All this worrying about just how far to the left or right the Democratic Party is keeps handing elections to Republicans. I live in Massachusetts where I must watch Kerry's frequent painful adjustments to find the exactly perfect spot on the left-right scale. In 2004, he lost an election to someone who is demonstrably incompetent and deceitful. Can we please stop all this adjusting? Can we please have the courage and intellectual honesty to take principled positions? If moderates were drawn to position-splitters, Democrats would be running the country.

Opposition to Lieberman is a matter of principle and it shows that the Democratic Party is not afraid of its platform.

Amanda Griscom Little and her subject Carl Pope seem to miss the issue. Yes, an occasional Republican will have a good record on the environment, but that is not the point. In fact, it's not just the point that voting for Chafee means keeping Republicans as chairs of all those Senate Committees, you know, the ones that should be overseeing the EPA and the Departments of Energy and the Interior. It is also ideological.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats believe in conscious, planned efforts for the common good. Since FDR, Democrats have represented a view that we are all in this together, that we must make common sacrifices for our community happiness and our common good. Republicans have an abiding faith in individualism -- even where individualism manifestly fails. It will certainy fail if we are going to stop global warming. The profit motive is not going to keep Florida from flooding or Bangladesh from disappearing. The sooner the environmental movement accepts the critical necessity to our survival of ushering liberals into the majority -- as opposed to counting votes on random issues that the Republican Senate leadership allows to come to the floor -- the safer we will all be.

Now, I know you guys need to do this to up your circulation among the cynicism-hungry, but I don't want to read it. If you could just move it off into a separate section, I would appreciate it.

Thank you

To a lesser extent, the press focuses on trivialities regarding Republican candidates. For example, Giuliani's comments about ferrets, however stupid or laughable they may be, are only of minor significance compared to his authoritarianism. Alas, we are more likely to hear about ferrets than habeas corpus.

This is one that I think Lakoff nails. Conservatives, by and large, believe we are in a struggle of good versus evil. The notion of "evil persons" seems antique to the modern liberal, versed as modern liberals are in all manner of psychology and sociology. To the modern conservative, it is not antique.

Thus, with diplomacy, they don't negotiate with "Evil". Thus, to them, legal and institutional systems are secondary to the fight against "Evil". Thus, the ends justify most any means. Thus, the convictions of conservatives (by definition good) must be wrong.

The asymmetries (Clinton/Bush, Kosovo/Iraq) don't bother them because Bush and his supporters are fundamentally good; Clinton's aren't.

Re: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/08/neocons/permalink/9ef305966bc3f75cabfb129e1997bdc2.html

Above, I read

Glenn Greenwald has packed so many falsehoods and wrongheadedness into this article, it is hard to know where to begin.

Unfortunately, you never began! You have stated a lot of contrary opinions without much argument backing them up. Further, the following is manifestly not true and saying it does not make it so:

Scooter Libby's case was another one in which a policy dispute was criminalized. That kind of criminalization is a very, very big deal

Lying to criminal investigators is not a big deal? Where?

You might find the folks at your gym helpful, but a lot of advice given out by gym folks is just plain dumb. Count your good fortune that motivation trumps precision.

The well-intentioned bimbos and himbos most likely to be hired by gyms will rarely evince good taste in music.