I'm better than you

And I can prove it!

City Pages

I don't know why I bother, really. I could be outside. Sitting in the cold rain.

Perhaps some of you read Katherine Kersten's latest school-yard taunt on Sunday. Perhaps not. According to Katie, conservatives are better informed, more tolerant, and more generous than liberals.

And better looking, too. So. There.

All  right, she didn't say the last thing, but she was thinking it.

Her proof that conservatives are better informed includes:

The widest gap [in political knowledge] -- 30 points -- came on a question about which political party is "generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government." Seventy-six percent of Republicans, but only 46 percent of Democrats, correctly named the GOP.

The funny thing is, you see, that Republicans administrations are better at spending money and increasing the deficit than Democratic ones, going back to the Archangel Ronald. So you might conclude that really, it's the Dems who have their facts straight.

That comes from not spending so much time on Fox News, which Katie, statistics show actually makes you dumber.

Her tolerance data is this:

A March 2012 Pew report, entitled "Social Networking Sites and Politics," found that 28 percent of liberals have "blocked, unfriended or hidden someone" on social-networking sites because of their political postings, compared with 16 percent of conservatives.

Of course, this is equally susceptible to the conclusions that it's the conservatives who are over the top obnoxious a greater percentage of the time, and that conservatives are personally threatening more often. Certainly, personal anecdotal evidence would bear that out.

Katie says that conservatives are more "charitable," too. A lot of that charity goes to churches, many of which spend most of their money right within the four walls of the church. (I read an article by an evangelical some time ago who quoted the figure 90%, but I don't have it handy. I don't recall whether that was for all churches or just evangelical churches.)

Moreover, the Mormon and the Catholic churches specifically have taken a lot of tax-deductible contributions from the pews and put it into the culture war against the GLBT community. Here's a Minnesota Public Radio story about the Catholic Church and its priorities.

This is not, I submit, generosity.

So Katie, I recommend that you just go back to telling people that their mothers wear combat boots.