<HTML>> The other was Robert Fisk. Warliberal.com (I thought > I had coined that term!) sympathizes: > > <A HREF="http://warliberal.com/2002_04_28_archives.html">http://warliberal.com/2002_04_28_archives.html</A> > > I sincerely hope Mr. Malkovich sees the inside of a > jail cell. Ugh. Has anyone read his "manifesto"? And who was the one who said that there's nothing more dangerous in this world than a liberal with a gun? <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">    ...I am, I know, more hawkish than I was last year at this time. But then, I supported the Gulf War -- or what I guess we'll be calling Gulf War I pretty soon -- at the time. My first reaction when I heard about the invasion of Kuwait was, "We should do something to protect an ally, but of course we won't." And I was 20 years old at the time, so a war could have had some profound effects on me. I think I underestimated the impact the end of the Cold War would have on our willingness to intervene. Anyway, about a year later, I took to saying that the US Marine Corps was the greatest force for good in the world.     The worst thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party was the Vietnam War. Of course, the D's were the least of the victims of the war, but from the 1968 convention to the 1992 primaries (when Clinton and Tsongas laid a smackdown on the left) the party was essentially captured by its lunatic fringe, and that fringe hated the military. Even those (the majority) who weren't out-and-out pacifists couldn't understand that the military was not only necessary, but a necessary good.     My mother (the Ginpundit) tried to raise me a pacifist, but it didn't take. When I was young -- about ten, I'd guess -- one of the hot topics was the nuclear freeze/nuclear disarmament. Continental Europeans, I remember, were really big on that. My reaction was basically: "Wait, if we disarmed, wouldn't the Russians just take over, or kill us all?" I was told it was more complicated than that, and I was young, so I believed. A few years later, I realized that it wasn't more complicated than that, and that the Russians would have either taken over or killed us all....        However... I don't consider any of this contrary to "liberalism" as I understand it, to the slightly left-of-center politics of the New Republic or the Democratic Leadership Council, or Bill Clinton for that matter. President Clinton is, of course, a repugnant human being. But I probably agreed with his policies about eighty percent of the time, and I'd guess that if you took out the times when he was clearly pandering and going against his best political judgment (and there was never anything wrong with his political judgment) it would be more like 95%. "Liberal" was used as a smear word by Republicans in the eighties, who used it to mean, basically, "Socialist". I've never felt that way. <A HREF="http://kinen.blogspot.com/">Glenn Kinen</A> today said that he thinks he's a (John) Kennedy Democrat, and I feel I'm in that tradition, and that of Truman, and FDR.     There are a number of things I don't normally talk about here, because they haven't been part of the national debate lately, but where I'm far out of step with the Republican Party, and more or less in agreement with the Democratic. I'm an environmentalist, though whenever possible I prefer the carrot of tax credits to the stick of regulation. And I favor our current progressive income tax. I think the current Federal income tax structure is more or less right; not perfect, but at least in the top 5 percentile. (I also think that taxes were ridiculously high before Reagan's cut, but most Democrats these days would agree with that.) I wish the State of Alabama would raise the income tax and lower sales taxes. I'm biased (in that my father and my communist sister are trial lawyers and my brother is in training to join the crowd) but I think "tort reform" is mostly a scam corporations are trying to pull to get away with selling defective products and services! . ! (I'm not saying that there aren't times when juries go too far, but that's what judges are for.) I think Ralph Nader's politics range from stupid to abhorrent, but I also think he did a lot to make this country a better place to live, back in the sixties and seventies. I just think it's long past time for him to go. And though I may be a hawk, I think that National Missile Defense is a huge boondoggle and liable to be a waste of time even if it worked, though we should probably keep researching. I'm theoretically pro-union, though I think the AFL-CIO's trade positions are immensely stupid and counterproductive; the American union movement is living in the past and needs to catch up with the postindustrial world.... </BLOCKQUOTE> </HTML>