It's the extremes that are dangerous. In a crowd of wild animals, I will pay more attention to the lions than the rabbits.

Buck is well aware that I am not lumping him in with the hard left...we've gone over this road before. He just likes to pull my chain by standing up indignantly and going, "socialist?? Moi??" Buck is not stupid. He knows exactly the people I am talking about.

What makes the hard left dangerous in this country is not that your average Democratic voter is a radical leftist (in fact, most radical leftists probably voted for Nader last election.) It's that so many of the minority of Democratic Party members that ARE radical leftists are in major leadership positions.

If I pulled 1,000 Gore voters off the street and polled them, I would find maybe five percent--tops--that would fall under the category "socialist."

If I pulled 1,000 members of the national, state, and local Democratic Party leadership into one pile, and polled them (after injecting the powerful and dangerous drugs required to make them tell the truth), I would probably get at least thirty percent that would fall under the category of "socialist."

Don't even ask about the academic community.

Hard rightists in this country--people who believe this ought to be some form of white theocracy--rarely make it to national leadership positions*. When Christian fundamentalist J. Robert Brame was proposed for a relatively minor government post, he was instantly leaped on by countless people and organizations and dismembered like one of those flesh-eating beetle attacks in the "Mummy" movies.

Brame quietly withdrew his name from consideration, and has vanished utterly from the scene.

Meanwhile, Socialist...oops, I mean Independent...Bernie Sanders is a Congressman, elected with a broad constituency in Vermont, and lauded by the Democratic Party and the media. And you will find few of his positions that are not widely supported by the same groups.

I'm glad that the hard right is being kept away from positions of power. Now if the same thing would happen to the hard left, I would be much happier.

*Don't even start with the crap about all Republicans being "hard right." You know exactly what I mean.