Liberal until it's inconvenient or costs the liberal money

I recently offered a flip, smart-alecked, response to a very minor point that a regular here at JoeUser.com (and the affiliated Stardock.com sites) had made.  The original article is here: Putting myself on a spending freeze, with the following snippet and discussion broken out below for clarity:

original snippet:

Call you the hypocritical liberal that you are.

That inspired the following reply:

blah   My point is that I have no problem making the sacrifices that will make a difference. Ethanol appears to be at best a feel good measure that really is not going to make a big difference to the environment. It does raise the price of corn which raises the price of dairy, beef and pork. It's one thing to know this intellectually. It's another thing to see the results at the grocery store every week.

Having had the thoughts in my head, rumbling around a bit over the last few days, I still want to revisit this discussion, and apparently my reply caused the original poster to revisit this sub-set of their original article as well, as the bulk of the text above was added a little later to the originally simplistic 'blah' reply.

I guess the original response I made was taken a bit harshly, and perhaps it should be, as one of the points of making that reply -- besides scoring some quick and easy smart-aleck points -- was to get the person that made the original comments to think about what they had just said, and how hypocritical their comments come across when they make them there.

I don't want to generalize here, but I guess I'm going to, as this just seems to be one example that proves the point that most liberals are fine and dandy in living with their liberalism UNTIL THE POINT THAT DOING SO IMPACTS THEIR OWN BOTTOM LINE.  Once that happens, once the liberal sees an impact upon themselves, then whoa!  Slow down!  Wrong target!  Wrong target.

This is something that just kills me to see, as liberals supposedly want the world to be a better place, especially for future generations and such, but only up to the point of it starting to inconvenience themselves.  Once it starts hitting home for them, rather than the rich fat cats, or whatever the target group is that they were originally going after, then the support for their goals, and any effort required at achieving those goals stops.

Clean air is a good thing -- unless it costs more money to buy goods at the grocery store.  Saving oil is a good thing -- unless it costs more money to buy food because we are using more ethanol.  You get the picture.  There is always an unless and until.

Why is it ok for liberals to save these conjunctions (back at good old Conjunction Junction, what's your function?) to pull out at just the right time?  In my mind, it's not ok.  I suspect in the minds of most reasonable individuals, it's not ok, but at the same time, liberals give other liberals passes on these sorts of issues all the time.

As Gideon noted in a couple of recent articles, taking swings at Michael Moore will get you tons of scorn and hatred back from the liberals as they protect one of their own.  The same holds if you take swings at Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Nancy Pelosi, Cindy Sheehan, etc.  God forbid the non-liberal that takes swings at these figures as they'll surely be villified for doing so.  But have one of these folks say something stupid, or trip themselves up on their own issues, and it will be ignored.

Heck, a recent example is Barrack Obama's threats against Pakistan.  (See Obama threatens Pakistan - is he right?)  As I pointed out in that article, if a conservative had made those statements they would definitely have been called threats, and all sorts of alarm bells would have gone off in the 'main stream media' (read: liberal media) over the same.  Because the comments were made by a liberal though, well, there can be no hypocrisy, right?