I understand that you want to be left alone. The fly in the ointment is that you think that non-conservatives, what you call "Leftists", are determined to deprive you of that right. Logically, therefore, the only way to achieve your desire to be left alone is to get rid of the pernicious "leftist" influence in America, or even "Leftists" themselves...even though, in so doing, you're telling someone else what to do, at a minimum, or at worst depriving them of their own rights.

I can't believe you actually wrote this. By this reasoning, stopping someone from holding me up with a gun is "depriving them of a right" or "telling them what to do." Good God, can't anyone think in abstracts?

First of all, "Leftist" and "non-conservative" are not identical sets. Just to keep it clear. Your use of "quotes" implies that there really isn't such a thing, which many liberals do seem to honestly believe.

I wish this board had a search function. I'd love to dig up the dozens of posts I have gotten from liberals on the board that thought I should be on my knees weeping in gratitude that the government takes a third of my life's earnings from me, mostly to buy votes from people who haven't earned it. That I am fulfilling my "social responsibility." That I should be grateful that they don't take as much as they do in other countries, and that I am an ogre for bitching about it.

And damn straight the Left in this country is determined to deprive me of the right to live my own life, and to take as much of the wealth I have earned as they can get away with. They have already removed vast sections of our property and individual rights, and given even the slightest legal leverage, would remove most of the rest. If I had told people fifty years ago that someday it would be illegal to smoke in privately owned bars, they would have laughed at me. Or if I had said that it would be a crime not to wear a seat belt, or build a shed in my yard, or drain my own fields. These seem like small things, but the philosophical implications on who owns what or who in this country is important.

The Left in this country has seriously proposed over the years: maximum wages(!), mandatory "living wages," limits on the size of cars, limits on numbers of children, eliminating chemical fertilizers and genetically engineered crops, near-total control of private businesses, eliminating many forms of intellectual property, shutting down vast sections of the country for the exclusive use of wildlife, banning logging and mining, eliminating corporations as a legal entity, nationalizing banks, nationalizing health care, wealth taxes, luxury taxes on pretty much everything, confiscation of all wealth over a certain arbitrary limit, reparations for slavery from those who had nothing to do with it, and a number of other ropes around the necks of Americans that I can't think of right now.

At one point or another I have documented almost all of these.

Some of these find support only in the extreme Left, like the Green Party, which, as I speak, has a real shot at the mayorship of San Francisco. Others are enthusiatically supported by the Democratic Party. You would get a serious case of the creeps if you looked up some of the legislation that rises up from the Progressive Caucus in Congress, and fortunately, doesn't get very far. But the fact that their proposals have not become law does not change the fact that their proposals accurately reflect the philosophies of the Left.

And I threaten the Left with what? Withholding my money and support? This is "telling them what to do?"

Have I ever discussed shooting them? Or any form of real violence at all? Yes, I have proposed whapping certain people with a large, dead fish, but one hopes the humor of that is obvious.

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And if the Left is being "suppressed" in this country, the suppressors are sure doing a crappy job of it. If you want to worry about "martial law," fine. I heard all the same crap through eight years of Reagan. I think you are smarter than the people who are worried about Ashcroft imposing some nutty theocracy on us the second we turn our backs.