IT’S HOW THE SELF-DETERMINED COOL KIDS PAT EACH OTHER ON THE BACK: Matt Welch: It’s Not Just MSNBC Making Flip Assumptions About Non-Liberal Racism. “There is nothing tolerant about assuming that those who have different ideas than you about the size and scope of government are motivated largely by base ethnic tribalism. MSNBC, on whose shows I have happily participated, engages daily in the othering business, of making conservatism itself (and sometimes libertarianism, and other non-Progressive ideological strains) a disreputable condition, explicable in terms of pathology. That this is done in the name of tolerance and sensitivity to punitive stereotypes is one of the ironies of our age.”