It's not as simple as Rich writes, of course - the "Best Friends Forever" episode used Cartman to represent Michael Schiavo, which should say it all. I'm not expecting South Park to lurch to the left anytime soon, especially not after the hilarious "Die Hippie Die" episode, which featured several not-so-veiled jabs at Ward Churchill. (The hippies repeatedly call less enlightened people "Little Eichmanns".) Fact is, South Park goes after everybody, on the right, left and in between - and while conservatives may find that an improvement on most other movies and TV shows, which exclusively make fun of Republicans and religious people, it can't really be called a "conservative" program. South Park's guiding ideology seems to be more libertarian than anything else, but it once featured the newly-literate Officer Barbrady swearing off books forever after he tried to read Atlas Shrugged.

There is one animated series on television which is arguably more conservative than South Park, and that's King of the Hill. Yes, it's still on, and unlike a certain other cartoon which airs on Fox Sunday nights, it hasn't deteriorated in quality one bit. Hank Hill is a dedicated Republican who idolizes Ronald Reagan and has little time for new-age fads and squishy liberalism, and while he's portayed as hopelessly square and obsessed with following the rules (not to mention obsessed with "propane and propane accessories" to a degree which suggests obsessive-compulsive disorder), he's also honest, hard-working and - this is astonishingly rare for a father in a television comedy - right more often than he's wrong. I bet Dubya himself enjoys King of the Hill, and I can't say that for South Park.