Al Capp was quite liberal and that reflected in his Li'l Abner comics. However, in the 1960s he dared to lampoon student radicals for their excesses. He portrayed them as belonging to S.W.I.N.E - Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything. It was a wonderful lampoon, which may explain why some say Capp went nuts. How dare he criticize liberals!

Back in the 1970s, Doonesbury was cutting edge stuff. However, his smugness became his undoing in my opinion. Like Tom pointed out, arrogance is the least endearing quality of so many liberals. They arrogantly believe that ordinary people are too stupid to decide things for themselves, so government must make decisions. Of course, they mean liberals in government making the decisions. That's the same arrogance that comes across when you hear them talk about socialism and communism - it would've worked if the right (meaning them) people were in charge. Anyone who dares to disagree is an idiot, bigot, racist, homophobe. It isn't hard to understand how that kind of arrogance resulted in dissidents being sent to mental hospitals in the Soviet era. Anyone who dares to disagree with the state _must_ be insane.