You know, the number of truly stupid people in the population is really pretty small. Most conservative voters are just normal people going about their lives in normal, ordinary ways. A relatively small percentage listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and most of those who do have the ability to weed out, mentally, the wheat from the chaff when Limbaugh says something nutty or they see a misplaced “D” under the name of a Republican miscreant on the Fox network. Some conservatives even voted for Obama in the last election.
I think it’s a result of the liberal propensity to regard itself as superior intellectually that leads so many people of a liberal mindset to swallow the idea that every conservative exposed, however minimally if at all, to the shenanigans of Limbaugh or the Fox network fully accept what they hear and adopt it as heartfelt belief.
Further, not that many conservatives watch and/or listen to these programs anyway. IIRC, Limbaugh pulls a weekly audience of twenty million listeners. And if I also remember correctly this is the aggregate of his daily listeners. So in reality he is only reaching four million listeners a day, and many of them only on a hit and miss basis as he is on in the background as they go about their work or daily business.
So he only reaches four million people a day and most of them hear only snippets of his program. And then among those four million are a great many who perfectly capable, like I said above, of separating the wheat from the chaff in what he’s saying. They’re likely to see his point on subjects that they already agree with and to smile and shake their heads when he’s spouting something that has been distorted or what is obviously nonsense.
So when you look at the total number of conservatives in this country, which numbered at least sixty million if you go by voters in the last election and don’t take into account youthful conservatives and/or those who didn’t vote, and you consider that of those who are exposed to right wing nonsense only a small percentage actually believe it, you are left with a large number who are unaffected by it - probably 95% at least.
So the average conservative voter is the small business owner, the small business manager, the busy soccer mom, etc. None of these people are particularly stupid and most of them by far are unaffected by the machinations of the right wing media - a media which is far offset by the more insideous though lighthanded (IMO :D) mainstream media, which has been subtly promoting liberal positions on philosophy and lifestyle for decades anyway.
So when you get right down to it, only a very small percentage of the conservative population actually believes nonsense like Obama is a Kenyan or that some Republican politician is really a Democrat because Fox put a “D” under his name four or five or however many times it was.
But all these criticisms are fairly recent anyway and yet the liberal tendency to label its opponents as stupid and backward goes all the way back, apparently. William F. Buckley railed against it in the early fifties and cited instances of it going back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Thus it’s become apparent to me that whatever it is in the human brain that results in a person’s having become a liberal is also responsible for the liberal propensity to view their opponents as stupid and hateful. But for every stupid or hateful thing a liberal can point to as typical of conservatives, I could show you an equally stupid and/or hateful thing that I can point to as being typical of liberals.
And on preview, Brainglutton, I’ve never heard any conservative make the claim that liberals are evil. That isn’t to say that none ever have, but it isn’t part of the mainstream conservative outlook. Frankly, it’s been my experience that liberals believe that conservatives are stupid, evil (or at least to the extent their stupidity allows them to be) and hateful, and conservatives believe liberals are pie-in-the-sky idealists who favor unworkable solutions that create more problems than they solve.
Essentially, the conflict between conservatism and liberalism is very similar to the conflict between generations. Conservative philosophies, beliefs and ways of life align more with the adults; and liberal philosophies, beliefs and ways of life align more with youth. It’s the generation gap writ large.
And on further preview:
Please point to the part of my post where I said Obama called Republicans stupid.
No, it means that people were tired of the war, politics as usual in Washington, and they fell for Obama’s message of hope and change…a message that has now morphed into such silly and meaningless platitudes as his recent “Reach for hope” speech. :rolleyes:
And frankly, much of the problem for the Republicans is that for the last few decades they’ve been liberal-lite. Limbaugh was correct when he urged Republican politicians and voters to get back to basic and fundemental conservative priciples, principles they had long ago abandoned in the belief that that veering leftward was the only way to get elected in this day and age. If you look at JFK’s “Ask not what you’re country can do for you” speech and contrast it with today where the question has literally become “How much can and will the government do for me?”, and you’ll see how much Republicans have had to move leftward to get elected. Now, with the Dems firmly in control and defying the will of the electorate, and being exhorted to do so by the rise and popularity of the Tea Party, Republicans are finally beginning to see that the correct course of action is to get back to the basics of conservatism rather than trying simply to be not quite as liberal as the liberals.
Yee-haw!!!
And now I’m out for the day. I gots chit to do.
And on yet further preview (dammit! :smack:), I would point out, Brain Glutton, that merely attending college is not any kind of reliable measure of innate intelligence, and intelligence alone is not any kind of measure of judgement, wisdom, self-discipline and things like that. And then you have to consider that a certain number of these students are taking liberal arts classes that are a total waste of time and money in terms of the job market (and how smart is that?), and a certain number are ‘professional students’, staying in school as long as possible to avoid having to contend with the real world.
It ain’t for nothin’ that William F. Buckley once said that he’d “sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty at Harvard University”. 
And besides, how many of these college and university students are being outpaced in income and lifestyle by conservatives who’ve gone into business and worked their ass off and are far outpacing them in terms of homes, cars, retirement programs, college for their kids, etc.
I hate to say it, but having a larger percentage of liberals in college doesn’t really mean anything except that there’s a larger percentage of liberals in college. 
And now, serially, I am out of here.