The antonym of liberal is not conservative but reactionary or even better revanchist
read Tanenbaum’s book.

So:
Reactionaries flame-out, then die. Let 100 flowers bloom

I think that hits ‘em where they live.

Comedy club nightmares. Wolfe’s the worst, but the other two are somehow equally insufferable. Insufferable, I hasten to add earnestly and seriously, because they are not funny. Although Dennis Miller had a decent Joan of Arc joke a while back.

Is there a sufferability limit below which there is no measure?

Yeah. That Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, you couldn’t get more unfunny talentless hacks, eh?

On the liberal side, commentators like Michael Moore and Jeanne Garofolo are more angry than funny. They’re the Glenn Becks of the left, dealing in self-righteousness rather than humor.

For more than you ever wanted to know about that personality type, see here:
The Authoritarians

This discussion answers some questions I’ve had lately concerning an old high school friend of mine. Back then, I saw him as a kindred spirit—both of us tended to be iconoclastic, we questioned authority, we were sarcastic. Like most teenagers, except more so, and more counter-culture. If I had been asked to guess back then what his politics would be thirty years later, I’d have supposed they’d be left-of-center because of his contrarian tendencies. But, as you’ve no doubt guessed, he’s a Fox News watching “libertarian” who spends a lot of his time finding ways to annoy liberals.

He annoys me, in fact. While it seems perfectly obvious to me that good Facebook netiquette is to refrain from posting antagonistic comments on the political posts by friends who hold opposing views, he clearly enjoys doing so in response to his (few) liberal friends’ posts. He likes to annoy people—it’s a clear line from our high school days to here. It’s just that back then, I wasn’t one of his targets.

There well may be the sort of sorting by temperament in politics that salient proposes, but, if so, it’s a weak sorting. Clearly, as NECLC’s comment indicates, there are many people on the left who feel that deliberate belligerence is an essential component of political action (whether or not they justify it as a necessary response to their opponents’ belligerence). I find it very interesting that NECLC and people like him use the very same kind of language, and express the very same brand of contempt, against non-belligerent liberals as do belligerent conservatives against all liberals. For them, politics is not policy, it’s conquest—and those allies who fail to understand this are part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can see this played out every day in the comments in the liberal blogosphere.

Even if there’s a lot of what I’m calling “belligerent liberals”, I still think that salient is on to something. Maybe it’s the case that the political culture has changed enough such that strong conservative positions are provocative today when they were innocuous thirty years ago. But I think that a lot of today’s conservative provocateurs would have been the same way back then. Instead of being contrarian, they would have simply belligerently enforced the status quo. They would be the ones making fun of the hippies on the street. I am utterly convinced that an important component of conservatism (not necessarily a trait shared by all conservatives) is a character that is authoritarian, conformist, and has an admiration for brutality. People with those temperaments may find their way to the left—but only in certain places and times when that characterizes that specific manifestation of the left. In more general terms, there’s something about that temperament that is more associated with the right than with the left. And thus these sorts of bumper stickers are more frequently targeted against liberals, than against conservatives.

In the late sixties my father passed along similar advise, saying he’d read Mao’s advise to being all negotiations by labeling your opponent a running dog.

Polarizing bummer stickers need to address both sides; one side should nod, smile and think “yep, certainly some true to that!” while the opposing side twists up their face, sputters, sighs and launches into a long tedious explanation why the joke isn’t.

This made him quite amused. He said, “What, you want to make something of it, b***h?” He tossed the envelope of posters aside, put up his fists like a boxer, and smirked. I had no idea what to make of that, backed away a couple steps, palms up, saying, “whoa, whoa, whoa,” etc. He snickered (or whatever you call it when people make a contempuous laugh that comes out as a “tih” sound) and said, “pussy.” Picked up his poster envelope, walked away, turned and called out something like “call me when you’re ready to stick up for yourself and defend your country.”’

Yeah Salient, but if you had clocked him one, he’d be whining on the whatever the equivalent of NRO was then about liberals being intolerant of dissenting opinions. You can’t win with these folks.

In general, I find all political bumperstickers annoying.