You said:

You kindly and intelligent liberals who post on this board: for God's sake look around you. Look at the creatures who are standing with you on your side of the line. September 11 shone a glaring light on them, and they are showing their true colors. Look at the roots of your philosophy.

And then you said:

That you seem to consider yourself one is apparent from the defensive reaction to my post. Yet I see little or nothing that you have in common with the far left academics and others that I routinely berate here, and I would think from our correspondence that you would certainly realize that I would never lump you in with the idiots at the Guardian. [emphasis mine]

Yet, you did. Right up there at the top, when you said "your side of the line".

When I first started coming here, I never identified myself as a liberal, but I have liberal tendencies and I'm repulsed by the entire "my country right or wrong" thing. Dissent -- its existence, its expression, and the tolerance of dissent by the majority -- is the sine qua non of the American Experiment.

When the conservatives hoot and catcall, the liberals retort with accusations of stupidity and stinginess, but when the liberals start to holler, the conservatives call them stupid and profligate (which I consider a tit-for-tat gotcha-last response, and OK) and also unpatriotic and immoral. (Witness the routine condemnations from the right of the ACLU, who have done signal service for the First Amendment defending dissenters.) When one side of the political scene seeks to silence the other not only by attacking their fiscal and political policies but their moral rectitude, this crosses the line all over the place. The far left does this to conservatives, and in that they have a big stage to speak from (many being in academia and in show business), they have a big audience. Republican Speakers of the House do this to liberals. There is a big difference between being derided by someone whose business is all flash and glam vs. someone who is in line for the Presidency.

I am considered liberal -- here -- because I think it's incumbent upon the government to provide a means not to freeze or starve to our less fortunate citizens. I also think it's important for government to provide educational opportunities to everyone and access to information, which would be why I'm in the business I'm in. (Conservative librarians mostly seem to work for corporations or conservative universities, where they don't have to confront censorship and equal access issues.) I also think that government health care benefits are much better than no health care at all, especially for children.

I'm fed up with discrimination based on sexual orientation. I don't care what anybody's religion has to say about it. I'll bet you a lot of gay conservatives agree with me, but wouldn't dare say so.

I believe business is important and valuable, but needs to be balanced by government. We saw what happened when it wasn't in the last half of the 19th century: the workers got trampled. Teddy Roosevelt saw it too. I also believe organized labor is a good thing when it doesn't become Big Business, and that strikes are not a hideous perversion but a political tool to be used in the wrestling match with Big Capital. "Them that's got shall get. Them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it still is news." A society in which power and money is concentrated in one segment of the population is dangerously unstable. We are headed that way (well, actually, we're there, but it hasn't dawned on a lot of people yet), and I don't like it.

I believe it's the government's job to safeguard the environment because business, with its perpetual focus on the quarterly report, frequently misses the long-range results of its actions, killing the goose that laid the golden egg. This is not to say that government can't go overboard; it does. The dialog between business and government sometimes more closely resembles a fist fight, but I can live with that.

I find it, by turns, amusing and insulting that you think that, because I consider the documents I cited to be the underpinnings of my philosophy, I must be a closet conservative. I know you said you don't apply this to me personally, but when someone makes a blanket statement that describes you, don't you think it applies to you? I do. Is it beyond imagination that two people could read these documents and see different things? And does that make one of them wrong?

If conservatives object to being considered kith and kin with Jesse Helms, they might try telling him to shut the hell up. George Wallace was a Democrat for most of his political life, but you never think of him as the posterboy for the DNC, precisely because the leadership turned their backs on him and spurned him. You, to your credit, have pointed out some of the grosser excesses of the far right wing of the conservative movement.

The reason someone pro-choice has a hard time calling him- or herself conservative is because the "Right to Life" people have taken over the Republican Party. Try spending time in a reasonable conversation with someone whose most moderate statement is that you're going to hell.

There are plenty of radicals on both sides to go around.

Gee, is this long enough yet? ;) The insomnia seems to be fading.

Regards--
Mary Anne