Why do people have liberal opinions? Dennis Prager has a theory: "naivete and narcissism" [TownHall.com]. Prager writes, "Very few people wake up in the morning planning to harm society... How, then, can decent and often very smart people hold liberal positions?" Prager is clearly an honest man. He confesses up front that his article is going to be a rediculous straw man: "most people who call themselves liberal do not hold most contemporary liberal positions." Great! So his theory doesn't refer to any actual liberals, and doesn't specify any actual liberal positions. This is kind of a neat approach to writing arguments. I think I'll give it a try:

Why do people hold conservative ideas? I mean, very few people wake up in the morning and say, "I'm going to rape small children." And, mind you, I'm referring to conservative ideas, not conservatives. Most conservatives today don't hold most conservative ideas. Yet conservative ideas have been wreaking havoc on our society. So why do people hold conservative ideas? There are many reasons, but the two greatest may be racial hatred and a desire to molest small children. At the heart of conservatism is the racist belief that the races must not be integrated. As a result of this belief, conservatives rarely give a black man a break. Instead, they organize lynch mobs, the KKK, corrupt police forces, G. Gordon Liddy and the national guard, and anything else that might help dispose of colored trouble makers. A second racist conservative belief is that because ragheads are brown, we shouldn't worry about shooting them or their children. Starting wars is always more fun than accounting for the loss of lives of innocent (non-white) bystanders. "Send in the troops!" "Nuke 'em!" "Four more years!" -- the conservative mind is full of jingoistic slogans and non sequitors about foreigners and darkies. Indeed, the very thought of "foreign non-white civilians" greatly disturbs conservatives. It shakes up their child-like views of the world, that every person is either "one of us" or "our mortal enemy," with no in-between. "Child-like" is operative. The further right you go, the less you like growing up. That is one reason so many child molestors are on the right. Never looking beyond school-children for sexual partners enables one to avoid becoming a mature adult. It is no wonder a conservative molester has recently argued that children should have the right to consent to sex with an adult. He knows in his heart that he is not really an adult, so why should he and not a chronologic child be allowed to consent to intercourse?

What a useful technique! I can just say anything I want about conservatives, as long as I don't specify which conservatives or which conservative ideas I'm talking about!