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By Evan Sayet

Delivered on March 5, 2007

BECKY NORTON DUNLOP: The Heritage Foundation has a very fine reputation for excellent research and writing on policy issues that are facing our nation and our world, focusing on Capitol Hill. One of the things that we have talked about in some of our work and with some of our speakers is the challenge that we face in our culture.

So we've decided to do something about that in this year of 2007, and what we've decided to do about it in the External Relations Department is to bring some people to our podium who have worked in the entertainment world: people who have a profession that is recognized and well received but come from a perspective on the culture that doesn't get widespread coverage, let's say, in today's mainstream media.

We aim to change that. We think some of the people and some of the productions that we're going to be bringing to Heritage in 2007 are ones that more and more people should see and hear and messages from people that need to be told to the mainstream, and you're going to hear them first here at The Heritage Foundation.

Evan Sayet has written and/or produced in virtually every medium there is. He started out as a stand-up comic. Very few are successful, but Evan has been successful at that. He was quickly spotted by David Letterman and offered a spot on a special episode featuring young talent. He then moved into writing, and he was an integral part of the team that made the "Arsenio Hall Show" the first late-night program in 30 years to give the "Tonight Show" a run for its money.

Then he moved to a very interesting assignment called "Politically Incorrect" with Bill Maher. After that, Evan wrote and produced the highest-rated special in the Learning Channel's history, "The 70's: From Bellbottoms to Boogie Shoes." He perfected the book for a musical comedy, wrote a screenplay optioned by Penny Marshall, and even tried his hand at game shows as the original writer of the cult classic, "Win Ben Stein's Money."

The latest twist in Evan's career came during the recent presidential elections when he turned his attention and skills toward convincing others of the greatness of America and the need to reelect President Bush and to stay the course in the Middle East. In a short time, Evan was made the communications director for Los Angeles for President Bush. He wrote a number of articles about this for major conservative outlets and later was asked to offer weekly commentary on KMJ Radio. He also began delivering the lecture that he's going to be delivering to us today.

He now is among Los Angeles's most in-demand speakers, a political pundit recognized by Dennis Prager as brilliant for his take on the unique power of the Judeo-Christian culture and singled out by Rush Limbaugh for his explanation of why Liberals lie. Evan is signed with one of the country's top speakers bureaus and has recently been booked at the highly prestigious Lincoln Club, whose monthly roster of speakers has included people such as Ken Starr, former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin, and the Consul General of Israel.

At around that same time, Evan returned to his first love, stand-up comedy, only now with a decidedly conservative twist. He has been the headliner of a night of conservative comedy called "Right to Laugh" and is now planning a series of one-nighters around the country. He recently appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and was well received by his audience on a night when there were many luminaries on the stage. He will soon produce his first CD, "Funny, You Don't Look Conservative."

Becky Norton Dunlop is Vice President for External Relations at The Heritage Foundation.

EVAN SAYET: I call myself a 9/13 Republican. I grew up a liberal New York Jew; you don't get much more liberal than that--although it was lower-case "l," not what's considered Liberal today. I graduated from high school knowing only one thing about politics: that Democrats are good and Republicans are evil.

I tell a story. It's not a true story, but it helps crystallize my thinking that brought me to become a conservative. I say: Imagine being in a restaurant with an old friend, and you're catching up, and suddenly he blurts out, "I hate my wife." You chuckle to yourself because he says it every time you're together, and you know he doesn't hate his wife; they've been together for 35 years. He loves his daughters, and they're just like her. No, he doesn't hate his wife.

So you're having dinner, and you look out the window and spot his wife, and she's being beaten up right outside the restaurant. You grab your friend and say, "Come on, let's help her. Let's help your wife," and he says, "Nah, I'm sure she deserves it." At that moment, it dawns on you: He really does hate his wife.

That's what 9/11 was to me. For years and years I'd hear my friends from the Left say how evil and horrible and racist and imperialistic and oppressive America is, and I'd chuckle to myself and think, "Oh, they always say that; they love America." Then on 9/11, we were beaten up, and when I grabbed them by the collar, and I said, "Come on, let's help her. Let's help America," and they said, "Nah, she deserves it."

At that moment, I realized: They really do hate America. And that began me on what's now a five-plus-year quest to try to understand the mindset. How could you possibly live in the freest nation in the history of the world and see only oppression? How could you live in the least imperialist power in human history and see us as the ultimate in imperialism? How could you live in the least bigoted nation in human history and, as Joe Biden said, "see racism lurking in every dark shadow"?

Over the next five years, what I came to think through, what I came to learn, what I came to find in conversations and studying, listening, and reading became this talk and very soon will be the book Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals "Think."

I assume that just about everybody in this room agrees that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. Well, I'm here to propose to you that it's not "just about" every issue; it's quite literally every issue. And it's not just wrong; it's as wrong as wrong can be; it's 180 degrees from right; it is diametrically opposed to that which is good, right, and successful.

What I discovered is that this is not an accident. This is part of a philosophy that now dominates the whole of Western Europe and the Democratic Party today. I, like some others, call it Modern Liberalism. The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the Modern Liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, and he will not only side with Saddam Hussein; he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Give him the choice between the vicious mass murderer corrupt terrorist dictator Yasser Arafat and the tiny and wonderful democracy of Israel, and he will plagiarize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels--as did our former President Jimmy Carter-- to side with the terrorist organizations and to attack the tiny democracy of Israel.

It's not just foreign policy; it's every policy. Given the choice between promoting teenage abstinence and teenage promiscuity--and believe me, I know this from my hometown of Hollywood--they will use their movies, their TV shows, their songs, even the schools to promote teenage promiscuity as if it's cool: like the movie American Pie, in which you are a loser unless you've had sex with your best friend's mother while you're still a child. Conversely, NARAL, a pro-abortion group masquerading as a pro-choice group, will hold a fund-raiser called "'F' Abstinence." (And it's not just "F." It's the entire word, because promoting vulgarity is part of their agenda.)

So the question becomes: Why? How do they think they're making a better world? The first thing that comes into your mind when trying to understand, as I've so desperately tried to understand, is that if they side always with evil, then they must be evil. But we have a problem with that, don't we? We all know too many people who fit this category but who aren't evil: many of my lifelong friends, the people I grew up with, relatives, close relatives.

If they're not evil, then the next place your mind goes is that they must just be incredibly stupid. They don't mean to always side with evil, the failed and wrong; they just don't know what they're doing. But we have a problem with this as well. You can't say Bill Maher (my old boss) is a stupid man. You can't say Ward Churchill is a stupid man. You can't say all these academics are stupid people. Frankly, if it were just stupidity, they'd be right more often. What's the expression? "Even a broken clock is right twice a day," or "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again."

But if they're not stupid and they're not evil, what's their plan? How do they think they're making a better world by siding with Saddam Hussein, by keeping his rape and torture rooms open, by seeking the destruction of a democracy of Jews? I don't know if you've seen the list going around the Internet of all the Nobel Prize-winning scientists from this tiny state of Israel. How do they think they're making a better world by promoting to children behaviors that are inappropriate and cause diseases and unwanted pregnancies and ruin people's lives? How do they think they're making a better world?

What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with--none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government--have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they're convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found--can only be found--in the attempt to be right.

If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight. If we didn't fight, of course we wouldn't go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It's a utopian vision, and all that's required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency--all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it.

When this first started to dawn on me, I would question my Liberal friends--and believe me, there were plenty of them in Hollywood. The thing about Hollywood is that it is overwhelmingly Liberal: upper-case "L," not lower-case "l." There are a lot more of us conservatives than you would suspect, but they are afraid. It's hard to come out because what's so Orwellian--and virtually everything about this philosophy is Orwellian--is that the Liberals are as illiberal as you can imagine. As much as they scream "McCarthyism," there is a "graylist" there that sees people not get hired because they don't toe the Leftist line.

What you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn't right and to prove that wrong isn't wrong. You see this in John Lennon's song "Imagine": "Imagine there's no countries." Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there's nothing left to kill or die for.

Obviously, this is not going to happen overnight. There are still going to be religions, but they are going to do their best to denigrate them. There are still going to be countries, but they will do what they can to give our national sovereignty to one-world bodies. In the meantime, everything that they teach in our schools, everything they make into movies, the messages of the movies, the TV shows, the newspaper stories that they pick and how they spin them have but one criterion for truth, beauty, honesty, etc., and that is: Does it tear down what is good and elevate what is evil? Does it tear down what is right and elevate what is wrong? Does it tear down the behaviors that lead to success and elevate the ones that lead to failure so that there is nothing left to believe in?

You might recognize this as the paradigm and the purpose of one of the most successful Liberal motion pictures of all time, Fahrenheit 9/11. There's nobody who believes Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was an honest attempt to portray the real events of that horrific day and its aftermath. Everybody knows that Michael Moore is a Leftist and that it was a propaganda film in which the facts were cherry-picked, the evidence manipulated, the narrative near-lunatic, all for one purpose. The question that we were debating at the time was, "Should we go to war against the Iraqi government, against Saddam Hussein?" So he used all the tricks and manipulations and lies that he could to show that America isn't that good, that America isn't worth fighting for, that Saddam Hussein isn't that evil and not worth fighting against, for the purpose of undermining our efforts to go to war.

Again, there is quite literally nothing in Hollywood, in the newspapers, in our schools that does not have this as its sole criterion. For example, there is no journalistic standard by which the misdeeds of a handful of night guards at an obscure prison for terrorists--misdeeds in which nobody was killed and nobody was seriously hurt--ought to be a front-page story in The New York Times. Not for a single day. Yet, for 44 straight days, this non-story was a front-page story in The New York Times. Why? Because while it met no journalistic standard, it met the one and only Modern Liberal standard: "You think America's good? We found something that's going to make you not believe that any longer. You think that the Islamic fascists are bad? No, no, no, this is why they do it. No wonder they fly airplanes into our buildings."

And that's just one of so many other examples. There was no journalistic standard by which Newsweek printed the story of Korans being flushed down the toilet. Not only was it a bogus story, it never happened--it was an impossible story. Think about it: Can you flush a book down the toilet? Even a five-year-old would know that you can't flush a book down the toilet; you can't fit a square peg into a round hole. So why did Newsweek run a story that was not only bogus, but that failed to meet even the most obvious logic? Because nothing matters to them. There is no standard, because a standard would require them to say something is better than something else, which goes against this entire philosophy. It met the one and only criterion of truth to Newsweek, which was that it attacked America and justified the Islamic fascist terrorist.

The same thing is true in the art world. There is no artistic standard, no aesthetic criterion by which-- forgive me--a jar of urine with a cross in it is beautiful. There is no aesthetic criterion by which the curators of the museum said, "Take down the Monet and put up the urine," but it met the one and only standard of art that exists to the Modern Liberal.

Similarly, the movies last year met no criterion of storytelling and no criterion of cinematography. The five nominees for Best Picture met one criterion. Brokeback Mountain said heterosexual marriage isn't that important; go be a homosexual if you choose. Munich said there is no difference between the terrorists and the people who stop them from murdering again. And if you look at the other pictures as well, ultimately with Crash winning, Crash said America is this evil, horrible nation where every moment of every day is filled with bigotry and racism.

There truly is no standard, no criterion for truth, beauty, justice, or anything else amongst the Modern Liberals, the dominant force in today's Democratic Party: not all Democrats, but those who will mindlessly accept without question, without doubt, that of course we went into Iraq to steal their oil because that's what America does; no need to even consider any other possibility. Not everyone who voted for John Kerry and who fits that description is aware of the elite's blueprint for utopia, and I don't think some of them would support it if they were.

What the elite have succeeded in doing through the institutions we've allowed them to control--and if we're going to save America, we must take back the schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry--is indoctrinating, starting with the very young and going all the way up through college and beyond, starting the first time they turn on "Sesame Street" and "Buster Bunny," going up through the middle years when they're told, "Hey, little boy, if you have a queer eye, you're going to be a cool guy," or, "Hey, little girl, it doesn't matter how cool you are; if you grow up to be a heterosexual married woman, you're going to be a desperate housewife."

So many of the other shows that are on the air show family and marriage and all the things that are traditional and that we recognize as good--shows like "The War at Home" and "Rules of Engagement"--as if it's another battle. They wouldn't allow "Make Room for Daddy" and shows like those because they were not realistic, so instead we now have the Bundys, where the mother and father hate each other and are looking to get as much as they can from each other, and this whole mindset. And it continues on through Ward Churchill's ethnic studies class.

What happens is, they are indoctrinated into what I call a "cult of indiscriminateness." The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather's birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought.

There's a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they'd been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: "In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate."

I'll give you an example. At the airports, in order not to discriminate, we have to intentionally make ourselves stupid. We have to pretend we don't know things we do know, and we have to pretend that the next person who is likely to blow up an airplane is as much the 87-year-old Swedish great-great-grandmother as those four 27-year-old imams newly arrived from Syria screaming "Allahu Akbar!" just before they board the plane. In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.

The problem is, of course, that the ability to discriminate, to thoughtfully choose the better of the available options--as in "she's a discriminating shopper"--is the essence of rational thought; thus, the whole of Western Europe and today's Democratic Party, dominated as it is by this philosophy, rejects rational thought as a hate crime.

So what you're left with after 10, 12, 14, 20 years in the Leftist indoctrination centers that our schools have become are citizens of voting age who are utterly unwilling and incapable of critically judging the merits of the positions they hold and have held unquestioned since they were five years old and first entered the Leftist indoctrination process.

There was a book that came out at just about the same time as Professor Bloom's that in some ways even better describes and explains the mindset of the Modern Liberal. It was Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and it reads like the bible of Modern Liberalism and the playbook of Democratic Party policy.

The sentence fragment "Don't hit," which is one of the lessons that Fulghum refers to, has morphed into an entire sentence now that they're adults: "War is not the answer." But they don't really need to know anything, because even though they know about Neville Chamberlain and what happens if you appease evil, they don't really need to know it because knowing it or not knowing it would not have changed the position they have now and have held unquestioned since they were five.

When I was five years old, I used to go around the neighborhood trick-or-treating with my friends on Halloween, and we'd have in one hand a bag for candy and in the other hand a little box with a slit on top for nickels and dimes and pennies for UNICEF, because at five years old, the United Nations is a terrific thing: "Don't hit, talk." Another lesson from Robert Fulghum is "Share everything." Well, here, we'll share power; we'll share our wealth; we'll pay for the United Nations. Let's talk things out. What a lovely, wonderful thing.

Then you turn 10, 15, 20, and you learn some things about the United Nations that change your opinion. You learn about the corruption. You learn about the anti-Semitism, that they ran away from the genocide in Rwanda, have done nothing about the Sudanese genocide--in fact, made the Sudanese members of the Human Rights Commission while they were committing this genocide! You and I change our position because these are things we really need to know, yet the Modern Liberal will maintain their five-year-old's position, their belief that the United Nations is this great, wonderful thing, and completely ignore everything they've learned since.

There was a song that came out at about this time called "Goodbye Stranger" by a group called Supertramp--because, you know, being a "tramp" is super! In it, this guy and this girl shack up together for a couple weeks, and apparently things are pretty wonderful until she says something like, "Honey, we've run out of food. Why don't you go to the supermarket, pick up some things, and then we can do this for another week or two?" He says, "I should go shopping? No, no, that's not my paradise. I'm leaving." And as he's walking out the door, he says to her, "Now, I believe that what you say is the undisputed truth, but I have to see things my own way just to keep me in my youth."

That is so much the mindset of the Modern Liberals. It's not that they are not aware of all the things that we're aware of; it's that they need to reject them in order to remain in this five-year-old's utopia that they've been told is the only hope for mankind: a mindless indiscriminateness.

So what you're left with is not really adults, but citizens of voting age who cannot judge their own positions but are virulently antagonistic to any position other than their own. Why? Because when you've been brought up to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative, any position other than their own must have been arrived at through the employment of discrimination. This is why Bush is Hitler; this is why Reagan is Hitler; this is why Giuliani is Hitler.

How is Rudolph Giuliani like Hitler to a thinking person? In one way: Hitler discriminated against the Jews; Giuliani discriminated against the crack-addicted prostitutes mugging people in Times Square. Hitler discriminated against the Catholics; Giuliani discriminated against the criminal overlords. Hitler discriminated against the gypsies; Giuliani discriminated against the terrorists on 9/11 and beyond. In other words, any form of discrimination is wrong.

The Modern Liberals know that theirs is a position arrived at through the moral imperative of indiscriminateness; therefore, any position other than their own must have been arrived at through the employment of discrimination. So this makes you not just wrong on your issues and your stances. They don't even think about your issues and your stances. They don't have to. Even if they were willing to, even if they were able to, they don't need to. Would you sit and contemplate Hitler's Social Security policy? No, you would fight Hitler.

So what you're left with is, after 10, 12, 14, 20 years in these indoctrination centers--and it's not a coincidence that the longer you stay in the indoctrination process, the more morally inverted you become, so that to become head of the Ethnic Studies Department, you have to argue that the Islamic fascist terrorists are the good guys and the victims of 9/11 were all little Eichmanns--is people who quite literally cannot differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong, better and worse.

But indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. Indiscriminateness of thought invariably leads the Modern Liberal to side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Because in a world where you are indiscriminate, where no behavior is to be deemed better or worse than any other, your expectation is that all behavior should lead to equally good outcomes. When, in the real world, different behaviors lead to different outcomes, you and I know why-- because we think. We know why communities that promote teenage promiscuity tend to fail at a greater rate than communities that promote teenage abstinence: Teenage promiscuity and teenage abstinence are not the same behaviors. Teenage abstinence is a better behavior.

Forget the moral component for a moment; let's just talk practicalities. If your boy's out messing around, he's not home reading a book. If your daughter's down at the abortion mill again, she's not at the library studying for the SATs. If your son's in a hospital bed somewhere dying of AIDS, he's not putting together his five-year plan.

You and I recognize why communities that promote teenage abstinence do better than those that promote teenage promiscuity in their music, in their movies, in the schools. But to the Modern Liberal who cannot make that judgment--must not make that judgment--that would be discriminating. They have no explanation. Therefore, the only explanation for success has to be that somehow success has cheated. Success, simply by its existence, is proof positive to the Modern Liberal of some kind of chicanery and likely bigotry. Failure, simply by its existence--no other evidence needed, just the fact that it has failed--is enough proof to them that failure has been victimized.

So the mindless foot soldier, which is what I call the non-elite, will support the elite's blueprint for utopia, will side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success, out of a sense of justice. As I said at the beginning, they're not evil. It's just a mindless acceptance without any true Socratic desire to talk about the real consequences. It's meaningless to them, and it's why John Lennon said utopia was all the people living for today.

By the way, it's not a coincidence that those who live for today now have so much debt. What is debt? It's the failure to repay a promise from yesterday. And they vote themselves nothing but more and more entitlements, which is what? Stuff for me. I'll worry about who pays for it later.

The same is true of good and evil. Since nothing can deemed good, nothing can be deemed evil. That which society does recognize as good must be the beneficiary of some sort of prejudice. That which society recognizes as evil must be the victim of that prejudice. So, again, the mindless foot soldier will invariably side with whatever policy, mindlessly accept whatever policy seeks to tear down what is good--America, Israel, Wal-Mart--and elevate what is evil until everything meets in the middle and there is nothing left to fight about.

Take an issue in the news and think like a Modern Liberal, and you will see how, once you've been indoctrinated into this mindset, there is no other choice. Remember, I said it was inevitable. Once you belong to this cult of indiscriminateness, there is no other conclusion you can come to than that good is evil and that evil is the victim of good.

We all know it's official policy at the Leftist media outlets to never call Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Harakat ul-Mujahidin, or any of the other Islamic fascist terrorist groups around the world "terrorists," and you know why. In fact, it's even in official memos to reporters ordering them not to use the appropriate word. That reason is that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Who are we to employ critical, rational judgment?"

But, as a very minimum standard, can't we at least agree that in order to be called a "freedom fighter," you have to be fighting for freedom? We know what Osama bin Laden is fighting for; he's told us. It's not freedom; it's an oppressive theocracy in which women are covered from head to toe and beaten if their ankles become exposed, and unless we all change to his religion, we are considered the offspring of pigs and monkeys to be decapitated. People like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore will call Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter because being indiscriminate quite literally leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off. That's how sick this mentality is.

So, if The New York Times and CNN and Newsweek and the rest of the leftist media outlets are right and there is no objective difference between the terrorist and the freedom fighter, why is it that you and I teach our children that George Washington is a hero and Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein are villains? You and I know why because we think.

George Washington risked his personal fortune to personally lead his troops into battle: battles fought nobly against other uniformed warriors for the purpose of creating the freest nation in the history of the world. Pretty noble, pretty heroic stuff. Yasser Arafat, on the other hand, stole his people's money, sent 14-year-olds out to fight his battles: battles fought against kids and women and civilians in pizza parlors and Passover ceremonies, all for the purpose of maintaining his corrupt dictatorship. Pretty villainous stuff.

But to the folks at The New York Times, there is no objective difference between the terrorist and the freedom fighter. So why do we teach our children that George Washington is a hero? The only possible explanation is that he is a white Christian of European descent. If there is no difference between the behaviors of the freedom fighters and the terrorists, then why do we teach that Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein are villains? There can be no other reason than they are darker-skinned Muslims of Middle Eastern birth.

So when push comes to shove and after 18 United Nations resolutions and 10 years of having our airplanes shot at in direct violation of our very clear agreements, after Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran and invaded Kuwait, bombed Saudi Arabia and bombed Israel, committed atrocities against the Kurds in the North and was committing genocide against the Marsh Arabs in the South, we finally, reluctantly go to war to liberate those poor people. You and I know why because we think: because we make critical, rational, moral judgments.

But to the Modern Liberal, to the mindless, to those who cannot discriminate between these behaviors, the only possible explanation for us going to war is some nefarious cause: because we're evil and Saddam Hussein, therefore, is a victim. So they will rush there, as we've seen, and act as human shields to protect his rape rooms and his torture chambers because they won't judge rape rooms and torture chambers, for that requires critical and moral judgment.

And if you listened to the chants of the mindless minions as they marched down the streets in their anti-America rallies, which the forged document users and the Leftist press euphemistically called "anti-war rallies," you could hear their chant: "One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist war." What race, exactly, comprises Iraq? What are they talking about? They don't know. It's not a factual statement; it's not an accurate statement. Didn't we just recently go to war to protect Muslims in Kuwait? Didn't we bomb the Christians of Europe to protect the Muslims of Europe?

What is this based on? It's based on the reality that once you subscribe to indiscriminateness, anything other than indiscriminateness is the evil of having discriminated.

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: You repeatedly used the term "Modern Liberal." When you go back in time, how do you view other definitions of "liberal" religiously, as when liberals were called "bleeding hearts" related to Jesus Christ, and in classical intellectual thought? I know a lot of Libertarians today like to call themselves liberal in the classical sense. How do you view Modern Liberalism with past liberalism?

MR. SAYET: Normally I would refer to the difference between upper-case "L" and lower-case "l." I refer to these people as Modern Liberals because it did come out of what we thought was the liberal tradition but went in a new direction. What they are now is very different from what they were. In fact, Modern Liberalism--upper-case "L" - is about as illiberal a philosophy as we've had in America, and though it's not quite yet gotten as violent as some others have, I fear that it's on its way.

As you go back through time, there was always the sense that we were trying to work toward something; there was a belief that there was something better than what came before. This Modern Liberalism is nihilism in a lot of ways. They will constantly argue, "question authority, question your government, don't trust your neighbors, don't trust Wal-Mart, everybody's out to get you," but they don't really replace it with anything. So there is nothing to aim for that you can make a judgment whether that's truly a good thing to do.

I think that, more than anything else, Modern Liberalism is characterized by its destructive nature. It tears down the authority of people in the schools, the authority of the old textbooks, the heroism of the people we would look up to and teach our children to look up to, but replaces it with nothing.

QUESTION: Do you have any more commentary on the past liberals? Do you respect liberals in the past?

MR. SAYET: There was always a liberal tradition in America, starting with the Founding Fathers and prior to them. It's very, very, very rare that the majority would cede so many rights and recognize that the rights came to everybody and that they didn't come from the powers here but came from a greater power than ourselves. The power that minorities have in America and have always had in America-- and I include myself as a Jew amongst the minorities--is unprecedented in human history, and that was true liberalism: the fact that it wasn't forced upon people.

The things that are happening now, like losing free speech in our schools, are the opposite of what liberalism was. Some of the same values that were liberal back in the '60s are conservative now. I'll give as an example a color-blind society. That remains a liberal concept; unfortunately, it's not liberal from a Modern Liberal--upper-case "L"--point of view.

QUESTION: Owen Graham, foreign policy intern here at Heritage. I think you've come to the nexus of what we as conservatives confront, because it really is a revolution. As Bloom puts it, it's changing everything from a right society to the privileging of differences and the lack of being capable of making decisions based on principles. The only principle is that you can't discriminate against anything.

MR. SAYET: Indiscriminateness of thought doesn't just lead to sometimes being right; it actually is a philosophy that has an inevitable conclusion. Bloom talks about "seeking the good," and that's what we try to do. It doesn't mean we're always right, doesn't mean we always get there, doesn't mean we don't stumble along the way; but without a recognition of good, then how do you progress toward good?

Which puts the lie to the concept that Modern Liberalism is progressive in any fashion. If they have nothing to progress toward, if there is no good, then they are forcing every single generation not only to reinvent the wheel, but to fight every battle we've ever fought to get to this great nation, this great time that we're in.

QUESTION: I thank you, and I hope that you are counseling some of the conservative candidates to bring this up, because it has permeated everything.

MR. SAYET: It's quite literally everything. That's why I didn't hesitate at the beginning to say it is the only standard in Hollywood, the only standard for journalism, the only standard for art, the only standard for justice.

One of the big canards of Modern Liberalism is this notion of diversity, as if diversity is a virtue. Diversity is not a virtue; diversity is meaningless. Diversity just means "different." Without the critical moral judgment to say, "Yes, it's different and good," you're not only not supporting good, but you are invariably supporting evil.

Our melting pot melted out some of the failed behaviors, some of the lesser behaviors. That's how we became such a terrific nation: by taking the best and leaving aside the rest. That makes the bad behaviors rare in our society, so to be diverse you have to promote that which is rare. Common sense and conventional wisdom are both rejected for no other reason than that they're common and conventional. So you find, again, the Modern Liberal championing always that which is the worst.

QUESTION: Alan Nichols from Washington Diplomat magazine. If Hillary Clinton were sitting here listening to you, trying to be open to you--assuming she's capable--she would say, "You have a perspective, but I also am working toward the good." You say liberals don't work toward the good, but Hillary would say, "I want universal health care because I believe it is best for America's citizens."

MR. SAYET: Absolutely. I really did try to stress at the beginning that I don't necessarily consider them evil. I absolutely believe that they believe that they are working toward "the good." The problem is that you've eliminated critical, rational judgment; you've eliminated the ability to tell the difference between what works and what doesn't work; you're coming from the mindset of a five-year-old.

When I was five years old, the New York World's Fair closed up in my neighborhood, down the street from me, and I insisted that my father buy the monorail that went around the park because I wanted to put it up alongside the Long Island Expressway and ease congestion and pollution because I was a liberal kid. He explained to me in grown-up fashion that we couldn't afford it and, technically, there were problems like getting the rights of way, creating a bureaucracy, etc.

When you have a conversation with a Modern Liberal about health care, there's no doubt that their goal is as good as mine was: curing air pollution or curing everybody's health problems. But if you don't have the grown-up sense to be able to discuss how, what's the reality, what's the truth, you can't have a conversation where you make the world a better place. It's all fantasy at that point. Again, you're dealing with a five-year-old, so of course she wants to make the world a better place. Very, very few of us don't.

It's a matter of having given up the ability to discriminate: (a) they can't bring it about because it's a childish conversation; and (b) when you have to make the decisions about who gets certain things-- for example, health care, welfare, or illegal aliens-- certain decisions have to be made about who qualifies for it, and when you're just going through indiscriminately giving all these benefits, then you're actually going to be assisting that which is most failed because they're the ones who are going to be most in need.

QUESTION: Global warming and Al Gore?

MR. SAYET: I am convinced that global warming is not a position they have arrived at through an honest and sincere look at the scientific data and the recognition that these models--look, we don't even trust models of weather three days down the road on the nightly news, but we're going to trust this one for 50 years down the road? I don't think it's an honest attempt to understand global warming.

In one fell swoop, you can turn America from the greatest nation in the history of the world--our productivity feeds the world--into the most evil nation in the history of the world. The idea that we're destroying the world is accepted more because it's an attack on America as evil polluters than it is because it's scientifically supported.

QUESTION: Since you're here from Hollywood, let's talk about the future. There are conservatives in Hollywood; they just don't want to put their heads out of the hole in the ground. Where do you see us getting to the tipping point, or where can we get along the road of retaking?

MR. SAYET: Let me tie those two questions together very quickly. One of the things that conservatives recognize is that the answer to problems is progress, and fortunately, technological progress has seen the conservatives find alternative methods.

Back in the studio day, you needed to work at the studio, and there was no place else to go; but now you have a Mel Gibson who can find unique ways of distributing and promoting, and there's the Liberty Film Festival that my friends run and whatnot. I am able to promote my shows via the Internet and through all kinds of technologies that would have made it impossible just five or seven or ten years ago. So as more and more channels come on cable, you're going to have more and more opportunities for unique voices, and because we are so incredibly right, they find us.

QUESTION: Can you talk about the term "progressivism," how that sort of replaced liberalism in a lot of ways as the new way they talk about themselves and what it means to be a progressive?

MR. SAYET: What I find interesting is how often what the Liberal claims about himself is exactly the opposite of what the truth is. Chris Matthews has this show called "Hardball," as if the title is going to tell us what the show really is when it's really quite the opposite. They've come to recognize that people recognize Liberalism in its modern form as the policies that have failed our schools, the policies that have failed us as a nation, the policies that have done so little to help the black community to get out of the rut that it's been in for the last 40 years in some ways--and that it is a pejorative.

It's funny, because the Liberals very much recognize themselves. I remember watching "Hannity & Colmes," and Sean Hannity said of Nancy Pelosi that she's a San Francisco liberal, and immediately Alan Colmes yelled at him that he was trying to demonize her. How do you demonize someone by stating the facts?

So suddenly they decide, "Okay, people have caught onto us about Liberalism; now let's call ourselves progressive. We won't be progressive in the slightest. It's just a name. It's just an advertising slogan."

Read more:
Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals "Think"

This article is about the modern Australian political party. For the Liberal party active in Australia from 1909 to 1916, see Commonwealth Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party of Australia (Lib or colloquially Libs) is a major political party in Australia. Founded in 1945 to replace the United Australia Party (UAP), the Liberal Party is one of the two major parties in Australian politics, along with the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

The Liberal Party is the largest and dominant party in the Coalition with the National Party of Australia, the Country Liberal Party of the Northern Territory and the Liberal National Party of Queensland. Except for a few short periods, the Liberal Party and its predecessors have operated in similar coalitions since the 1920s. Internationally, the Liberal Party is affiliated to the International Democrat Union.

The party's leader is Malcolm Turnbull and its deputy leader is Julie Bishop. The pair were elected to their positions at the September 2015 Liberal leadership ballot, Bishop as the incumbent deputy leader and Turnbull as a replacement for Tony Abbott, whom he consequently succeeded as Prime Minister of Australia. Now the Turnbull Government, the party had been elected at the 2013 federal election as the Abbott Government which took office on 18 September 2013.[3] At state and territory level, the Liberal Party is in office in three states: Colin Barnett has been Premier of Western Australia since 2008, Will Hodgman Premier of Tasmania since 2014 and Mike Baird Premier of New South Wales since 2014. The party is in opposition in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory.

The party's ideology has been referred to as conservative,[4]liberal-conservative,[5] and conservative-liberal.[6] The Liberal Party tends to promote economic liberalism and social conservatism, though often the latter at the expense of the former, especially since the 1990s.[7] Two past leaders of the party, Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard, are Australia's two longest-serving Prime Ministers. The Liberal Party has spent more time in government than any other federal Australian political party.

The contemporary Liberal Party generally advocates economic liberalism (see New Right). Historically, the party has supported a higher degree of economic protectionism and interventionism than it has in recent decades. However, from its foundation the party has identified itself as anti-socialist. Strong opposition to socialism and communism in Australia and abroad was one of its founding principles. The party's founder and longest-serving leader Robert Menzies envisaged that Australia's middle class would form its main constituency.[8]

Towards the end of his term as Prime Minister of Australia, in a final address to the Liberal Party Federal Council in 1964, Menzies spoke of the "Liberal Creed" as follows:

As the etymology of our name 'Liberal' indicates, we have stood for freedom. We have realised that men and women are not just ciphers in a calculation, but are individual human beings whose individual welfare and development must be the main concern of government ... We have learned that the right answer is to set the individual free, to aim at equality of opportunity, to protect the individual against oppression, to create a society in which rights and duties are recognised and made effective.

Soon after the election of the Howard Government the new Prime Minister John Howard, who was to become the second-longest serving Liberal Prime Minister, spoke of his interpretation of the "Liberal Tradition" in a Robert Menzies Lecture in 1996:

Menzies knew the importance for Australian Liberalism to draw upon both the classical liberal as well as the conservative political traditions. ... He believed in a liberal political tradition that encompassed both Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill a tradition which I have described in contemporary terms as the broad church of Australian Liberalism.

Throughout their history, the Liberals have been in electoral terms largely the party of the middle class (whom Menzies, in the era of the party's formation called "The forgotten people"), though such class-based voting patterns are no longer as clear as they once were. In the 1970s a left-wing middle class emerged that no longer voted Liberal.[citation needed] One effect of this was the success of a breakaway party, the Australian Democrats, founded in 1977 by former Liberal minister Don Chipp and members of minor liberal parties; other members of the left-leaning section of the middle-class became Labor supporters.[citation needed] On the other hand, the Liberals have done increasingly well in recent years among socially conservative working-class voters.[citation needed]However the Liberal Party's key support base remains the upper-middle classes; 16 of the 20 richest federal electorates are held by the Liberals, most of which are safe seats.[10] In country areas they either compete with or have a truce with the Nationals, depending on various factors.

Menzies was an ardent constitutional monarchist, who supported the Monarchy in Australia and links to the Commonwealth of Nations. Today the party is divided on the question of republicanism, with some (such as incumbent leader Malcolm Turnbull) being republicans, while others (such as his predecessor Tony Abbott) are monarchists. The Menzies Government formalised Australia's alliance with America in 1951, and the party has remained a strong supporter of the mutual defence treaty.

Domestically, Menzies presided over a fairly regulated economy in which utilities were publicly owned, and commercial activity was highly regulated through centralised wage-fixing and high tariff protection. Liberal leaders from Menzies to Malcolm Fraser generally maintained Australia's high tariff levels. At that time the Liberals' coalition partner, the Country Party, the older of the two in the coalition (now known as the "National Party"), had considerable influence over the government's economic policies. It was not until the late 1970s and through their period out of power federally in the 1980s that the party came to be influenced by what was known as the "New Right" a conservative liberal group who advocated market deregulation, privatisation of public utilities, reductions in the size of government programs and tax cuts.

Socially, while liberty and freedom of enterprise form the basis of its beliefs, elements of the party have wavered between what is termed "small-l liberalism" and social conservatism. Historically, Liberal Governments have been responsible for the carriage of a number of notable "socially liberal" reforms, including the opening of Australia to multiethnic immigration under Menzies and Harold Holt; Holt's 1967 Referendum on Aboriginal Rights;[11]Sir John Gorton's support for cinema and the arts;[12] selection of the first Aboriginal Senator, Neville Bonner, in 1971;[13] and Malcolm Fraser's Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976. A West Australian Liberal, Ken Wyatt, became the first Indigenous Australian elected to the House of Representatives in 2010.[14]

The party has mainly two unorganised factions, the conservative right and the moderate left. Historically, moderates have at times formed their own parties, most notably the Australian Democrats who gave voice to what is termed small-l liberalism in Australia.

The Liberal Party is a member of the International Democrat Union, the only party with the name Liberal to hold membership.

The Liberal Party's organisation is dominated by the six state divisions, reflecting the party's original commitment to a federalised system of government (a commitment which was strongly maintained by all Liberal governments until 1983, but was to a large extent abandoned by the Howard Government, which showed strong centralising tendencies). Menzies deliberately created a weak national party machine and strong state divisions. Party policy is made almost entirely by the parliamentary parties, not by the party's rank-and-file members, although Liberal party members do have a degree of influence over party policy.[15]

The Liberal Party's basic organisational unit is the branch, which consists of party members in a particular locality. For each electorate there is a conferencenotionally above the brancheswhich coordinates campaigning in the electorate and regularly communicates with the member (or candidate) for the electorate. As there are three levels of government in Australia, each branch elects delegates to a local, state, and federal conference.[15]

All the branches in an Australian state are grouped into a Division. The ruling body for the Division is a State Council. There is also one Federal Council which represents the entire organisational Liberal Party in Australia. Branch executives are delegates to the Councils ex-officio and additional delegates are elected by branches, depending on their size.[15]

Preselection of electoral candidates is performed by a special electoral college convened for the purpose. Membership of the electoral college consists of head office delegates, branch officers, and elected delegates from branches.[15]

The Liberals' immediate predecessor was the United Australia Party (UAP). More broadly, the Liberal Party's ideological ancestry stretched back to the anti-Labor groupings in the first Commonwealth parliaments. The Commonwealth Liberal Party was a fusion of the Free Trade Party and the Protectionist Party in 1909 by the second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, in response to Labor's growing electoral prominence. The Commonwealth Liberal Party merged with several Labor dissidents (including Billy Hughes) to form the Nationalist Party of Australia in 1917. That party, in turn, merged with Labor dissidents to form the UAP in 1931.

The UAP had been formed as a new conservative alliance in 1931, with Labor defector Joseph Lyons as its leader. The stance of Lyons and other Labor rebels against the more radical proposals of the Labor movement to deal the Great Depression had attracted the support of prominent Australian conservatives.[16] With Australia still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, the newly formed party won a landslide victory at the 1931 Election, and the Lyons Government went on to win three consecutive elections. It largely avoided Keynesian pump-priming and pursued a more conservative fiscal policy of debt reduction and balanced budgets as a means of stewarding Australia out of the Depression. Lyons' death in 1939 saw Robert Menzies assume the Prime Ministership on the eve of war. Menzies served as Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 but resigned as leader of the minority World War II government amidst an unworkable parliamentary majority. The UAP, led by Billy Hughes, disintegrated after suffering a heavy defeat in the 1943 election.

Menzies called a conference of conservative parties and other groups opposed to the ruling Australian Labor Party, which met in Canberra on 13 October 1944 and again in Albury, New South Wales in December 1944.[17][18] From 1942 onward Menzies had maintained his public profile with his series of "The Forgotten People" radio talkssimilar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "fireside chats" of the 1930sin which he spoke of the middle class as the "backbone of Australia" but as nevertheless having been "taken for granted" by political parties.[19][20]

Outlining his vision for a new political movement in 1944, Menzies said:

...[W]hat we must look for, and it is a matter of desperate importance to our society, is a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen, though not through the dull and deadening process of socialism.

The formation of the party was formally announced at Sydney Town Hall on 31 August 1945.[18] It took the name "Liberal" in honour of the old Commonwealth Liberal Party. The new party was dominated by the remains of the old UAP; with few exceptions, the UAP party room became the Liberal party room. The Australian Women's National League, a powerful conservative women's organisation, also merged with the new party. A conservative youth group Menzies had set up, the Young Nationalists, was also merged into the new party. It became the nucleus of the Liberal Party's youth division, the Young Liberals. By September 1945 there were more than 90,000 members, many of whom had not previously been members of any political party.[18]

After an initial loss to Labor at the 1946 election, Menzies led the Liberals to victory at the 1949 election, and the party stayed in office for a record 23 yearsstill the longest unbroken run in government at the federal level. Australia experienced prolonged economic growth during the post-war boom period of the Menzies Government (19491966) and Menzies fulfilled his promises at the 1949 election to end rationing of butter, tea and petrol and provided a five-shilling endowment for first-born children, as well as for others.[22] While himself an unashamed anglophile, Menzies' government concluded a number of major defence and trade treaties that set Australia on its post-war trajectory out of Britain's orbit; opened Australia to multi-ethnic immigration; and instigated important legal reforms regarding Aboriginal Australians.

Menzies ran strongly against Labor's plans to nationalise the Australian banking system and, following victory in the 1949 election, secured a double dissolution election for April 1951, after the Labor-controlled Senate refused to pass his banking legislation. The Liberal-Country Coalition was returned with control of the Senate. The Government was returned again in the 1954 election; the formation of the anti-Communist Democratic Labor Party (DLP) and the consequent split in the Australian Labor Party early in 1955 helped the Liberals to another victory in December 1955. John McEwen replaced Arthur Fadden as leader of the Country Party in March 1958 and the Menzies-McEwen Coalition was returned again at elections in November 1958 their third victory against Labor's H. V. Evatt. The Coalition was narrowly returned against Labor's Arthur Calwell in the December 1961 election, in the midst of a credit squeeze. Menzies stood for office for the last time in the November 1963 election, again defeating Calwell, with the Coalition winning back its losses in the House of Representatives. Menzies went on to resign from parliament on 26 January 1966.[23]

Menzies came to power the year the Communist Party of Australia had led a coal strike to improve pit miners' working conditions. That same year Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and Mao Zedong led the Communist Party of China to power in China; a year later came the invasion of South Korea by Communist North Korea. Anti-communism was a key political issue of the 1950s and 1960s.[24] Menzies was firmly anti-Communist; he committed troops to the Korean War and attempted to ban the Communist Party of Australia in an unsuccessful referendum during the course of that war. The Labor Party split over concerns about the influence of the Communist Party over the Trade Union movement, leading to the foundation of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party whose preferences supported the Liberal and Country parties.[25]

In 1951, during the early stages of the Cold War, Menzies spoke of the possibility of a looming third world war. The Menzies Government entered Australia's first formal military alliance outside of the British Commonwealth with the signing of the ANZUS Treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States in San Francisco in 1951. External Affairs Minister Percy Spender had put forward the proposal to work along similar lines to the NATO Alliance. The Treaty declared that any attack on one of the three parties in the Pacific area would be viewed as a threat to each, and that the common danger would be met in accordance with each nation's constitutional processes. In 1954 the Menzies Government signed the South East Asia Collective Defence Treaty (SEATO) as a South East Asian counterpart to NATO. That same year, Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov and his wife defected from the Soviet embassy in Canberra, revealing evidence of Russian spying activities; Menzies called a Royal Commission to investigate.[26]

In 1956 a committee headed by Sir Keith Murray was established to inquire into the financial plight of Australia's universities, and Menzies pumped funds into the sector under conditions which preserved the autonomy of universities.

Menzies continued the expanded immigration program established under Chifley, and took important steps towards dismantling the White Australia Policy. In the early 1950s, external affairs minister Percy Spender helped to establish the Colombo Plan for providing economic aid to underdeveloped nations in Australia's region. Under that scheme many future Asian leaders studied in Australia.[27] In 1958 the government replaced the Immigration Act's arbitrarily applied European language dictation test with an entry permit system, that reflected economic and skills criteria.[28][29] In 1962, Menzies' Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that all Indigenous Australians should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (prior to this, indigenous people in Queensland, Western Australia and some in the Northern Territory had been excluded from voting unless they were ex-servicemen).[30] In 1949 the Liberals appointed Dame Enid Lyons as the first woman to serve in an Australian Cabinet. Menzies remained a staunch supporter of links to the monarchy and British Commonwealth but formalised an alliance with the United States and concluded the Agreement on Commerce between Australia and Japan which was signed in July 1957 and launched post-war trade with Japan, beginning a growth of Australian exports of coal, iron ore and mineral resources that would steadily climb until Japan became Australia's largest trading partner.

Menzies retired in 1966 as Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister.

Harold Holt replaced the retiring Robert Menzies in 1966 and the Holt Government went on to win 82 seats to Labor's 41 in the 1966 election.[31] Holt remained Prime Minister until 19 December 1967, when he was declared presumed dead two days after disappearing in rough surf in which he had gone for a swim.

Holt increased Australian commitment to the growing War in Vietnam, which met with some public opposition. His government oversaw conversion to decimal currency. Holt faced Britain's withdrawal from Asia by visiting and hosting many Asian leaders and by expanding ties to the United States, hosting the first visit to Australia by an American president, his friend Lyndon B. Johnson. Holt's government introduced the Migration Act 1966, which effectively dismantled the White Australia Policy and increased access to non-European migrants, including refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. Holt also called the 1967 Referendum which removed the discriminatory clause in the Australian Constitution which excluded Aboriginal Australians from being counted in the census the referendum was one of the few to be overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian electorate (over 90% voted 'yes'). By the end of 1967, the Liberals' initially popular support for the war in Vietnam was causing increasing public protest.[32]

The Liberals chose John Gorton to replace Holt. Gorton, a former World War II Royal Australian Air Force pilot, with a battle scarred face, said he was "Australian to the bootheels" and had a personal style which often affronted some conservatives.

The Gorton Government increased funding for the arts, setting up the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Training School. The Gorton Government passed legislation establishing equal pay for men and women and increased pensions, allowances and education scholarships, as well as providing free health care to 250,000 of the nation's poor (but not universal health care). Gorton's government kept Australia in the Vietnam War but stopped replacing troops at the end of 1970.[33]

Gorton maintained good relations with the United States and Britain, but pursued closer ties with Asia. The Gorton government experienced a decline in voter support at the 1969 election. State Liberal leaders saw his policies as too Centralist, while other Liberals didn't like his personal behaviour. In 1971, Defence Minister Malcolm Fraser, resigned and said Gorton was "not fit to hold the great office of Prime Minister". In a vote on the leadership the Liberal Party split 50/50, and although this was insufficient to remove him as the leader, Gorton decided this was also insufficient support for him, and he resigned.[33]

Former treasurer, William McMahon, replaced Gorton as Prime Minister. Gorton remained a front bencher but relations with Fraser remained strained. The McMahon Government ended when Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party out of its 23-year period in Opposition at the 1972 election.

The economy was weakening. McMahon maintained Australia's diminishing commitment to Vietnam and criticised Opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, for visiting Communist China in 1972only to have the US President Richard Nixon announce a planned visit soon after.[34]

During McMahon's period in office, Neville Bonner joined the Senate and became the first Indigenous Australian in the Australian Parliament.[35] Bonner was chosen by the Liberal Party to fill a Senate vacancy in 1971 and celebrated his maiden parliamentary speech with a boomerang throwing display on the lawns of Parliament. Bonner went on to win election at the 1972 election and served as a Liberal Senator for 12 years. He worked on Indigenous and social welfare issues and proved an independent minded Senator, often crossing the floor on Parliamentary votes.[36]

Following Whitlam's victory, John Gorton played a further role in reform by introducing a Parliamentary motion from Opposition supporting the legalisation of same-gender sexual relations. Billy Snedden led the party against Whitlam in the 1974 federal election, which saw a return of the Labor government. When Malcolm Fraser won the Liberal Party leadership from Snedden in 1975, Gorton walked out of the Party Room.[37]

Following the 197475 Loans Affair, the Malcolm Fraser led Liberal-Country Party Coalition argued that the Whitlam Government was incompetent and delayed passage of the Government's money bills in the Senate, until the government would promise a new election. Whitlam refused, Fraser insisted leading to the divisive 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. The deadlock came to an end when the Whitlam government was dismissed by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975 and Fraser was installed as caretaker Prime Minister, pending an election. Fraser won in a landslide at the resulting 1975 election.

Fraser maintained some of the social reforms of the Whitlam era, while seeking increased fiscal restraint. His government included the first Aboriginal federal parliamentarian, Neville Bonner, and in 1976, Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, which, while limited to the Northern Territory, affirmed "inalienable" freehold title to some traditional lands. Fraser established the multicultural broadcaster SBS, accepted Vietnamese refugees, opposed minority white rule in Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and opposed Soviet expansionism. A significant program of economic reform however was not pursued. By 1983, the Australian economy was suffering with the early 1980s recession and amidst the effects of a severe drought. Fraser had promoted "states' rights" and his government refused to use Commonwealth powers to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania in 1982.[38] Liberal minister, Don Chipp split off from the party to form a new social liberal party, the Australian Democrats in 1977. Fraser won further substantial majorities at the 1977 and 1980 elections, before losing to the Bob Hawke led Australian Labor Party in the 1983 election.[39]

A period of division for the Liberals followed, with former Treasurer John Howard competing with former Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock for supremacy. The Australian economy was facing the early 1990s recession. Unemployment reached 11.4% in 1992. Under Dr John Hewson, in November 1991, the opposition launched the 650-page Fightback! policy document a radical collection of "dry", economic liberal measures including the introduction of a Goods and Services Tax (GST), various changes to Medicare including the abolition of bulk billing for non-concession holders, the introduction of a nine-month limit on unemployment benefits, various changes to industrial relations including the abolition of awards, a $13 billion personal income tax cut directed at middle and upper income earners, $10 billion in government spending cuts, the abolition of state payroll taxes and the privatisation of a large number of government owned enterprises representing the start of a very different future direction to the keynesian economic conservatism practiced by previous Liberal/National Coalition governments. The 15 percent GST was the centerpiece of the policy document. Through 1992, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating mounted a campaign against the Fightback package, and particularly against the GST, which he described as an attack on the working class in that it shifted the tax burden from direct taxation of the wealthy to indirect taxation as a broad-based consumption tax. Pressure group activity and public opinion was relentless, which led Hewson to exempt food from the proposed GST leading to questions surrounding the complexity of what food was and wasn't to be exempt from the GST. Hewson's difficulty in explaining this to the electorate was exemplified in the infamous birthday cake interview, considered by some as a turning point in the election campaign. Keating won a record fifth consecutive Labor term at the 1993 election. A number of the proposals were later adopted in to law in some form, to a small extent during the Keating Labor government, and to a larger extent during the Howard Liberal government (most famously the GST), while unemployment benefits and bulk billing were re-targeted for a time by the Abbott Liberal government.

At the state level, the Liberals have been dominant for long periods in all states except Queensland, where they have always held fewer seats than the National Party (not to be confused with the old Nationalist Party). The Liberals were in power in Victoria from 1955 to 1982. Jeff Kennett led the party back to office in that state in 1992, and remained Premier until 1999.

In South Australia, initially a Liberal and Country Party affiliated party, the Liberal and Country League (LCL), mostly led by Premier of South Australia Tom Playford, was in power from the 1933 election to the 1965 election, though with assistance from an electoral malapportionment, or gerrymander, known as the Playmander. The LCL's Steele Hall governed for one term from the 1968 election to the 1970 election and during this time began the process of dismantling the Playmander. David Tonkin, as leader of the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party of Australia, became Premier at the 1979 election for one term, losing office at the 1982 election. The Liberals returned to power at the 1993 election, led by Premiers Dean Brown, John Olsen and Rob Kerin through two terms, until their defeat at the 2002 election. They have since remained in opposition under a record five Opposition Leaders.

The dual aligned Country Liberal Party ruled the Northern Territory from 1978 to 2001.

The party has held office in Western Australia intermittently since 1947. Liberal Richard Court was Premier of the state for most of the 1990s.

In New South Wales, the Liberal Party has not been in office as much as its Labor rival, and just three leaders have led the party from opposition to government in that state: Sir Robert Askin, who was premier from 1965 to 1975, Nick Greiner, who came to office in 1988 and resigned in 1992, and Barry O'Farrell who would lead the party out of 16 years in opposition in 2011.

The Liberal Party does not officially contest most local government elections, although many members do run for office in local government as independents. An exception is the Brisbane City Council, where both Sallyanne Atkinson and Campbell Newman have been elected Lord Mayor of Brisbane.[40]

Labor's Paul Keating lost the 1996 Election to the Liberals' John Howard. The Liberals had been in Opposition for 13 years.[41] With John Howard as Prime Minister, Peter Costello as Treasurer and Alexander Downer as Foreign Minister, the Howard Government remained in power until their electoral defeat to Kevin Rudd in 2007.

Howard generally framed the Liberals as being conservative on social policy, debt reduction and matters like maintaining Commonwealth links and the American Alliance but his premiership saw booming trade with Asia and expanding multiethnic immigration. His government concluded the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement with the Bush Administration in 2004.[35]

Howard differed from his Labor predecessor Paul Keating in that he supported traditional Australian institutions like the Monarchy in Australia, the commemoration of ANZAC Day and the design of the Australian flag, but like Keating he pursued privatisation of public utilities and the introduction of a broad based consumption tax (although Keating had dropped support for a GST by the time of his 1993 election victory). Howard's premiership coincided with Al Qaeda's 11 September attacks on the United States. The Howard Government invoked the ANZUS treaty in response to the attacks and supported America's campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the 2004 Federal elections the party strengthened its majority in the Lower House and, with its coalition partners, became the first federal government in twenty years to gain an absolute majority in the Senate. This control of both houses permitted their passing of legislation without the need to negotiate with independents or minor parties, exemplified by industrial relations legislation known as WorkChoices, a wide ranging effort to increase deregulation of industrial laws in Australia.

In 2005, Howard reflected on his government's cultural and foreign policy outlook in oft repeated terms:[42]

When I became Prime Minister nine years ago, I believed that this nation was defining its place in the world too narrowly. My Government has rebalanced Australia's foreign policy to better reflect the unique intersection of history, geography, culture and economic opportunity that our country represents. Time has only strengthened my conviction that we do not face a choice between our history and our geography.

John Howard

The 2007 federal election saw the defeat of the Howard federal government, and the Liberal Party was in opposition throughout Australia at the state and federal level; the highest Liberal office-holder at the time was Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman. This ended after the Western Australian state election, 2008, when Colin Barnett became Premier of that state.

Following the 2007 federal election, Dr Brendan Nelson was elected leader by the Parliamentary Liberal Party. On 16 September 2008, in a second contest following a spill motion, Nelson lost the leadership to Malcolm Turnbull.[43] On 1 December 2009, a subsequent leadership election saw Turnbull lose the leadership to Tony Abbott by 42 votes to 41 on the second ballot.[44] Abbott led the party to the 2010 federal election, which saw an increase in the Liberal Party vote and resulted in the first hung parliament since the 1940 election.[45]

Through 2010, the party improved its vote in the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections and achieved state government in Victoria. In March 2011, the New South Wales Liberal-National Coalition led by Barry O'Farrell won government with the largest election victory in post-war Australian history at the State Election.[46] In Queensland, the Liberal and National parties merged in 2008 to form the new Liberal National Party of Queensland (registered as the Queensland Division of the Liberal Party of Australia). In March 2012, the new party achieved Government in an historic landslide, led by former Brisbane Lord Mayor, Campbell Newman.[47]

The following is a complete list of Liberal Party leaders:

Key: Liberal Labor Country/National PM: Prime Minister LO: Leader of the Opposition : Died in office

1 Queensland is represented by the Liberal National Party of Queensland. This party is the result of a merger of the Queensland Division of the Liberal Party and the Queensland National Party to contest elections as a single party.

2 The Northern Territory is represented by the Country Liberal Party, which is endorsed as the Territory division of the Liberal Party.

See more here:
Liberal Party of Australia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The graphic pictured above is getting passed around quite a bit on Facebook lately and it gets posted by liberals whenever the subject of Benghazi comes up. The graphic above with a list of attacks below, supposedly points out that many more people were killed in embassy bombings and shootings under Bush than the 4 who were killed in Benghazi under President Obama. The comparison is made as if somehow sheer numbers excuses a cover up, issuing stand down orders and lying about the cause of the Benghazi consulate attack.

In effect what liberals are saying when they post this graphic is, "Well yes, we know Obama lied about Benghazi, covered up the truth and made up a story as to what caused the attack, but Bush is way worse because there were more embassy attacks and more people died under his watch." Sadly, this is simply part of the "blame Bush for everything that happens to Obama" mentalities of both liberals and Obama himself because not a single one of these attacks when looked at closely, even holds a candle to what happened in Benghazi. And in fact, with one of the attacks listed below, even though it has 371,000 references in Google, we can't find any evidence the attack even happened. All references in Google search seem to be the same list that liberal blogs just blindly copied, passed around and then mindlessly published without checking a single reference. So much for liberal facts!

Liberals also like to point out that either 52 or 54 people were killed (depending on what sources you read), but when looked at these attacks more closely only 1 person who died was an American. That person was U.S. Diplomat David Foy killed in Pakistan in March 2006. All other deaths were either brave embassy guards who were killed in the line of duty defending the safety of embassy employees, or they were innocent bystanders killed in the crossfire or bomb explosions.

We also have the list that somewhat goes with the inaccurate graphic and is posted over at Daily Kos, which I will never link to (but you can find it here) , with the title "If diplomatic attacks are a sign of weakness, Bush was the weakest of all."

In reality this list is weak because everything on it pales in comparison to Benghazi. Yes, real people with families and loved ones died in these attacks, but in no case was there any controversy surrounding them as there is in the Libya attack and in no embassy attack under the Bush Presidency was there any attempt to cover-up what happened or was there blame placed on something that turned out to be patently false. The sheer level to which Obama has gone to hide the facts of this attack is like nothing we have ever seen in the United States of America.

Read below as we destroy both the list and the graphic at the top of this post:

June 14, 2002, U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan - Suicide bomber kills 12 and injures 51.

Unlike Benghazi, this attack happened outside the walls of the consulate and yes, twelve people were killed and 51 injured, all Pakistanis. I cannot find any reports of Americans amongst the injured. And we aren't sure how this attack matches up with the graphic above because there were 12 people killed, not 10.

February 20, 2003, international diplomatic compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - Truck bomb kills 17.

This one is only on the list found at Daily Kos and the link to the list above and we especially love this example because we can't find a single credible reference anywhere in Google that this attack ever happened!

February 28, 2003, U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan - Gunmen on motorcycles killed two consulate guards.

Two policemen were killed in this shooting outside the consulate and according to CNN, "none of the staff inside the compound at the time were injured in the attack."

July 30, 2004, U.S. embassy in Taskkent, Uzbekistan - Suicide bomber kills two.

Two Uzbek policemen were killed outside the embassy of both the countries of Israel and the United States. US and Israeli officials said none of their staff were among the casualties.

December 6, 2004, U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia - Militants stormed and occupied perimeter wall. Five killed, 10 wounded.

This is the only attack on this list and referenced in the graphic where the walls of the embassy were breached and personnel inside were killed, but once again, the graphic and the reference above from The Daily Kos don't match. Four security guards and five staff were killed, none were Americans. By our math, 4 plus 5 equals, 9, not 8 as listed in the graphic and 5 as listed in the reference above.

March 2, 2006, U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan - Suicide car bomber killed four, including a U.S. diplomat directly targeted by the assailants.

This is the only attack where an American diplomat, not an Ambassador like Christopher Stevens, was actually killed. Tragically, David Foy was specifically targeted outside the embassy when a massive car bomb went off in the parking lot behind the consulate as he arrived for work.

Isn't it interesting that the only embassy attack where an American was killed under Bush and they don't include it in their completely inaccurate graphic above. You would think they would want that one in there.

September 12, 2006, U.S. embassy in Damascus, Syria - Gunmen attacked embassy with grenades, automatic weapons, and a car bomb (though second truck bomb failed to detonate). One killed and 13 wounded.

Here we go again, another attack listed where not only were no Americans killed, no Americans were even injured. Yes, sadly one brave Saudi security guard was killed doing his job as militants tried to storm the embassy compound. Once again, the embassy wall were never breached and all American personnel inside remained safe.

January 12, 2007, U.S. embassy in Athens, Greece - A rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the embassy building. No one was injured.

Another embassy attack that liberals try to point out in some way is equal to what happened in Benghazi, Libya. While this is a serious event that targeted one of our embassies, it took place early in the morning when a grenade was launched into an empty embassy building. Again, no one was killed or injured.

July 9, 2008, U.S. consulate in Istanbul, Turkey - Armed men attacked consulate with pistols and shotguns. Three policemen killed.

Yet another case where embassy security sadly died, but died in the line of duty. ThreeTurkish National Police officers were killed defending the embassy. All Americans inside remained safe.

March 18, 2008, U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen - Mortar attack misses embassy, hits nearby girls school instead.

Though there are reports by liberal websites of 2 being killed at a girl's school near this embassy when mortars were fired at it but missed, the official US Embassy website in Yemen says that there were only injuries.

September 17, 2008, U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen - Militants dressed as policemen attacked the embassy with RPGs, rifles, grenades and car bombs. Six Yemeni soldiers and seven civilians were killed. Sixteen more were injured.

You liberals might what to get your facts straight on this before you post such drivel. How many were killed? The graphic says 10 and the quote above says 11. Actually there weren't 10 people killed, there were 19, six attackers, six Yemeni police, and seven civilians. And guess what, absolutely zero Americans were killed or injured in that attack.

Even though some members of the Yemeni security forces were killed, they did exactly as they were supposed to do, they defended the embassy and saved the personnel inside! And liberals are pointing this out as a sign of weakness? Having security forces do their duty and die during a battle is weakness?

2008 - Rioters set fire to US Embassy in Serbia - (Only listed in graphic above)

Rioters did break into the embassy in this attack and one person was killed, a rioter when they got trapped in a part of one building they had set on fire. All American personnel were safe and accounted for.

There are also 2 more attacks going around the net that liberals are trying to paint as Bush's fault, but once again, neither even remotely holds up to scrutiny as anything even compared to what happened in Benghazi. The first is an attack on what liberals are trying to call the American consulate on January 22, 2002 in Calcutta, India where 5 policemen were killed. In reality it was not the consulate , but an American cultural center that was attacked.

And the final one going around the net is in relation to the bombing of 2 Bali nightclubs on October 12, 2002 when a third much smaller device detonated outside the United States consulate in Denpasar, causing only minor damage.

There you have the graphic and the list, including one attack that never happened, which liberals use to whine and ask why there was no outrage when Bush was president and embassies were attacked. Bush did plenty of things wrong, but he did not lie to all of the country, assisted by a willing press, in order to try and cover up the deaths of 4 Americans.

See the original post here:
Liberals Use Grossly Misleading Graphic And List To ...

Question What is the difference between a liberal and a puppy? Answer -A puppy stops whining after it grows up.

Question What is the only thing worse than an incompetent liberal President? Answer -A competent liberal President.

Question Who was the first liberal Democrat? Answer -Christopher Columbus. He left not knowing where he was going,got there not knowing where he was,left there not knowing where hed been and did it all on borrowed money.

Q: How many liberals does it take to change a light Bulb? A: At least ten, as they will need to have a discussion about whether or not the light bulb exists. Even if they can agree upon the existence of the light bulb they still may not change it to keep from alienating those who might use other forms of light.

Q:How many liberals does it take to change a light bulb? A:None. Liberals wouldnt actually change the light bulb, but they would show compassion for it by talking a lot about how terrible it is in the dark and more funding is needed to improve dim, 60 watt bulbs up to bright and productive 100 watt bulbs.

Q: How many liberals does it take to change a light bulb? A: Let George Bush fix it! Its his fault its dark anyway!

See the rest here:
SHORT JOKES ABOUT LIBERALS - Laugh@Liberals

The basics of liberal vs. conservatives come down to a simple dynamic: liberals are for progress, liberty, equality, creativity, originality, love for one another; conservatives are against them all (though they'll concoct, contrive, contort, conflate and conceal to hide that very fact). Liberals liberate. Conservatives conserve. Liberals push forward. Conservatives pull backwards. So you have pro and con... for and against... progressive vs. conservative.

Here's how it plays out:

Rich and powerful people have a very good reason to promote conservatism. The fundamental core of conservatism is to "conserve" (preserve, maintain) traditional customs, institutions and hierarchies. This is a perfect formula for keeping the socio-economic elite rich and powerful, or making them even more so. It's also the perfect formula to keep all other people in their proper places, which, of course, is below and subvervient to the rich and powerful. The father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, called this "the chain of subordination."

As a matter of "faith" these conservative elites believe that they are the superior people, and thus the just rulers of society. Conservatives have referred to this as "natural law." They maintain that if economic, social and governmental policies are skewed in their favor, then all of society will benefit. In economic parlance, this ideology is called "supply-side," though today it is more commonly known as "trickle-down" economics, or sometimes "Reaganomics" (or sometimes "voodoo economics.") This idea goes way, way, way back in history, and has been promoted by every king and pope and sultan and dictator around the world. In all of that time and practice, there is zero evidence that it actually works to benefit all the people, or even the overall economy, of any particular society. What it does do quite effectively is enrich the already rich. And so there is little wonder why conservative power-mongers so stubbornly stick to the "trickle-down" formula, and perennially sell it to a gullible public.

So, the conservative socio-economic elite are constantly pushing for low, low (or no) taxes for the rich and their corporations, and low, low (or no) regulation on business. They want to skew social systems, including government, toward their favor. They don't really care about the lower classes, including the vast middle class, which is the true engine of a modern economy. They only care about themselves. Indeed, for them to make more and more and more money, and acrue more and more power, it is in their best interest to squash the lower classes. So wealthy and powerful conservatives believe that We the People should serve the economic system, which is rigged in favor of the socio-economic elite.

Democracy presents a basic problem for these conservatives because it tends to oppose hierarchical and institutional power. The idea of inherent superiority, subservience, or "traditional" power structure runs counter to the values of democracy. So it turns out that much of conservative ideology is deeply un-American (as well as un-Christian). In a democracy, policy, customs and institutions are supposed to be skewed toward We the People, in a system where "hierarchy" and "subservience" are at least greatly diminished if never completely eliminated entirely. In a democratic society no one is considered "superior" just because they are of a particular clan or culture or possess wealth or power.

Yet at the heart of conservative thinking remains the rigid belief in hierarchy, natural rulers, and thus superiority and inferiority. The conservative socio-economic elite are determined to "conserve" this separation and inequality if at all possible.

Since the founding of America, liberals have sought to expand opportunities for the average person, and even the disadvantaged and downtrodden, seeking a more egalitarian society that works for everyone.

Liberals have a more fact-based, rather than faith-based, ideology. They are not so motivated by self-serving but actually negative emotions, such as prejudice, greed and fear, and thus can see the great advantages to a society of justice for all, and the "general welfare," a term used in the preamble of the Constitution.

Liberals are "utilitarian" in thinking that social, economic and governmental policy should be skewed toward the advantge of the largest number of people, not just the rich and powerful, or toward any particular clan, religion or cultural group. And liberals are far more magnanimous in being willing to share both their wealth (by not being so greedy) and their innate self worth (by not being so prejudiced) with other people.

Liberals take to heart, and mind, the ideas of liberty, equality, justice for all, and pursuit of happiness: true American values. Liberals also are a whole lot better at extending compassion for all: a true Christian value. And from this real commitment to universal values comes the continual liberal impulse to try to expand rights and steer toward a more equitable and just society. This does not mean that liberals wish to destroy rich people or capitalism, but that these people, and this economic system, must be controlled to the extent that they serve We the People, not vice-versa.

In fact, the United States has done far better economically when operating under general liberal principles than it does under conservative ideology. For example, the Great Depression and this latest Great Recession both resulted following an extended period of conservative, "trickle-down" economic policy. Taxes were slashed, regulations were relaxed or eliminated, bubbles and mini-booms resulted, the rich got richer, the Middle Class struggled, the poor got poorer, and then the economy crashed. A tragic collapse in the economy - affecting hundreds of million of Americans - has happened twice now in the past 80 years... and still the conservatives won't learn the lesson!

Conversely, the largest expansion of a Middle Class in the history of the world took place under the auspices of the New Deal programs, policy and ideology. In this way, liberals often have to actually rescue conservatives and capitalism from their own web of greed. Barack Obama may have done it again by pulling the U.S. economy back from the precipice of depression that 30 years of "Reaganomics" steered us on to.

Now the conservatives are back, selling the same old snake oil. Mitt Romney offers a tax plan that will lower the tax rates of the ultra wealth even further than the record lows they are at presently. His plan (according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center) will give the richest Americans a $250,000 tax break, while costing the average middle class family with children an extra $2,000 per year. Newt Gingrich calls for zero taxes on corporations.

The current Democratic Party (far from actually liberal) favors just slightly increasing the top tax rate so that the richest Americans are paying a fairer share of their wealth, for the good of the commoners and the commons... which is to say, America. To get back to real prosperity, it will take more than this paltry bargaining by the moderates. America will need to return to strong unions, high taxes on the rich and corporations, and stringent regulation on business and industry, most particuarly the financial sector.

Because conservativism is based upon the "traditional value" of strict clan hierarchy, a ranked system of order is to be "conserved." That's a system of ranking, or castes, in which certain people are inherently superior to others. Of course, professional conservatives place themselves over and above other people. This is Burke's "chain of subordination."

Historically, conservative policies seek to conserve, protect or expand hierarchies, institutions and traditions that subjugate women, indigenous people, poor people, workers, immigrants and other minorities, non-Christian religions. Slavery itself was a long-running "traditional value" of conservatism.

Importantly, the traditional hierarchy and "chain of subordination" also claims ownership of the environment. The "traditional value" of conservativism regarding the environment is that natural resources should be subjugated and controlled by the strongest. This ethos spurred hundreds of years of blatant imperialism, exploitation of developing nations and their people, and has led to devastating consequences for the biosphere.

Liberals carried the load in the struggle to uplift and liberate women, workers, children, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and other minorities, including gay, lesbian and transgender individuals. Today, liberals are struggling to prevent the erosion of hard-won rights for these same classes in the face of an onslaught of conservative measures to reduce or destroy such rights and power.

Conservatives habitually seek to restrict rights, protections, including voting privileges (they originally mandated that voting was restricted to white males who owned property, and then only for congressional representatives, not for senators). Likewise, conservatives traditionally seek to depress voter turnout through such means as intimidation, poll taxes, means testing, and registration restrictions which unfairly target the poor. The lower the turnout, the fewer voters professional conservatives have to convince to vote against their own best interest, and the better the conservative's chance of winning.

Liberals seek to expand voter turnout, understanding that the greater the number of voters, the greater the likelihood of the liberal candidate or issue prevailing.

Conservatives understand their policies serve only a select few, and that they cannot win unless they "divide and conquer". They do this by playing upon voters' prejudices, greed, fears and "wedge" issue emotionality, often successfully convincing voters to actually vote against their own economic or social self-interest. They also seek to divide America from the rest of the world through bully tactics and unilateral actions.

In conservative ideology, it is the individual on his (or her) own, and America separate from and above the rest of the world.

Liberal positions actually serve the welfare of far more individuals than those of conservatives, therefore their policies are more likely to unite rather than divide. Liberals also seek to join and cooperate with the rest of the world through careful, nuanced diplomacy and organizations such as the United Nations.

In liberal ideology, we are all in this together, we work together, we help each other, as Americans, and as nations of the world.

Conservatives by nature are exploiters... of workers, of women, of minorities, of the economy (for the corporation), of the environment.

Liberals defend, preserve and protect workers, women, minorities, the economy (for the middle class), and the environment.

Conservatives seek to preserve a white-bread world that supports the primacy of patriarchal, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture, and have little or no interest in understanding or respecting other cultures. Occasionally, they will allow persons or groups who are somewhat similar (i.e. Catholics, minorities) within their tent, but only if it is self-serving. This ignorance fuels suspicion and fear of "the other," and often a tendency to want to subjugate this "other", which, of course, generates resistance, animosity and distrust from "the other." This creates a negative feedback loop that is continually reinforced by the conservative, so they remain at war with the world.

Liberals, even though perhaps a part of WASP culture, value a variety of perspectives and cultural traditions, and are more open to learning about them... thereby reducing fear of the unknown. They are free to develop true and lasting trust with "the other", and forge a better future that works for all.

Conservatives seek a homogeneous populace that obeys and conforms to their conceptions of "traditional values". Anyone outside this populace, whether voluntary or involuntary, is "the other", and is subject to ridicule, scorn, ostracization, bigotry, fear, subjugation, and sometimes violence. In this regard, conservatives pay lip service to concepts such as freedom, equality and individuality, but can become very unsettled when these American rights are put to any use which varies from their sense of conformity.

Liberals recognize that the full exercise of freedom, individuality, creativity and "the pursuit of happiness" not only allows non-conformity but in many cases requires it.

Science and art often conflict with conservative concepts. When this happens conservatives react with hostility and rigidity. They will not modify their ideology to accommodate modern knowledge and changing sensibilities. Instead, they choose to defend their traditional, often mythological, mindset by denigrating and attacking science and art. Thus the conservative becomes more and more estranged from discovery, truth, creativity, and fun.

Liberals are far more free to learn from and enjoy science and art because being truth-based, not tradition/mythology-based, these high achievements of the human spirit are generally supportive of liberal values and concepts. Additionally, the more astute and sophisticated liberal actually revels in exposure to concepts that challenge their viewpoints and sensibilities, for this enables them to continually refine their ideology to remain in accord with the most modern scientific insights and deep truths that the creative arts often reveal.

Conservatives cling tenaciously to traditional, mythological, often archaic systems, including clan mentality that fears any threat to established status-quo. That status-quo generally plays in favor of the conservative elite, thus his need to protect it. To do so, he transposes his own fear (though often a distorted, exagerrated version) to his followers to ensure their loyalty.

A "boogie-man" or evil regime is actually an aid in securing such blind loyalty. Thus, you have Ronald Reagan ramping up his belligerent rhetoric against a fading and tired Soviet Union (the "Evil Empire"), and Cheney-Bush with their "Axis of Evil" and "terror alerts" actually encouraging a fearful populace following a domestic attack by 19 guys with box-cutters.

Conservative leaders continually endeavor to frighten their constituents because they want them to turn toward the leaders for "security". And so the followers become mere sheep, spooked into falling right in line with right-wing social, political and religious dogma. Thus, conservatives are perpetually the most afraid of all all political classes.

Liberals are much less invested in preserving the status quo, and therefore much less fearful of change to such systems. Instead, liberals can allow themselves to see change as potentially positive and hopeful, even as it overturns some long-held traditions.

As for "boogie-men," liberals have been far better at confronting and defeating them than have conservatives... and without having to terrorize their own people. "The only thing we have to fear... is fear itself," pronounced Franklin Roosevelt, rallying American resolve before taking on and defeating two of the most fearsome militaries in world history -- the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

More free and less fearful than conservatives, it turns out that liberals are the actual "free and brave" celebrated in the Star-Spangled Banner.

Because professional conservatives thrive only by keeping a significant portion of the populace in fear, they must maintain an aggressive defensive posture against all real and imagined threats in the world. Macho posturing and the set-up of "boogie-men" that serve to bind their followers to them are a staple of conservative word and deed. Such "boogie-men" require blustering, continual defense sector build-up, a never-ending escalation of military spending, and/or by actual armed confrontations.

Such a military build-up virtually demands war on a semi-regular basis to justify and perpetuate the state of fear and dependency among the populace. As always, conservative leaders don't want a fair fight, they want to rig the game in their favor. So the enemy, the "boogie-man," is usually some disadvantaged or downtrodden people like the Indians or the Mexicans or the Spaniards in Cuba or the Filipinos or the Vietnamese or the Grenadians or the Iraqis or the Afghans or "terrorists" hiding out in caves. Fueled by conservative prejudice and greed, the Americans come blustering in with all their overwhelming firepower, claiming to be spreading democracy or civilization, making a mess of things and creating generations worth of hatred, then pull out and declare a great victory.

Such war-mongering represents a great victory for the professional conservatives who 1) successfully maintain, or expand, their flock of sheeple, and 2) make millions (or billions) of dollars through their war-making adventures, and 3) clandestinely pass legislation amidst the fog of war that furthers their agenda. It's a win-win-win for them, usually not so much for the nation.

Not being nearly as fearful in general, liberals are far more likely to seek peaceful solutions to conflict than conservatives. Liberals are also not nearly so driven by prejudice and greed. So they are suspicious of the "military industrial complex" and its natural impulse toward proclaiming "enemies" and moving toward conflict and war.

Liberals are also far less easy to bamboozle when it comes to the "provocations" that purportedly require war. Thus, liberals early on saw through the Bush administration's rush to war with Iraq based on the ballyhooed "weapons of mass destruction" that conservatives were swallowing down hook, line and sinker.

However, the notion that liberals are cowardly, or "lily-livered," is sheer myth. When a real (not imagined) threat emerges, liberals are often the first to perceive the threat (as they currently do with unbridled corporate greed), and will defend America as fiercely as any conservative. And they often do so with much greater efficiency, responsibliity and humanity... it is rarely liberal soldiers or officers who are caught demeaning, torturing, or murdering innocent citizens. Meanwhile, the most important American military victories in history came under the watch of liberal Commanders-in-Chief.

The commonly used conservative perjorative of a "lily-livered liberal" is a vicious myth perpetrated by an evil mentality that deliberately seeks to divide and conquer by demeaning, even demonizing, the other, of just two, political polemics. It is a vile tactic, never even remotely returned in kind by liberals, that underscores the validity of the word "praetorian" for conservative.

To achieve their objectives, conservatives often are compelled to distort and deceive so as to hide their true intent. They have to hide their true intent because conservative ideology is so often counter to the welfare of the common good of the nation and the vast majority of its citizens. It is also quite contrary to authentic American values of liberty, equality, pursuit of happiness, and justice for all. So deception is a perennial conservative tactic.

Not having enough votes to forward their agenda by themselves, the wealthy elite and corporations successfully connive social conservatives to join with them by disguising and distorting their real purposes, and diverting attention to social "wedge issues" which often prompt the social conservatives to vote with the power elite and actually against their own best interests.

Masters of "disinformation", the actions of conservatives are often the precise opposite of their promises. This practice has long been built into conservative strategy. Thus, "The Clear Skies Initiative" was a giveaway to air polluters; "The Healthy Forests Initiative" a boon for timber companies; "The Patriot Act", actually an afront to the U.S. Constitution; the "Compassionate Conservative" and "Uniter not a Divider" candidate became one of the least compassionate and most divisive presidents; "Fair and Balanced" Fox News is, in fact, the least fair and balanced television news channel in American history. The "No Spin Zone" conservative television program spins like a whirling dervish.

Truth has a liberal bias simply because conservatives long ago abdicated truth in favor of mythology and tradition. So conservatives often find themselves in opposition to natural and scientific fact. In such situations professional conservatives deceive, distort and distract, paying for their own "experts" who happily "dissent" with established science. Meanwhile they encourage their allies in government to postpone or kill solutions to issues that the conservatives do not support.

Liberal politicians have been known to exaggerate and sometimes fail to deliver on their promises, but rarely do they need to lie about their intent. And rarer still would be the liberal who does the exact opposite of what was promised. The liberal agenda revolves around helping average people. No wedge issues are needed. No disinformation required. Liberals rely on voters understanding the nuance of issues, and perceiving the holistic truth. Sometimes that is asking too much of the significant section of the populace that are low-information voters and/or are susceptible to manipulation, fear-mongering, bigot-baiting.

Conservative ideology often clashes with actual facts, scientific discovery and natural truth, so it is in the interest of conservative if the populace remains disengaged, distracted, uneducated and plain dumb. Conservatives hope that the voter has amnesia when it comes to American history, lest they realize how wrong-headed conservatives have been for over 230 years.

Conservatives have actively worked against, indeed fought tooth and nail, every step of progress that our nation has ever made, including, very importantly, every expansion of educational opportunity. And conservative economic policy has always favored the ultra wealthy and coporations. These conservative power-mongers greatly benefitted from the general public not well knowing these very facts. They also are well aware of the inverse: the more education a person gets, the more liberal they generally become.

In election cycles they strive to divert attention from the real issues, consistently throwing up smoke-screens of "wedge issues" to further confuse and confound a huge segment of the population, as well as happily engaging in the "politics of personal destruction" style mudslinging. Anything to keep actual facts out of the mix. Mindless consumerism and entertainment such as sports, video games, most television programming and other diversions also serve the conservative cause. It is no coincidence that such programming often comes directly from huge corporations (run by conservatives) eager to perpetuate the "dumbing down" of America.

The more education an individual has, the more likely they are to tend toward liberal values. Scientists, researchers, professors, teachers, artists, writers, in general the smartest and most educated people in the country are most often liberals. And this is why conservatives are so often at odds with school and university curricula. Truly understanding the history of America means recognizing that this country was founded on liberal ideas, and that each and every stitch of progress made since 1776 sprang from a liberal font. The more information and knowledge a person has, the more they realize that issues can rarely be distilled down to black and white, but require a more nuanced approach.

In election cycles, liberals struggle to keep the focus on the primary issues that affect each and every person and family, and not get dragged into 1) tangential issues, such as abortion, gun control, gay marriage, etc. that truly affect only a comparative few, or 2) personal attacks that serve to divert attention from the real issues.

In keeping with their strict and punitive Old Testament orientation, conservatives hold that evil and sin are the norm within humankind, and therefore a system of order, hierarchy and severe punishment must remain in place. Naturally, the strong and exemplary people (the royals, the nobles, the wealthy and their henchmen) shall be considered the keepers of this order, and all others shall be subject to this "chain of subordination" as Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservativism called it. As a result of this worldview of humanity awash in sin and depravity, and the unworthiness of most people, conservatives live in constant fear and separateness from the bulk of humanity. If most humans are sinful, then the world is an exceedingly dangerous place. SO they must ever be on-guard to anything that might threaten their clan. This leads to their ultra-sensitive sensibilities being easily offended by non-normative behavior such as alternative art, music, literature and lifestyles. They are predisposed to consider someone guilty until proven innocent. This negative, pessimistic and fearful view of humanity explains why conservatives have little empathy for "the other" and wish no particular "social contract" with them.

Liberals, if they are Christian (which many are) place more stock in the New Testament orientation of love for one another. Those liberals who are not very religious maintain a secular humanist perpsective which accords dignity, worth and inherent goodness to most people. Liberals are far less prone to being offended by alternative lifestyles or tradition-challenging art, music and literature. They are predisposed to consider someone innocent until proven guilty. With a far more optimistic and positive view of other people, liberals are far less fearful of the world, and therefore are more prone to want to help others and not allow anyone to fall between the cracks of society.

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Compare and Contrast Liberals and Conservatives... a handy ...