“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” –William F. Buckley

For people who attach a religious reverence to the virtues of “tolerance” and “diversity”, liberals are shockingly intolerant of the viewpoints of others, and demand complete orthodoxy of thought and opinion on a variety of disputed policies and beliefs. Heaven help the poor fool who crosses a liberal on one of the sacred tenets of their secular religion, for that is to invite not only heated disagreement, but personal attacks and character assassination. For liberals, it is not enough to disagree, especially when facts are not on their side. Then they simply avoid rational debate by maligning their opposition, dismissing the message by asserting that the messenger is driven by hatred or greed, and/or are racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, or just generally malevolent.

Democrats were elated in 2008 when Obama was elected president and they took control of both houses of Congress. Republicans were demoralized, having lost even the ability to influence, much less control, the political process. With a supermajority in the Senate and a huge majority in the House, Democrats could, and mostly did, do anything they wanted. The near-trillion dollar “stimulus” bill was passed, as was ObamaCare, along with a Democrat utopian wish-list. Republicans could only stand by and complain from the sidelines that Democrats were shutting them out.

Five years later, the failures of their liberal policies are on display for the entire world to see, and Democrats are desperate to lay blame at the feet of Republicans. The stimulus bill not only failed to stimulate, but increased unemployment by more than two percent. Obama accrued more debt in four years than Bush did in eight. And of course Obama’s signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, has turned out to be a massive bureaucratic boondoggle that is still not close to being fully implemented, and yet is fraught with cost overruns and administrative disaster. Democrats, who passed the law “to see what was in it”, and did so without a single Republican vote, now demand Republicans step in and fix it.

However, in our stridently politically correct nation, it is considered not only a faux pas, but outright blasphemy to criticize the president. Or rather, THIS president, who is, you may have heard, black; therefore, any criticism is prima facie evidence of racism. On the other hand, those on the political left are free to engage in character assassination, and do so with impunity, with rarely as word from the media highlighting their hypocrisy. The examples of this are legion.

Of Republican opposition to socialized, government-run health care, rather than acknowledging there are legitimate areas of disagreement on how best to provide health care for all Americans without undermining the Constitution, Obama instead paints his opponents as uncaring trolls, saying “The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care. Why is it that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail? Their number one priority?”

Republicans don’t object to providing health care for every one that needs it. They object to a centrally-planned, top-down, heavily bureaucratic, government-run, expensive system that has not only increased costs and reduced accessibility to doctors, but has given power to the IRS (which administers, and monitors compliance with, the law) to pry into the most sensitive and private areas of our lives. The irony is that almost as many people are now uninsured nearly four years after the law was passed as there were before. Of course, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid inadvertently revealed the law’s true purpose when he recently admitted ObamaCare is simply a stepping stone between free market health care and an American incarnation of single payer (read: completely government controlled) health care.

The politics of personal destruction has become the de facto playbook for liberals who have for decades been unable to sell the American people on their policies, and have had to enact their policies through judicial fiat, executive order or, in Obama’s case, a blatant and outright disregard for the constitutional separation of powers.

This same assignment of hateful motives to their opposition has become a recurring theme by liberals, and has only grown more strident in the Obama-era. A few other examples include:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s declaration that opposition to homosexual marriage can only be driven by hate, and a desire to make homosexuals feel like second-class citizens. Never mind that Democrat-hero Bill Clinton signed DOMA, and Obama himself just a few years ago opposed homosexual marriage. Never mind the fact that heterosexual marriage has been the standard for virtually every nation, culture, society, and religion for thousands of years. No, according to Kennedy and many homosexual marriage proponents, only they, the enlightened few, are morally sound in their judgments, and the rest of us, billions of people acting since the beginning of history, are all hateful, morally evil bigots.

It is this type of thinking that has led to an inversion of accepted morality and attacks on religion by the Obama administration, where taxpayer dollars fund a performance by drag queens at a military instillation’s “Diversity Day”, even as Christians are threatened with punishment for such “offenses” as sharing their Christian faith with their fellow soldiers, or even simply having a Bible on their desk. The Obama administration considers religious expression a form of hate speech, and is actively trying to crush it.

It is darkly amusing to see how completely oblivious liberals are to their own double standards. Obama won re-election in large part based on class warfare, maligning the character of those that have achieved financial success as being “rich fat cats”, even as he lives in an enormous mansion, flies on the world’s most advanced and luxurious private jet, and takes lavish vacations more often than most people change the oil in their cars…all at taxpayer expense. Obama feels such a sense of entitlement, as if he is truly royalty, that he even had his dog Bo flown aboard a military MV-22 Osprey (an aircraft that takes off like a helicopter but flies like a plane) to join his family on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, the ultra-exclusive playground for the rich. It would be nice if Obama, who loves to lecture us about the need for “shared sacrifice, would share a little in the sacrifice himself.

What we must understand is this suppression of free thought and rational debate is not meant to achieve uniformity of thought, but to crush dissent. As British historian Alan Bullock noted, "No one understood better than [Soviet dictator Josef] Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”

America faces dire problems that potentially represent the fall of our republic; stratospheric debt levels driven by metastasizing entitlement programs, high illegitimacy rates which drive poor educational achievement, high crime rates, and a growing dependency on government for basic needs, and a collapse of the “indispensable supports” of religion and morality which the Founding Fathers declared are the pillars of our republican form of government. If we can’t address these issues honestly, without attacking the motives of those that disagree with us, then we stand no chance of resolving them before the nation falls due to political entropy.