“Liberals” today are just following the DNC talking points. Many of them are incapable of thier own original thought. How else do you explain so many “liberals” not giving a shit about human rights violation is Iraq?

A REAL liberal would have been outraged by women and children being raped and tortured because a male in the family spoke against the goverment. Indeed when Clinton was in office liberals WERE outraged.

But when a republican is in office suddenly liberals ABANDON liberal beliefs and find every excuse to support a dictator.

It is an embarrasment to the liberals who went before them.

You will probably delete this post and I sorta hope you do. Having the left in a total state of denial about why they are losing power is critical to republicans gaining it.

Since Clinton’s first election, the Dems have lost more and more elected offices. Rather than try to figure out why the vast majority of the American people don’t like their message any more, they live in denial. And there they shall stay.

And you are delusional if you think toppling dictators will be an important political issue come 2004 or after. This is a fact that I regret a great deal, since I have a long list of dictators I’d like to see ousted, but in the long run the American people don’t have the appetite for it.

This claim is ridiculous. Liberals have been concerned about human rights violations, in Iraq and elsewhere, for years, and continue to be, but they are not so foolish to believe this war was really fought out of concern for Iraqis’ human rights. They know that conservatives seem only to develop a concern for human rights when they need to cloak a war—advanced under false pretenses—in respectability (Iraq), or when they are otherwise engaging in incipient warmongering (China). Really, you’re asking the wrong question. The question isn’t “what happened to liberal concerns with human rights?” but “why have conservatives suddenly discovered them?” It would be great if this discovery was attached to some “core principle” of conservatism, but this administration’s continued support for Saudi Arabia, scuttling of a UN statement against the abuse of women, advancement of MFN status to the repressive dictatorship in Singapore, and general unconcern with human rights abuses anywhere other than Iraq suggest that it’s nothing more than political opportunism by one of the most opportunistic administrations in recent history.

“Since Clinton’s first election, the Dems have lost more and more elected offices.”

Numerically, this simply isn’t true. While since Clinton’s first election, the Dems have lost elected offices, between 1994 and 2002 they have steadily reclaimed House and Senate seats and governorships, to return things to general parity. 2002 represented a setback, but never fear. Conservatives have a knack for screwing things up, and liberals will be back soon enough to clean up the mess.

if this isn’t a black eye inasfar as it demonstrates left-of-center willingness to sacrifice principle in favor of utility, i don’t know what is.

I was hoping that the “Higgins Manoeuvre” was in honour of Alex “Hurricane” Higgins awesome off-several cushions snooker shots, when he was just drunk enough in the Benson & Hedge’s snooker finals.

But of course libertarians endorsing the party of regulating your sex life in order to get some ineffective tax cuts is the height of “moral clarity”.

if you’re referring to the santorum affair, you can read my (rather harsh) criticism here, here & more recently, here. besides, i could be termed a very, very mild libertarian, quite different from the guys (& gals) @ the volokh conspiracy & samizdata, for example.

fundamentally, however, it’s a bit different to endorse republicans, flawed as they are, vs endorsing “the guys who never broke with the Moscow line.” i mean… jeeeeeesh! maybe i’m just a humorless crank, but the notion of nodding approvingly in the general direction of an outfit like the communist party because it decided it’s more anti-bush than anything else strikes me as… what? reprehensible, irresponsible, indefensible?

Of course he’s not endorsing communism, for chrissake. Can’t you do better than this kind of shallow “gotcha”?

Eh, why bother…