged by reality and who changes his views becomes a neocon and there is no other form of life more reviled than a neocon, for he too is a liberal but who went off the reservation and he too challenged the liberal's pious bigotry. No one is hated more than an apostate who always challenges, at a deep level, the surest orthodoxy.

I have thought this all of my life, sensing their meanness, their cliquishness, their self-absorption, and their sheer frivolity. Making huge gaseous statements of what ought to be while ignoring how to help people here and now is nothing if not deeply frivolous.

It is also cheap and lazy. And now we find stingy--of time and money. And of blood.

One of the most successful sneers of the liberal has been that of hypocrisy. A conservative gets caught with his pants down and the liberals sneer "hypocrite." But hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and the liberal, by sneering at virtue, gives himself absolution in advance, sparing himself the trouble of being virtuous. And now we find that virtually the only liberal virtue is gaseous self-regard. The bar of good behavior is a low one indeed.

Ecce homo liberalis: He tells people what to do with their money while keeping his own. Hypocrisy of the worst sort.

I love it.