...were not supported by, nor were they directed by, 90 percent or even 50 or even 20 percent of the people. They were directed by dictators backed up by ruthless militias. The people had no power. They were ruled by gangs.

Tyrannies don't abide by elections, don't abide by laws, and don't give a damn about public opinion. In every way they are opposite to liberal democracies. So why are liberals getting tarred with the tyranny brush?

Liberals aren't making signing statements, aren't invading countries on bullshit premises, aren't outing CIA agents for vengeful political purposes. Yet we're painted as the fearsome bugaboos of liberty and freedom. Why is that?

It's a smear job and it's designed to limit the power of public opinion. It's a long standing conservative tactic that goes back to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, who felt that the press lost the Vietnam war by reporting negative news. Sound familiar? So they set out to smear the press and the liberals. The result is we now have a cowardly press and politicians are afraid to admit to being liberals. Not so coincidently, we're bogged down in another unwinnable war.

I think the smear job has to stop. In the Democratic party, we need to start by stopping it within the party itself. I don't care if Lieberman or anyone else wants to be conservative or moderate in the Democratic party, as long they agree not to bash liberals.

...about you and the other defenders of Lieberman. It's that easy stupid slander that just rolls off your tongue.

You didn't just slander liberals, you slandered American liberal democracy. You slandered our Constitution, our system of representative government, our laws, our heritage, our history, and our people. You wrongly equated democratic self rule to communism and Nazism. You slandered what Lincoln called the 'last best hope of mankind.'

If you don't think the people ought to govern their own lives, then WHO DO YOU THINK SHOULD? Should the rich do it? Should an appointed council of academics do it? Should mysterious forces in the air do it? Should we just give up on government altogether and go back to the caves and fight each other in hand to hand combat?

If we're going to have a government and a complex society, then SOMEBODY HAS TO MAKE THE RULES. I think the people ought to do it through their own self rule, and that makes me a liberal. The likes of Reagan, Nixon, and now Bush think that they ought to make all the decisions themselves, like kings, and that makes them Tory conservatives. Libertarian conservatives think that rich people ought to make the decisions, without any government hindrance at all, and that makes them morons willing to sell themselves into slavery for a few dollars.

This is what it's all about. It's about WHO RULES. It's about POWER. When you look at conservative anger, it turns out that they are angry that they have to share power in this country with black people, liberals, city folks, gay folks, uppity women, non-Christians, and foreigners. Hence they reject this democracy and call for the rule of strongmen (like Reagan, Nixon, or Bush) or they call for the shackling of governmental power through libertarianism. They rant about government bureaucrats and government regulations and worship market forces. They deride the very idea that government can accomplish anything. All of this is an attempt to limit the power of we, the people to rule our own lives.

Powerful forces like corporations (and sometimes labor unions) often support these efforts because they would like to increase their own powers. One way to deal with a public upset over, say, the environment, is to promote a philosophy that says the government shouldn't have the power to do anything about the environment. That limits the power of not just the government, it limits the power of the people and it increases the power of polluters over the public.

When Lieberman and Limbaugh and you and others deride liberals, you are deriding American liberal democracy. When you promote scare stories about how we'll all turn into Nazis and commies or gay people or whatever, you are attempting to scare us out of our right to responsibly control and order and improve our own lives. You want us to remain helpless while others rule over us.

If the misadventure in Iraq can teach us anything, it ought to tell us that we have to start thinking for ourselves again, because God knows, Bush won't do it for us and neither will our corrupt elites. We have to stop dreaming that God or magic market forces or somebody's super knowledge will take care of everything for us. We need to take responsibility for ourselves and make our OWN decisions, in public, and with tranparency. We need to stop being afraid of ourselves and start taking back our own government. And the only way to do that is through the philosophy of liberal democracy, because every other governmental philosophy is only about picking who else should rule instead of the people.

...five year olds can't even spell 'anal.'