Liberals are like Bizarro-World conservatives; that is, liberals do everything backwards.  While conservatives believe that the guilty should be punished and those who are irresponsible should suffer the consequences of their bad choices, liberals believe that the guilty and irresponsible should be rewarded at the expense of the innocent and responsible people in America.

Susan Rice either lied about Benghazi or was irresponsible for not knowing the truth.  Obama is rewarding her with a promotion.  Samantha Power said that America is evil and should apologize for its actions, and she is being rewarded by being named U.S. ambassador to the U.N., where she will fit right in with all the dictators that condemn the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Benghazi whistle-blowers, who spoke truth to power, are being persecuted.

Liberals have always championed Supreme Court rulings that make it harder to convict the guilty.  While we can all agree that beating a confession out of a suspect is wrong, liberals believe that physical evidence should be excluded if a police officer or judge made a mistake.  For example, a man murdered a young girl after kidnapping her from the YMCA.  He surrendered to police, and while being transported, he told police where the body was.  Clearly only the killer could have that information.  However, the courts ruled that the man must be freed since the statements were made without the killer's lawyer being present.  The killer was not physically attacked or coerced.

The flip-side of rewarding criminals is punishing the innocent future victims of the criminals who are freed.  Further, by undermining the legal system's ability to punish the guilty, liberals encourage more crime by reducing the perceived downside.  That too punishes the innocent.

ObamaCare is designed to reward those who didn't bother to get their own insurance, and then became ill, as well as those who are unable to buy their own insurance.  In some cases, people have tried to succeed in America but failed, so helping with their medical care is not so bothersome.  But providing care for those who through their own bad life choices -- dropping out of school, using drugs, etc. -- is rewarding the irresponsible.

To pay for the benefits for the irresponsible, ObamaCare imposes a significant expense on the responsible Americans.  Just forcing insurance companies to cover children under their parents' policies until the children are 26 drives up the costs for all Americans, thereby punishing the adults who raised their children to be independent after college, or before, while rewarding both irresponsible young adults and parents who did a bad job raising their kids.

Obama's crony capitalism rewards those who give him money.  Many of Obama's friends have been granted exemptions from ObamaCare, for example.  Additionally, 80% of the $20.5 billion loaned to "green" energy companies went to companies whose owners had given substantially to the Obama campaign. 

At the same time, liberals constantly seek to increase taxes on American small businesses that often file as individuals.  Given that the only crime small businesses are guilty of is creating jobs, this is another example of punishing the innocent.

Liberals say that a man and a woman who engage in consensual sex can kill their daughter if they don't want her.  While there are some who might argue that having sex while refusing to accept the consequences -- unless the consequence is an STD, in which case the offending partner is considered potentially at fault -- is responsible behavior, the simple fact is that, given that no form of contraception is perfect, it is irrational to assume that sex can't result in pregnancy.  Allowing abortion empowers the irresponsible parties, the people who engage in sex but refuse to accept the consequences, to kill an innocent third party.  Their unborn daughter has clearly done nothing to deserve a painful execution, but liberals fully support rewarding her parents and punishing her.

While people can argue about the way the state of Israel was founded, the simple fact is that today, Israel has made amazing efforts to reach peace with its Muslim neighbors.  America would never tolerate repeated missile attacks from Canada or Mexico, for example.  Yet liberals hold Israel to be the problem in the Middle East and demand that Israel put its civilian population at risk.

At the same time, liberals endorse Hamas and the PLO, even though those organizations call for the destruction of Israel, albeit usually only in Arab-language sources.  Even when the Palestinians use a guided anti-tank rocket to attack a school bus, liberals seem unfazed about rewarding Muslim terrorists.

Liberals want to reward those who spew true hate speech.  If someone calls Bush Hitler, calls a Crucifix in a jar of urine art, or condemns all conservatives as racists, liberals will defend his right to free speech and help him get federal funding.  But if someone speaks out against gay marriage or wants to offer a woman entering an abortion clinic a pamphlet, liberals are incensed.  In fact, liberals are constantly working to get all conservatives tossed off the airwaves and to have Fox News banned.

The explanation for this strange behavior by liberals is actually fairly simple.  They have very different definitions of guilt, innocence, and responsibility from conservatives'.

Liberals believe that guilt is a relative thing, because people are really not responsible for their actions.  In the liberal mind, a black who grows up in a ghetto gets a free pass on being a criminal because he can't help himself.  While that is obviously very racist, it's also clearly wrong, because the majority of poor blacks are not criminals.

Liberals believe that the unborn child is not innocent, but rather that she is a parasite whom the mother has the right to kill.  In a liberal's mind, innocence is aligned more with the correctness of a cause than with the actions of an individual -- someone who shoots an abortionist is a monster, but the Unabomber was motivated by love of nature.  Any action that furthers the liberal cause is good, so lying about Benghazi was good because it made it harder for ObamaCare to be repealed, and people who are doing what liberals think of as good are obviously, in liberal eyes, innocent of wrongdoing.

Finally, responsibility in the eyes of liberals is not a personal characteristic, but a societal one.  People are not required to be responsible for their own lives, like free men have been since time immemorial; instead, it is government, guided by caring and loving liberals, which is responsible.  People who don't take care of themselves are not at fault in the minds of liberals.  Rather, it is society that fails by not providing a good lifestyle for those who don't want to try.

Modern liberals espouse the same "ends justifies the means" situational morality-based definitions of guilty, innocent, responsible, and irresponsible first espoused by Machiavelli and perfected by Lenin.

You can read more of tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.