Liberal guilt is a good thing? You have got to be kidding. The reason conservatives make fun of liberal guilt - and try looking past the guilt to understand what I am saying - is that feelings of guilt lead to choices based on that guilt alone. Sometimes very silly choices. Affirmative action comes to mind. A long diatribe justifying ridiculous behavior is utterly foolish.

Your dismissal of affirmative action is by no means persuasive just because you ask us to bring it to mind. What I would say is that denial is the thing that more often leads to silly choices—and your conservative "common sense" delusion is a great example of the sort of thing I have in mind.

Liberal guilt is what led to a welfare system where poor, uneducated women were paid to have fatherless children and poor men were encouraged to abandon their children. It is all fine and dandy to want high taxes to fund these 'compassionate' programs when you are incredibly wealthy. When you are working poor, paying taxes for these programs means eating ramen noodles so that the deadbeat next door can order pizza. When you are middle class, paying taxes for these programs means that you can't save for your kids college.

It is all fine and dandy to have 'compassion' for the criminals when you live in a posh neighborhood. You don't have to live with them. But it is the poor people, the folks that liberals claim to have compassion for, that pay a terrible price when the police are undermined and the courts let violent criminals go with a slap on the wrist.

One of the reasons my pizza eating neighbor lived the way she did was because some liberal judge gave the man who raped her at 13 a pathetic 18 month sentence. The rapist came back from jail and told everyone that she had begged for sex. The liberal welfare system gave her everything she wanted so she had no motivation to better herself. And the liberal social workers wouldn't take away her daughter even though she was leaving the child alone with a parade of homeless bums and there was a loving set of grandparents who could have given the child a better home. I will be very suprised if that child makes it to the ripe old age of 13 before she is raped.

Liberal guilt leads to one making decisions based on, well, guilt.

They could work out for the best. They could work out for the worse. That's up in the air.

I think the point is that decisions are being made simply to relieve guilt. If they are made for any other reason, we're no longer talking about liberal guilt.

I'm middle class, and I don't live in a posh neighborhood. You are making all sorts of silly asumptions and you don't have the slightest reason for doing so except that you have your "mind" made up. Cheers.