On Being A Liberal
By John Constantine

For they think it will make their life easier
And god knows up till now it's been hard
But the game never ends, when your whole world depends
On the turn of a friendly card
    - The Turn of a Friendly Card, Alan Parsons Project

The dearer a thing is, the cheaper as a general rule we sell it
    -Samuel Butler

So this is the script of the horror film we're in now.  The world is in such a chaotic state, balanced on the edge of collapse.  We're weeks, if not days, from a war with Iraq as I write this.  The people running this incredible show are completely focused on their goal.  The only thing we're sure of is that we don't want to do things the way their doing them.  We are sinking into debt, as a collective nation, at an incredible rate.  Our economic outlook is grim in the short run.  We are wondering why we can't see the end of this tunnel.

This is my third attempt at writing this, too.  I can't see the end of this tunnel, either.

We're floundering leaderless.  If there is one thing that defines the liberal party in 2003, it's a party without leadership.  Daily I read and hear about things that there should be a definitive democratic response to.  I hear none of it from my party's leadership.  Every time I listen the media - with rare exceptions - they've acted like a propaganda arm of the administration...  I mean, the press has always acted like a propaganda department.  But during the 1970's I really thought we'd have at least some sort of kernel of a real, proactive, investigative fourth estate of the government.  What with the amazing reporting by the once great Woodward and still (apparently) moral Bernstein.

But it was just a short lived blip.  Today, we just can't seem to get anything.  During the 1980's, we had a press on bended knee, worshipping President Reagan.  The man was dubbed the Teflon president - conveniently by those who apparently couldn't get off their knees long enough to actually write a real story.  Then there was the whole mess about the first Gulf War.  Regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, the press pretty much rolled over and reported the lies we were told in order to justify the war.  The press quietly accepted its muzzle and reported only the scraps it was thrown throughout the entire war effort.  Sanitized pictures of oh-so-cool smart bombs.  None of the humanitarian devastation and idiocy.  Only afterwards - nearly a decade - did we really learn that the smart bombs weren't that smart.  Hundreds of thousands of civilians died needlessly.  Only know is the press admitting that a lot of the evidence Bush senior paraded out before us was a complete lie (i.e. the babies being ripped from their incubators, the 265,000 phantom Iraqis on the border of Saudi Arabia).

Then during the 1990s, the press decided that it was going to destroy Bill Clinton.  Of course, it all turned out to be a viscous lie, too.  Well, everything but the blow job.  But nothing else turned out to be true.  I guess the press was kind of tired of being on their knees for the duration of the 1980s and decided they had to beat up on somebody in order to prove that they still were a force to be reckoned with. But this isn't a rant about the so-called Press in America.  Yea, I have a lot of problems with them - serious problems.  But I'm just using their ineptitude as a spring board to an even more pointless rant.

You see, over the last ten years or so, the very word Liberal has become a pejorative.  Think about it.  When anyone on the right wants to tell anyone that someone is an idiot, they call them a liberal.  Heck, we constantly have it beaten into our head that we have a Liberal Press - as if that was actually a bad thing.

I don't know if you ever read 1984 by George Orwell.  You really should, if you haven't.  One of the things that was done by the evil Big Brother is to warp words into their entire opposite meaning.  For example in the real world, just look at the word Liberal.  The word comes from the Latin root liber, which literally means free.  So when you're whining about the "liberal media", what you're really whining about is the "free media".

Think about it.  Daily we hear the pundits on the right complain about the free press.  Now, I know that you're probably saying to yourself: "Well, liberal is just another word for democrat, so what we're really complaining about is the democratic press.  It's not our fault that they claimed the word liberal for their political party."  And this might actually be a good argument.  Except that it's completely Orwellian.  I mean, really.  The right could have actually created the pejorative using the actual party name.  Nope.  Instead, they used the word liberal, rather than democrat.  Makes you wonder a bit.  Well, at least it makes me wonder.  I'm sure it would make you wonder if you still had cognitive thought left.