The slam against Schumer and Feinstein is appropriate without a doubt but what about the democrats almost unilaterally waffling on debating the merits of impeaching Dick Cheney? What could be more important than the democratic party going after this lawless administration? It is clear that the democratic party has not only failed the people who voted them into office to defeat the Republican agenda and to return a scintilla of credibility back to our government, instead the democrats have floundered and folded at every turn except to in the end vote to support the Bush agenda.

Schumer and Feinstein are just the tip of the iceberg in the democratic henhouse. Feinstein has either lost her ability to read or she dozed off during Mukasey's testimony in order for her to assert that Mukasey would not support waterboarding or torture if appointed. She also managed to ignore the thousands of letters from her constituents requesting her to decline Mukasey's appointment.

The two party system has died. We should all demand a public ceremony to publically acknowledge its demise.

Feinstein is the Joan Rivers of the Senate: plastic surgeons have begun mining her gray matter for new material.

... And these 'left wing' thinkers are exactly the ones who we needed to listen to in the first place and need to listen to.

I hope I understand you correctly. Let me know if I don't.

Well, it seems to me that the once-shunned views of progressives who from the start viewed the Bush regime as particularly, dangerously radical are increasingly being accepted by more putatively sober-minded, moderate liberals. So that's great.

My critique has more to do with a larger trend, and what I think to be a more fundamental and permanent failing on the part of most liberal thinking.

To the extent that every Republican administration in the last quarter century has subscribed to a coherent, corporatist, and fundamentally criminal ethos — you might call it the Reagan Epoch — moderate liberals have had a very hard time grasping what's going on around them.

Yes, there were liberals in politics, policymaking, and the press who have criticized radical right-wing policies, and that includes Salon's criticism of Bush's Iraq war.

But fundamentally the criticism has been ad hoc reaction, and has been accompanied by a general unwillingness on the part of the liberal political and intellectual establishment to aggressively deconstruct the fallacies of modern right-wing mythology.

The effect of this failure has been that liberals themselves are perpetually caught up in this bizarre right-wing master narrative. Liberals have forgotten, or could never parse, the massive differences in how Democrats and Republicans handled and failed to handle, respectively, the end of the Cold War; or Clinton's years of active and effective intelligence work in countering al Qaeda; or the urgently, immediately apparent insanity of the Bush regime's earliest foreign and domestic policies. Talk to most (ostensibly) educated liberals about these things and their eyes glaze over. They have no idea what you mean.

This is taking things back much further than Bush, of course, and further than Salon. But that's part of my point — the events of the past few years are only the most egregious, and belatedly alarming, end of a larger phenomenon. Moderate liberals somehow lacked the basic grasp of globalism that would have led them to embrace their more progressive cousins' anti-"free trade" views during the 1990s, in much the same way that they couldn't see their way to supporting the aggressive, confrontational stance of the anti-war movement. It amazes me how few liberals seem to remember the assassination attempts against Clinton, for example, or Desert Fox, or the perfidious arms-for-hostages deal that got Reagan the White House in the first place. They've forgotten how long the insane craziness of the right wing has been going on, and how timidly the liberal establishment has sat by at every turn. Literally forgotten.

So where did this deracination of American liberalism begin? If liberals were writing a letter to "Since You Asked", Cary Tennis might inquire what purpose it's served liberals to be so enthralled by the right-wing discursive regime, and so ineffectual in applying basic good judgment to the issues of our time.

I don't know the answers, but I think that it is very important to find out. Until we do, liberals in this country won't really understand what happened to them and their mode of thought, and will fail again at the next test.