this is a question that i have been asking myself and friends for years. it is also the reason why i use “scare quotes” when i use the terms “liberal” and “conservative”. they are  terms that are loaded, that assume too much, that have been distorted by demagoguery on both the left and the right, and that too often are used ad hominem to dismiss valid arguments.

i have addressed it in this blog a little bit recently, although far brighter minds and better writers than i are nailing it down eloquently. victor davis hanson has a nice little smmmmmmackdown in NRO that lays out the current craziness nicely:

Iliberal Liberals? [Victor Davis Hanson]

Amid the fog of Obamania there are strange things happening on the left. A liberal presidential candidate for months campaigns on the theme of political corruption and cynicism, and the need for reform/public financing, then as the general election season begins, goes on to raise the largest amount of private cash in American political history— only to renounce the entire system of public funding of campaigns.

Then he announces that he will meet his challenger anywhere, anytime in populist town-hall fora, bereft of teleprompters and canned speeches, only to make that promise inoperative.

Al Gore, in William Jennings Bryan- style, trots the globe damning a wasteful West (in between vein-bulging outbursts against Bush ["He LIED to us!"]), only to construct a grotesque energy-devouring mansion for himself — while Bush quietly has a four-bedroom eco-ranch-house that uses a fraction of the energy and water of the Gore monstrosity.

For months, Obama professes his humanitarian sensitivity by welcoming talks with the creepy fascistic regime in Tehran, in between his staff’s shrill warnings that neocons gratuitously want to bomb Iran, while Bush and the Europeans quietly craft a united front of trade sanctions and embargoes to ward off Iran’s proliferation plans for Middle East Armaggedon — until we reach the point that exasperated Europeans are red-faced as Obama’s utopian rhetoric of engagement without requisites leaves them high and dry.

So who really is liberal?

GOOD QUESTION!