Donald, Letting the Wall Street Journal define Liberals is like having Satan define sanctity. You’d never know it when he got through with it. With very little change here’s another look at the Wall Street Journal’s take: U.S. conservatism picked up Liberal fire, but not Liberal light. It has also managed to wed politics to religious fundamentalism and to confuse the two in the public’s eye. The conservative belief that greed carries with it the capacity for good obfuscates the real Christian message of peace through sharing and brother (or sister) hood. It perverts the Sermon on the Mount and destroys the real miracle of the loaves and the fishes, that of common commensality and sharing. This makes “opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or unintended consequences” unpersuasive. Barry Goldwater used the force of his personality to infuse his supporters with a sense of transcendent mission — the philosophy of the Rand Corporation. The emotions this movement inspired collided with the one deeply moral political phenomenon that postwar America has experienced–Martin Luther King’s civil-rights movement. Proof of that is Lyndon Johnson’s prescient comment that the Democrats had just handed over the South to the Republican Party, and political snakes like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms found no problem abandoning the Democrats to join with the fundamentalist conservatives and getting themselves reelected by race-baiting – Remember Helm’s ad showing a Caucasian getting a rejection slip while an unqualified African-American got the job. There are plenty of yahoos on the Right who still put credence in the fairy tale. – The Rev. King’s multiracial civil-rights marches and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S. were a political and moral achievement brought about under Liberal presidents and over the opposition of fundamentalist Rightists like the Aryan Nation and… Read more »