UPDATE BELOW 

Many anti-conservatives think they have found a winner with their continuing casting of 17-year-old Bristol Palin as the dispositive indicator of “hypocrisy” on the part of social conservatives. To them, if any social conservative OR any member of his or her family or group of friends is anything less than morally perfect, then that is proof of “hypocrisy” to be trumpeted from the rooftops with an assured smugness that only those who actually DO believe themselves to be morally perfect can muster.

The problem, as Kleinheider posts at the Nashville Post, is that in their rush to preen themselves and hate conservatives (yet again), they read social conservatives exactly wrong:

The Left simply misunderstands the Cultural War because they believe that social and religious conservatives think they are perfect people. Rural, working class people know exactly who they are. The Left seems to think that they are somehow breaking the news to social conservatives that sometimes, even often, kids will have sex and get pregnant. Social conservatives know these things. They are not as divorced from reality as they sometimes get painted.

You see, conservatives have code by which they live that accounts for it all. Whether they are “right” or “wrong” is immaterial. It is the Left’s misunderstanding which is important here.

Conservatives know they are imperfect. Instead of embracing the imperfection and “giving up” they instead prefer to strive for something better.

Now, whether this outlook is conservative outlook is true or untrue, healthy or unhealthy is, again, not the point, politically speaking. Telling the American working class that Sarah Palin was wrong to have tried to bring up her daughters by a code in which she believed and that Bristol Palin’s unborn child is the proof that the Left’s arguments about traditional life are true will not resonate with anyone who is not already an Obama voter.

The Left cannot win this Battle of Bristol. The more they try to win it, to demonstrate they are right, the more they will lose ground with those voters they desperate need to stay home or vote for Barack Obama.

For what the Left sees as hypocrisy, most folks who are not Obama voters just see as falling short. As, of course, we, as humans, all do.

The problem here is that too many on the left see conservatives as caricatures rather than people. And because their understanding of conservatives has never advanced beyond the level of character development found in a cheap comic book, they always seem to wind up lashing out at conservatives in ways that offend rather than persuade.

Once again, the leftist side of the blogosphere winds up indulging in the endlessly growing extremism of its own group-think syndrome, killing off its own best arguments in a self-destructive emotional vendetta to score points against people they hate instead of actually make the valid arguments available to them on substance.

Sad. And stupid. But alas, it seems, predictable. Indeed, we see this type of thing from them time and time and time again.

UPDATE: Protein Wisdom finds another gem, a Democratic Party activist blatantly arguing that a teenager’s misdeeds are presumed the result of bad mothering.  Does anyone really want to defend the anti-Palin argument across-the-board here?  Or is this just another in the long, long list of areas where there are no rules of consistency, logic, or decency that are allowed to get in the way of bashing those horrible, evil conservatives?