Of course, the liberal vision is the one America was founded on. And so one of the conservative's favorite fallbacks is the claim that conservatives want the same thing, only they are just more realistic. It was this "realism" that said, "unfortunately, blacks just aren't equal to whites," and that liberals were "unrealistic" to support black equality. It said the same thing about women as well.

And how many fifths of a white person were blacks originally counted as? When did women get the vote? That liberal vision in 18th Century America? George Will said it well.... It reads "pursuit of happiness," not "delivery" of happiness.

Tim W. Brown:

One doesn't have to be a right-wing pundit to recognize the barbarism of many Iraqis and other Middle East peoples.

No, but it helps. Especially since the barbarism is overwhelmingly in the eye of the beholder. Iraq, of course, is the cradel of civilization. They didn't invade us. We invaded them. In violation of the UN Charter, which under our Constitution is the law of the land. We are responsible for Abu Ghraib. Yes, they lived under a dictatorship, whose leader we helped bring to power. But they had a large, professional middle class--doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.--prior to the first Gulf War, that is, again thanks to us. And you call them uncivilized?

I'm a moderate Democrat and agree that tribalism is a relic of the Stone Age that has no business directing people's behavior in the modern world. To my admittedly Western-oriented mind, to be "tribal" is by definition to be uncivilized. The allegiance of civilized peoples is to the community, nation and world, regardless of family, religious or ethnic ties. The United States was founded on this principle, and most of Europe, after two centuries of bloody conflict similar to that occurring presently in the Middle East, has also finally come to this enlightened conclusion.

Oh, yes, the genocide of the Native American people was sooooo civilized. Right.

I have neither patience nor tolerance for cultural equivalency types who argue that certain practices of non-Western cultures are okay, because Westerners cannot grasp the traditions of other cultures. Female genital mutilation, child slavery, and, yes, murdering people from tribes other than yours are always barbaric, uncivilized and wrong.

What you fail to grasp is that "cultural equivalency types"--Frank Boaz and his students such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict--are the ones who woke America up to the shameful racism of their "commonsense" assumptions that other people were inherently inferior to them, because they had barbaric cultures.

What the American Boaz school of anthropology did was to revolutionize our way of seeing the world, so that "other" didn't automatically appear as "inferior." It allowed us to see beyond outward differences to understand how similar goals were being pursued. And, by giving us the ability to see large patterns behind a welter of specific differences, it allowed us to understand large-scale structural differences--the sorts of things that Ruth Bennedict described in her classic, Patterns of Culture.

It was precisely this same tradition that developed an objective, cross-cultural foundation for critically analyzing cultures--including out own--from a non-ethnocentric perspective. They, and they alone have a scientifically valid perspective from which to criticize things such as female genital mutilation, and they were among the very first to speak out against it. They also, of course, speak out against our culture's intense homophobia, which stands in stark contrast to the tolerance and integration of homosexuals into society that is found in many "primative" "tribal" people.

I disagreed with the War in Iraq from the beginning, and I deeply regret the horrible conflicts between Iraqis that were unleashed. However, I'm beginning to think that, regardless of American intervention or nonintervention, Iraqis are incapable of ever settling their differences, much less peaceably, so long as they cling to primitive tribal and sectarian models and refuse to join the civilized world.

Spoken like a true racist! How white of you.

Ignoring history and offering essentialist explanations instead is the very heart of racism. That's you, to a "T".

First Shooter says that conservatives are realists and liberals are not. Then he turns around and criticizes me because the core liberal principles of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence were compromised in order to secure a political union. (He's also ignorant of the history involved, since prior to the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 it was widely assumed that the cut-off of the slave trade in 1808 would lead to gradual end of slavey, thus making the compromise a temporary one.)

He also ignores the fact that blacks themselves have repeatedly used the core principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to argue for their own liberation.

Here and elsewhere, I have repeatedly quoted from Langston Hughes, "Let America be America Again," which begins:

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

(whole poem here: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Hughes-America-Again1938.htm)

This illustrates yet another difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals can recognize, face up to, and deal with contradictions--even sharpening them to overcome them. Conservatives live in denial and double-standards. For them, contradictions exist only to be ignored in their heroes and to be used to discredit their enemies. But a reality-based struggle to deal with and resolve contradictions is utterly foreign to them.

p.s. George Will is a pompous ass. Quoting him as you do only makes you an ass's ass. The meaning of Jefferson's phrase is a good deal deeper than Will's shallow mind is capable of grasping. He has neither the wit of a Bill Maher, nor the wisdom of Jefferson.