The bill making English “the official language” of the United States was a meaningless piece of political puffery designed to appease voters, but Dennis Prager’s comments on the liberal method of argument are dead on.

The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as “racist.” And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill “xenophobic.”

Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.

One-word put-downs of opponents’ ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual — their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors — liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.

This is easy to demonstrate.

Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:

Racist
Sexist
Homophobic
Islamophobic
Imperialist
Bigoted
Intolerant

And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:

Peace
Fairness
Tolerance
The poor
The disenfranchised
The environment

These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways.

First, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person.

Second, these words make it easy to be a liberal — essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy.