What it means to be a liberal

[Tigermike 3,067]

Do you agree with this? Or do you think this is self serving makeover to disguise the libs?

What it means to be a liberal

By Geoffrey R. Stone. Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, is the author of "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime."

Published October 10, 2006

For most of the past four decades, liberals have been in retreat. Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have controlled the White House 70 percent of the time and Republican presidents have made 86 percent of the U.S. Supreme Court appointments. In many quarters, the word "liberal" has become a pejorative. Part of the problem is that liberals have failed to define themselves and to state clearly what they believe. As a liberal, I find that appalling.

In that light, I thought it might be interesting to try to articulate 10 propositions that seem to me to define "liberal" today. Undoubtedly, not all liberals embrace all of these propositions, and many conservatives embrace at least some of them.

Moreover, because 10 is a small number, the list is not exhaustive. And because these propositions will in some instances conflict, the "liberal" position on a specific issue may not always be predictable. My goal, however, is not to end discussion, but to invite debate.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.)

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.)

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.)

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty."

Consider this an invitation. Are these propositions meaningful? Are they helpful? Are they simply wrong? As a liberal, how would you change them or modify the list? As a conservative, how would you draft a similar list for conservatives?

link

[DKW 86 7,451]

Way too much "Truthiness" in that for me. I submit a correected view of Liberalism.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

Liberals want the censorship of anyone that questions anything they believe and refuse to give an open and balanced voice to anything that they do not 100% agree with. IE, any number of Conservatives are runoff anf attacked for their free speech on college campuses. Leibermann didnt agree with the Dems, throw him out of the party. There are no Conservative Dems anymore. They all left because the Left refused to even let them speak within their party.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.)

It was Democrats they waged war against the US to keep the blacks as slaves. It was Democrats that imposed Jim Crow laws. It was the Clinton Administration that crapped allover the Constitution in Filegate, etc by trampling all over hundreds of civil rights and privacy rights. It is the democrats that refuse to allow a reasonable black man to run for President. Is not hate speech also Free Speech? We might not like it but it is still Free Speech.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."

It is Chicago Democratic leaders that still brag about fixing elections. Elections where voters are bused back and forth across town to vote in many districts, etc. It ia Alabama Democrats that brag about half of the cemeteries vote every election cycle. It was the New Jersey Democratic party that invented GerryMandering. It was the 1996 Clinton Gore Campaign fund raisers that broke hundreds of laws and refused to acknowledge one bit of responsibility for Templegate, RiyadiGate, CoffeeGate, etc. And then claimed that "there was no controlling legal authority."

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.)

Liberals believe that the worst thing to come from California is publicly sponsored referendums (propositions) in which the very Liberal ideas are shot down by the public taking govt into their own hands. Overbearing govt monitoring seems to be what Liberals love. Although a very small pecentage of crimes are done with registered guns, the govt wastes millions upon millions every year registering guns for no real reason other than intruding on privacy rights.

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people.

It is liberals that decry victims as victimizers and fight to keep felons out on the streets and making our own strets less and less safe. It is Liberals that defame every Christian person and institutuion on the planet at every turn. It is Liberals that defame Jews as the real murderers in Palestine becasue of their long held hatred for Jews.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

It is Liberals that raise taxes within their own countries that eventually force going businesses to relocate and cost middle income folks their jobs. It is Liberals who rabidly hang on to failed Educational policy and refuse to allow choice through vouchers to poor black urban families and thereby trapping them in inner city poverty.

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women.

This is a country founded on Freedom OF Faith and not on Freedom FROM Faith. We have Chaplain Prayers in the Senate and House, oaths taken on Bibles, "In God We Trust" written on our money. Liberals are just using these ideas to further divide the US for political gain.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.)

It is Liberal juries and Judges that have fostered some of the biggest fallacies and frauds on American Jurisprudence. It is Liberals who falsely found a freedom of Abortion in the 14th Amenndment even when the foundation of that "right" is totally hallucinated from reading the 14th Amendment. It is Liberal judges and the Ninth District Court of Appeals that have given us McDonalds Coffee lawsuits and other equally bogus and specious decisions that have almost ruined the American worker and American business. It is Liberal leaders in this country that crap on women's rights (Kennedy and Clinton) and laugh about it openly as these women get their rights trashed every day. I wished that Liberals would see the hypocrisy fo their stands on Abortion and Human Rights. I know there are approx. 35M aborted persons and 35M childless couples that probably feel the same way too.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

It is Liberals that attack spending on every turn for defense and further restrict the actual removal of criminals from the street because they hallucinate more and more bogus claims of rights that just impede the execution of the law by law enforcement agencies. How many guilty peopel go rfree? How many innocent people must die? How many victims get their lives ruined while Liberals blindly refuse to see the damamge they do on a daily basis?

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty."

Liberals are the ones that saw our troops dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and did nothing. It was a Liberal that saw our hostages taken in Iran, and did NOTHING. It was Liberal leaders that continue to side with dictators and others that take away the human rights of those living in other countries. It is Liberalism that masks itself as Democratic form of govt and them stifles true debate and true thought to get its way.

Too much more to say here. Could go go for hours.

[TexasTiger 13,055]

Way too much "Truthiness" in that for me. I submit a correected view of Liberalism.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

Liberals want the censorship of anyone that questions anything they believe and refuse to give an open and balanced voice to anything that they do not 100% agree with. IE, any number of Conservatives are runoff anf attacked for their free speech on college campuses. Leibermann didnt agree with the Dems, throw him out of the party. There are no Conservative Dems anymore. They all left because the Left refused to even let them speak within their party.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.)

It was Democrats they waged war against the US to keep the blacks as slaves. It was Democrats that imposed Jim Crow laws. It was the Clinton Administration that crapped allover the Constitution in Filegate, etc by trampling all over hundreds of civil rights and privacy rights. It is the democrats that refuse to allow a reasonable black man to run for President. Is not hate speech also Free Speech? We might not like it but it is still Free Speech.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."

It is Chicago Democratic leaders that still brag about fixing elections. Elections where voters are bused back and forth across town to vote in many districts, etc. It ia Alabama Democrats that brag about half of the cemeteries vote every election cycle. It was the New Jersey Democratic party that invented GerryMandering. It was the 1996 Clinton Gore Campaign fund raisers that broke hundreds of laws and refused to acknowledge one bit of responsibility for Templegate, RiyadiGate, CoffeeGate, etc. And then claimed that "there was no controlling legal authority."

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.)

Liberals believe that the worst thing to come from California is publicly sponsored referendums in which the very Liberal ideas are shot down by the public taking govt into their own hands. Freedom from overbearing govt monitoring seems to be what Liberals love. Although a very small pecentage of crimes are done with registered guns, the govt wastes millions upon millions every year registering guns for no real reason other than intruding on privacy rights.

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people.

It is liberals that decry victims as victimizers and fight to keep felons out on the streets and making our own strets less and less safe. It is Liberals that defame every Christian person and institutuion on the planet at every turn. It is Liberals that defame Jews as the real murderers in Palestine becasue of their long held hatred for Jews.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

It is Liberals tha raise taxes within their own countries that eventually force going businesses to relocate and cost middle income folks their jobs. It is Liberals who rabidly hang on to failed Educational policy and refuse to allow choice through vouchers to poor black urban families and thereby trapping them in inner city poverty.

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women.

This is a country founded on Freedom OF Faith and not on Freedom FROM Faith. We have Chaplain Prayers in the Senate and House, oaths taken on Bibles, "In God We Trust" written on ourr money. Liberals are just using these ideas to further divide the US for political gain.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.)

It is Liberal juries and Judges that have fostered some of the biggest fallacies and frauds on American Jurisprudence. It is Liberals who falsely found a freedom of Abortion in the 14th Amenndment even when the foundation of that "right" is totally hallucinated from reading the 14th Amendment. It is Liberal judges and the Ninth District Court of Appeals that have given us McDonalds Coffee lawsuits and other equally bogus and specious decisions that have almost ruined the American worker and American business. It is Liberal leaders in this country that crap on women's rights (Kennedy and Clinton) and laugh about it openly as these women get their rights trashed every day. I wished that Liberals would see the hypocrisy fo their stands on Abortion and Human Rights. I know there are approx. 35M aborted persons and 35M childless couples that probably feel the same way too.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

It is Liberals that attack spending on every turn for defense and further restrict the actual removal of criminals from the street because they hallucinate more and more bogus claims of rights that just impede the execution of the law by law enforcement agencies. How many guilty peopel go rfree? How many innocent people must die? How many victims get their lives ruined while Liberals blindly refuse to see the damamge they do on a daily basis?

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty."

Liberals are the ones that saw our troops dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and did nothing. It was Liberal that saw our hostages taken in Iran, and did NOTHING. It was Liberal leaders that continue to side with dictators and others that take away the human rights of those living in other countries. It is Libearalism that masks itslef as Democratic form of govt and them stifles true debate and true thought to gget its way.

Too much more to say here. Could go go for hours.

These lies and distortions brought to you by GOP spokesman, David Ward, even though he will deny that he knows his Republican masters three times before the cock crows.

[DKW 86 7,451]

Way too much "Truthiness" in that for me. I submit a correected view of Liberalism.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

Liberals want the censorship of anyone that questions anything they believe and refuse to give an open and balanced voice to anything that they do not 100% agree with. IE, any number of Conservatives are runoff anf attacked for their free speech on college campuses. Leibermann didnt agree with the Dems, throw him out of the party. There are no Conservative Dems anymore. They all left because the Left refused to even let them speak within their party.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.)

It was Democrats they waged war against the US to keep the blacks as slaves. It was Democrats that imposed Jim Crow laws. It was the Clinton Administration that crapped allover the Constitution in Filegate, etc by trampling all over hundreds of civil rights and privacy rights. It is the democrats that refuse to allow a reasonable black man to run for President. Is not hate speech also Free Speech? We might not like it but it is still Free Speech.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."

It is Chicago Democratic leaders that still brag about fixing elections. Elections where voters are bused back and forth across town to vote in many districts, etc. It ia Alabama Democrats that brag about half of the cemeteries vote every election cycle. It was the New Jersey Democratic party that invented GerryMandering. It was the 1996 Clinton Gore Campaign fund raisers that broke hundreds of laws and refused to acknowledge one bit of responsibility for Templegate, RiyadiGate, CoffeeGate, etc. And then claimed that "there was no controlling legal authority."

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.)

Liberals believe that the worst thing to come from California is publicly sponsored referendums in which the very Liberal ideas are shot down by the public taking govt into their own hands. Freedom from overbearing govt monitoring seems to be what Liberals love. Although a very small pecentage of crimes are done with registered guns, the govt wastes millions upon millions every year registering guns for no real reason other than intruding on privacy rights.

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people.

It is liberals that decry victims as victimizers and fight to keep felons out on the streets and making our own strets less and less safe. It is Liberals that defame every Christian person and institutuion on the planet at every turn. It is Liberals that defame Jews as the real murderers in Palestine becasue of their long held hatred for Jews.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

It is Liberals tha raise taxes within their own countries that eventually force going businesses to relocate and cost middle income folks their jobs. It is Liberals who rabidly hang on to failed Educational policy and refuse to allow choice through vouchers to poor black urban families and thereby trapping them in inner city poverty.

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women.

This is a country founded on Freedom OF Faith and not on Freedom FROM Faith. We have Chaplain Prayers in the Senate and House, oaths taken on Bibles, "In God We Trust" written on ourr money. Liberals are just using these ideas to further divide the US for political gain.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.)

It is Liberal juries and Judges that have fostered some of the biggest fallacies and frauds on American Jurisprudence. It is Liberals who falsely found a freedom of Abortion in the 14th Amenndment even when the foundation of that "right" is totally hallucinated from reading the 14th Amendment. It is Liberal judges and the Ninth District Court of Appeals that have given us McDonalds Coffee lawsuits and other equally bogus and specious decisions that have almost ruined the American worker and American business. It is Liberal leaders in this country that crap on women's rights (Kennedy and Clinton) and laugh about it openly as these women get their rights trashed every day. I wished that Liberals would see the hypocrisy fo their stands on Abortion and Human Rights. I know there are approx. 35M aborted persons and 35M childless couples that probably feel the same way too.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

It is Liberals that attack spending on every turn for defense and further restrict the actual removal of criminals from the street because they hallucinate more and more bogus claims of rights that just impede the execution of the law by law enforcement agencies. How many guilty peopel go rfree? How many innocent people must die? How many victims get their lives ruined while Liberals blindly refuse to see the damamge they do on a daily basis?

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty."

Liberals are the ones that saw our troops dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and did nothing. It was Liberal that saw our hostages taken in Iran, and did NOTHING. It was Liberal leaders that continue to side with dictators and others that take away the human rights of those living in other countries. It is Libearalism that masks itslef as Democratic form of govt and them stifles true debate and true thought to gget its way.

Too much more to say here. Could go go for hours.

These lies and distortions brought to you by GOP spokesman, David Ward, even though he will deny that he knows his Republican masters three times before the cock crows.

1) I dont have Republican masters.

2) I just think out loud.

3) I think Tex just uttered some hate speech toward me. Anyone seen a real liberal around here? I need to make a complaint...

[otterinbham 0]

Well, actually, this is a bunch of self-serving nonsense. The ideals outlined in this manifesto are so broad that just about anybody would agree with them.

Where liberalism failed was in the execution of their vision, and their belief in interventionist government. Inspired by the ideas of Keynes and Galbraith, liberalism feel that macroeconomic theory remains the solution to our economic woes. The sine qua non of liberalism rests on the guiding principle of government during two separate initiatives in American history: The New Deal and The Great Society.

Both have a great deal of mythology attached to them. However, the liberal mantra that both movements were successes is disproved by objective analysis of the facts.

For starters, the Great Depression was not caused by the Crash of 1929. Yes, it initiated the Great Depression. But the true culprit was government RESPONSE to the stock market crash. If you look at other crashes such as 1987 and 2001, you realize that both were of similar severity to The Crash. However, while government in 1987 and 2001 brought forward highly effective fiscal responses to avert a severe economic turndown, the government in 1929 did a botch job of things by tightening credit, rather than loosening credit. This move by the Federal Reserve at the time was akin to pouring gasoline on a manageable brush fire.

Then came possibly the very worst piece of legislation ever authored (with the possible exception of Bush's new Medicare prescription plan): The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which effectively destroyed international trade in the early 30s. While actually passed in 1930 during the Hoover administration, it falls very much within the liberal ideology of government intervention in the market economy--resulting in an estimated 14% drop in international trade. 14% is catastrophic, no matter how you measure it.

Finally, FDR's New Deal Program was very inspirational, yet had very little substantive effect on the Great Depression. By ratcheting up income tax rates and regulation, capital spending, discretionary spending, and investing dried almost completely up in the 1930s, at a time when value investors should have been picking up stocks for cheap thereby putting fresh money into companies in sore need of cash. While hagiographers of FDR love to show his "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" speech from 1933, what they studiously ignore is that the country's economic plight was just as bad in 1938 as it was in 1933. In fact, unemployment had not changed markedly, and many economic indicators only began showing improvement a year or so after many aspects of FDR's economic program were shut down by the Supreme Court. In fact, I would say that the true saviors of the American economy were actually Adolph Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. Because the economic activity spurred by World War II was what set the country back on the road to prosperity, sad to say.

Then, LBJ's Great Society program came along. Prior to LBJ, the average tax burden in this country was around 5%. Today, even with tax cuts, it sits around 40%. The raft of ill-considered government programs launched by LBJ have had far-ranging consequences, from the plundering of Social Security, to the gutting of our inner cities, to the marked productivity downturn the country experienced from 1965 until the mid 1980s. All you have to do is realize how widely celebrated the 1996 welfare reform is today to realize how wasteful and ineffective the Great Society was. In fact, the steady ongoing decline of poverty statistics in this country was actually halted for two decades following LBJ's inauguration. The only success in LBJ's administration was the Voting Rights Act and other Civil Rights legislation, which corrected a shameful injustice in American society.

Why the history lesson? Because these are the two great events in liberal imagination. Widely ballyhooed and celebrated, they were actually ineffective. In fact, if you apply Hayek's Law of Unintended Consequences, you realize that both were very destructive to the American economic growth. Heck, don't take my word for it. Just read the views of Edmund Phelps, America's newest Nobel laureate in Economics. Phelps, Friedman, and Hayek have effectively destroyed the notion that Keynsian economics, the linchpin of liberal economics, can be a viable, sustainable system.

Yet talk to liberals, and watch how they wax nostalgic over these two eras in American history. Perhaps they find them inspirational. But they were unmitigated disasters for the lower- and middle-classes in the country, both in economic and societal terms. They ignore the mounting body of economic evidence. Instead their childlike faith in large-scale government solutions to problems remains unchecked. Instead of actually questioning their basic philosophy of macroeconomics, they want to tinker with it at the margins, while leaving the Rube Goldberg machinery untouched.

So, that is the crux of liberalism. A shared set of philosophical goals with conservatism (with some notable exceptions), but a seriously flawed understanding about how to best pursue those goals.

On the flip side, the current Conservative movement is utterly bankrupt: Morally, ethically, and functionally.

Third party anyone? I know DKW is gunning to start one of his own. Count me in.

[CCTAU 3,351]

These lies and distortions brought to you by GOP spokesman, David Ward, even though he will deny that he knows his Republican masters three times before the cock crows.

Speaking of.......TT-a-doodle-doo

[AUman43 5]

Conservatives have really "saved the world" haven't they? When are people going to realize that this crap of "values" and "morals" , etc are just tactics for retro-repubics to get reelected.? They have been in power now for 12 years so why are things in such a screwed up mess if all their ideas are right?

[Tigermike 3,067]

Conservatives have really "saved the world" haven't they? When are people going to realize that this crap of "values" and "morals" , etc are just tactics for retro-repubics to get reelected.? They have been in power now for 12 years so why are things in such a screwed up mess if all their ideas are right?

This thread was titled "What it means to be a liberal". In the minds of many you have articulated exactly what it means to be a liberal. Attack, slander conservatives but offer absolutely no ideas whatsoever. Is that all that liberals stand for? Is that all that you believe?

BTW - Start a thread on the short comings of Republicans if you wish, we will all be glad to chime in.

BTW II - The article was written by a lib, not a conservative or a Republican. A conservative or Republican would not have written a self-serving bunch of horse***t about liberals.

[DKW 86 7,451]

Mike, even when you ask some people to think, they just cant do it.