Conservatives value symbols (flag, church, country), slogans ("America: Love It or Leave It!", "My country, right or wrong!", "What's Good for Business is What's Good for America!", "God Hates Fags!"), and fables (god, "America is a nation built on Judeo-Christian values!", "God is the source of all law and liberty"). Liberals are prepared to examine arguments from all sides and make their judgments based on available information as objectively as possible.
Conservatives judge people based on their gender (women shouldn't be allowed to control their own reproductive health, hold positions of leadership over men, or even vote) sexuality (gays, lesbians, and transgenders are moral degenerates and an abomination before god who are dedicated to destroying marriage and "Traditional Family Values" as well as being overt or covert pedophiles bent on turning all our children into godless, AIDS-ridden, hedonistic perverts), ethnic background (they don't mind people of various races as long as they don't live in their wealthy, WASP-ish, gated communities and aspire to be no more than gardeners, servants, or janitors), religion (any religion is fine as long as it's ours, but if you're a Muslim, Wiccan, or worse a non-believer you're either a terrorist, a depraved satanist, or a traitor deserving of death), economic status (all poor people are lazy, Cadillac-driving "welfare kings and queens" who should be cut loose to sink or swim. If they have the deplorable bad taste to be poor, tough cookies; they need to pull themselves up by own bootstraps or do the rest of us a favour and die so we can build more shopping malls where their tenements stood), level of "patriotism", and unquestioning loyalty to the Amerika Fuhrerprinzip. Liberals accept people regardless of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion (with the exception of witless fundamentalist extremism attempting to impose itself on others by force of the state), or economic status. Most conservatives are now overt hyper-capitalists, but note that the root word of "capitalist" is "capital" (money). Liberals often tend to lean more towards socialism, who's root word, "social" has to do with people. Capitalists and conservatives care more about money, while liberals are more concerned about people and their welfare.
Conservatives would LIKE to understand, but they don't. For them, their tired slogans, meaningless prayers, scripture, doctrine, dogma, propaganda, and jingoistic hyperbole ARE thinking, but in reality they ring hollow. Liberals are more often intellectuals because they actually spend time thinking about issues, NOT parroting Fox News, White House talking points, Wall Street's con jobs on the public, the blatant idiocy of Ben Stein, Kent Hovind, and the Discovery Institute, the rabid homophobia of Fred Phellps, the despicable misogyny of the Army of God, the rank xenophobia of the Minutemen Project, or any sermon given by any rank and file witless preacher in any given church on any given day.
Conservatives would like to see themselves as the intellectual, spiritual, and patriotic heirs to the founding fathers of American democracy, and, at one time, they may very well have been; but they have long since devolved into blind, arrogant, strutting, militaristic, chest-thumping, war-humping, bigoted, unquestioning, unthinking, morally retarded misanthropes who are no longer able to distinguish between truth and fallacy, as all they have left is to wave flags, plaster their pick-up trucks and Escalades with confederate flags, "God Love George Bush" and "I Get My News on FOX!" bumperstickers, while they feed their children into the bottomless Iraq meat grinder, pray to their non-existent Santa Claus/Sky God, and pour money into the Swiss bank accounts of the CEO's of ExxonMobil, Lockheed-Martin, James Dobson, and Big Pharma, all the while believing that this is what passes for being a true American.
Conservatives aren't thinkers; they're suckers.
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