It’s recently occurred to me that there’s more behind this sort of liberal hate treatment than just philosophy. As the old saying goes, follow the money.
It would be interesting to see a tabulation of the following:
1. Number of speeches given by leading liberals over a 5 year period.
2. Awards given to those leading liberals over 5 year period
3. Speaking fees and other monetary considerations along with awards given those same liberals over the time frame
4. Source of the fees and monetary considerations, i.e., private money or money from taxpayer-funded institutions.
5. The same four metrics for GOP and/or Conservatives.
What I strongly suspect you’d find is that liberals have established a significant gravy train funded primarily by tax dollars, or by awards/speaking fees from businesses that benefit greatly from tax dollars, through which they pad their incomes when they are out of office, while waiting for future employment opportunities in the public sector.
Thus, any threat to that gravy train such as, for example, Ms. Rice becoming a popular college commencement speaker, must be shouted down to prevent all that taxpayer “gravy” from being siphoned off by non-liberals.
Liberals are very good at rewarding each other with taxpayer-sourced funds when they are temporarily out of power, and they’re also quite effective at protecting those funds from poaching by conservatives.
Note that I’m not including other obvious taxpayer-funded plums such as ambassadorships and university presidencies, but just speaking fees and monetary awards, and the source of funding.
I realize conservatives get money for their speeches as well, but I suspect the source of funding for said speeches tends to be private rather than taxpayer sourced.
Very probably an accurate assessment. It is certainly part of the picture.