DAMN, I love it when the Republican right-wing "re-defines" something.  Just recently I was talking with a couple of conservative friends of mine who said, "...Anyway, ‘liberalism’ has been re-defined."  Huh?  Wha..?!  That is about the STUPidest thing I’ve ever heard.  Well, okay... short of the Supreme Court’s decision hand over the Oval Office to George Bush.

   What I want to know is, who the heck re-defined Liberalism while we weren’t looking?  I’ve been a liberal for as long as I can remember.  It’s something I’m proud of because our founding fathers were the great Liberals of their day.  Liberals brought us Women’s right to vote, the New Deal, Veterans Rights, Civil Rights, the Great Society and just about any other necessary social, political and economic change that has helped our country progress and prosper.

   The last great Republican was Teddy Roosevelt, who also happened to be a great liberal and conservationist.  Republicans will go nuts with the fact that he couldn’t have been a Liberal because he was also a great hunter.  (The Republicans have yet to figure out that Liberals only hate guns in the hands of criminals, idiots and paramilitary Billy-Bobs, and that you don’t really need an Uzi to protect your suburban home, but I digress).  Since Teddy’s day the only thing Republicans have been able to do for us is give us a major deficit when we let them get their hands on the Oval Office.

   Webster defined a Liberal as one who is "not characterized by selfish, narrow, or contracted ideas or feelings; favorable to civil, political, and religious liberty; favorable to reform or progress, and in politics often opposed to conservative; not to literal or strict; free"¹ and is "not bound by orthodox tenents or established forms in political or religious philosophy; independent in opinion; not conservative…"²

   So this brings us to those who would "re-define" Liberals and why they have this burning need to do so.

   The very concept of any one group re-defining another with an opposing philosophy smacks of a self-serving agenda, and it boils down to one thing: re-definition takes away the truth (or alters it) and replaces it with lies.

   Webster said Liberals are favorable to religious liberty.  Right-wingers want you to believe their re-definition of Liberalism; that all Liberals hate God, churches or anything to do with religion.  Liberals hate family values, schools, freedom and America.  Liberals consort with communists, nazis, devils, voodoos, dance naked with the devil by the light of the full moon, etc, etc.  That’s the re-definition, and the re-definition is pure political bull.

   On the subject of bull, Webster also defined "conservatives" as those "disposed to maintain existing institutions or view; opposed to change."³

   With Webster's definitions in mind, who do you think made the most progress, advances, and blows for freedom in the United States over the past 200+ years?

   That’s the real truth behind the right-wing desire to re-define Liberals.  And with that thought in mind there is nothing left I could possibly say to all those right-wing nut cases lurching from corridor to corridor in the White House clutching their agenda: "I know what you are up to and you will not get away with it.  So in the meantime, please take note of the mistletoe hanging from the belt loop on the back of my pants."

--Steve Mack

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1	The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language (Processing & Books, Inc., 1971) Page 490
2	Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (The Riverside Press, 1953) Page 484
3	Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (The Riverside Press, 1953) Page 177