Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
It might not seem to be the truth to you, but there are people out there who really do not care what you think about what they think. They are settled in to their habits of mind and comfortable understandings about the "ways things are." They exist on all sides of the political spectrum, but they seem to congregate more where there are other systems to support their self-satisfaction with their world-view. So far I am describing really angry people who feel left out of the process ... or people who believe that the process has been running amok for a while. Strangely, there are people on both sides of the current political contest who are like this.
On the liberal and progressive side there are knee-jerk, bleeding hearts, and special interests who will never believe there is any good in anybody on the other side. I find myself among these people often, but the ones on the other side are more frightening, to tell the truth. They have a violent streak in them that the Left does not seem to have. In fact, they prize this quick-draw streak as sure evidence that they are not going to get caught in any "revolutions" from the Left. They are, in actual fact, ready to defend their way of thinking by force of arms ... rather than sitting down and examining any evidence or any chains of logic.
If there were ever a watershed election in these terms this one between McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden is it. Basically, McCain and his running mate are quick-draw people. Robert Parry has something to say about that in his essay about what a McCain victory would mean. There is another essay, unavailable today because of an equipment failure at Smirking Chimp, which I think you ought to read as well. Keep trying this link for the next couple of days. It is all about the "unsettling issue of McCain's emotional instability."
Clearly McCain's fabled hot-headedness is the undoing of his qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief. He would not pass any military psychological evaluation that bestows trust in our nuclear arms. But, moreover, he is already showing little signs of losing mental acuity. This, of course, brings the Palin candidacy into stark relief. You have to wonder what the Republicans are thinking! Well, to go back to the beginning of this essay, what they are thinking is that a bit of ornery belligerence is just what the world needs from America.
