You must have been somewhere else during the '60s and '70s if you think hippies were as irrational as today's freaked-out conservatives. Have you ever read a Whole Earth Catalog? You missed Friday night dinner at the hippie commune I was in in the '70s at 25 Surrey Street, Cambridge, Mass.

And then you anticipate my calling you on it by saying it's just my hippie nostalgia. Clever.

A very few of us did go off the tracks. We did at times think people could change more easily than they could, but that was because most of us got ourselves into therapy and were changing ourselves. (Tea-baggers in therapy?) Our hearts and brains and psyches were in the right place.

Conservatism since 1980 wasn't because hippies were duped by communists and welfare moms. It was and is because the numerous sensible freedoms that came about through the '60s and '70s freak out conservatives. They do not get the spirit of American freedom. They do not know that people can have healthy internal control.

And as for intellectual conservatives, we've known all along that intelligence doesn't necessarily make a person smart.

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- but others appear to be making a similar mistake too, so I wanted to get this in: Although Dave didn't do a big direct "I'm sorry," I think that was the gist of his saying the bit about living in Lutheran guilt. When you're out of control, feeling like a terrible, terrible person - he was not just mocking his extortionist - is not too far behind.

As soon as I hear "evil" I know someone's into fanatical, or at least alcoholic, black-and-white thinking.

Brooks' contention that their fanatics are worse than our fanatics - see Tim McVeigh - is only the beginning of the problem. He doesn't know enough about craziness to spot the real thing. We have us a psychiatrist troubled loner.

The Ft. Hood shooter is way too full of solipsistic rigidity to even be genuinely capable of the self-hating codependence necessary for a suicide attack in the name of Islam. He's doing his version, incompetently, of suicide by cop.

We'll see if this view is how it plays out at trial.

Meanwhile, paying attention to what's going on with people is not necessarily, as Brooks would have us believe, liberal softness.

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you're willing to scrap near-universal healthcare if conservatives refuse to share in funding near-universal abortion services? That's what I hear you saying. All or nothing? Do you hate yourself? Do you hate the rest of us? We need real healthcare now, desperately.

This is just what they want. You're falling into their trap. They're splitting their opposition if you and me don't stick together; but if I stick with you, we're sunk.

If Democrats can't find a legislative way around this, then once healthcare is passed, don't you think progressives as a group could find a way to fund abortions for those who can't afford them? until conservatives get saner? and we get a more solid majority?

Obviously we cannot let private health insurance companies get out of providing abortion services.

Of course you're pissed. I am too.

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If you leave the Democratic Party - if enough of you leave - we won't have the power to win more liberal institutions.

If you think of your fight with conservatism as a fight with me - and I'm liberal - and not as a fight with the Republicans, you are voting Republican, not liberal. You are voting for fewer liberal institutions.

I know you're pissed. I'm pissed too. Let's put it someplace it'll do some good.

Just to point out, since I'm no necessary fan of religion: Fanaticism aplenty crops up in non-religious ideologies like nationalism, atheistic communism, PETA, radical ecology, etc. Of course now it's mostly right wing.

It's there, too, usually less lethally, in secular hobbies where one is more likely to only waste or ruin one's own life. See extreme sports.

You don't have to dig too deep to see that the common thread is getting off on and become addicted to the electrochemical flows of fanatical mood alteration. Other parallels with addiction are striking.

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We as workers, consumers and citizens must legally force democracy on employers. This is the vital link.

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but the problem is how insidious that charm is.

A couple years ago I got around to seeing Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra's film of George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign. He was incredibly charming and bright, cracking jokes and being the life of the party. But by the time I was viewing this I knew what I knew: He would grimly go about methodically ripping the Constitution to shreds, meanwhile hating over half the country.

Charm, smarm. Well, schmarm, which doesn't really work. But what am I doing, trying to get funny? I was really disturbed by the film, by how he fooled so many in the most viciously uncharming cynical way, that naughty little Christian.

So the handwriting's on the wall, that it's ditto with Palin.

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