Amen, brother! There is a chasm that divides this great country separating the real Americans from the Progressive/Statist/Liberal-Marxists whose goal is to turn America into a USSR-French/British type dictator-nanny state with the elites controlling every facet of our lives.

I no can longer have a political conversation with my Left thinking friends since they are incapable of rational thought.

A great book by Jean-Francois Revel (Last Exit to Utopia) explains the mind set and ideology of the Left and their evil agenda. A must read.

Like many others, I am aware that the phrase "Wall of Separation between Church and State" was NOT in the Constitution, but in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote. Curious, I looked into this letter. Who was it to? What was the context? In short, what was Jefferson's intention?

http://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html

Turns out, TJ wrote these words in response to a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association re their minority position in Connecticut, where state leaders held that freedom of religion was a privilege bestowed upon them, not a fundamental right.

The "Wall" metaphor in his letter was preceded by the First Amendment language re freedom of religion and the free expression thereof.

Turns out, Jefferson was very much a believer that a man's religion was between him and his God. He was more concerned that the government would interfere with someone's religion (say, a Catholic Nun who refuses to perform an abortion) than that religion would interfere with the government.

The "Wall of Ignorance" crowd don't realize that they are not only misreading the Constitution itself, but are misreading Jefferson's original use of the term. The wall was to protect individuals, not the government nor the people as a collective.

It is somewhat ironic that I was linked to this column from a page which featured ML King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, which I come across from time to time...and usually take the time to read it in its entirety. I consider it a brilliant and inspiring speech. Would that it had come true.

The census people and Harry Reid are in hot water about the term "negro." There is another word... and it describes civil rights "leaders" such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Jeremiah Wright, who have done all they can to make the Rev King's "dream" come false. Racist? Why, yes... I believe they are!

May they ALL be judged by "the content of their character"...such as it is... or isn't. But it is not my place, but God's, to judge them. Still, I don't think it's even a close call. "No man can serve two masters..." If you don't know the rest, you can check your Bible... or Google it up, for that matter!

Excellent column! We Conservatives need to press this self-evident truth that Liberalism really IS a mental illness. It's one thing to have faith that something good is true. It's another thing entirely to stubbornly insist that something is true even after a) overwhelming contrary evidence obtains, b) the belief itself leads to failure far more often than not and c) acting upon the belief causes untold suffering and was the catalyst for the systematic slaughter of more than 90 million people. The Left of course blames anyone and everyone for those murders -- anyone but the proponents of their own deceitful ideas.

That's not faith; that's insanity.

A funny and excellent excellent and commentary. But we must guard against arrogance ourselves. I call myself a Classic Liberal, as did Milton Freedman (Capitalism and Freedom) with Conservative sympathies. Liberalism is not a disease: socialism is. Individual liberty, freedom of conscience and a free market are the antidote.

We must not forget how powerful vanity is. Many things ascribed to evil are really properly ascribable to weakness... That's why the framers wisely made for limited government...

But of course I have the same problems with my so-called liberal friends (they aren't really liberal at all). I told my brother I wouldn't talk to him about Obama since there'd be no point. A man who whines that he's cleaning up someone else's mess exhibits the lowest possible standard of ethics possible. Correct me if I'm wrong.

We conservatives are the real liberals. We have let the fight for that description go without a shot... that was a mistake.

Abu--Whatever meaning words may have in the dictionary is secondary to what they come to mean in real life. "Liberals" has come to be synonymous with socialists, progressives, communists, fools and dunderheads. So be it. I recall reading an article many years ago by John Steinbeck, who resented the fact that the Reds had shanghaied the perfectly fine word, "comrades," but such is life. It was better to lose the word and win the Cold War.

Regards, Burt

Your reply to Abu touches on another symptom of the disease of liberalism, Burt. That symptom is the fact that, until recently, liberals have always had the loudest, most repetitious voices and have continuously used those voices to redefine common words to mean something entirely different than their original meanings. You even used one of those words --- progressive --- in your reply.

At the same time, we Conservatives meekly accept and even use those redefined terms to mean their liberal redefinition. A current case in point is the Health Care Bill. That mess has nothing to do with Health Care and everything to do with converting our country to a socialist, police state.

The problem with this redefinition, as I see it, is that we Conservatives lose the argument before it starts because we are put in the position of arguing for the left. How can you possible be aqainst Health Care?

This sort of confusion over "classical" liberalism and modern "Progressive" liberalism is the reason many have adopted the practice of differentiating the two by the easy expediency of capitalizing Liberalism (modern Progressivism) and leaving the classical liberalism in its lowercase form. For clarity and consistency, I do the same with Conservative.

That helps clear up right from the beginning much of the confusion between classical liberalism -- best epitomized by the Founding Fathers -- and modern Liberalism as practiced by the current radical administration of Marxists in the White House and Congress. Then we don't have to keep explaining over and over again that when we talk about Liberalism being a mental disorder, it refers to the undeniably mentally ill elites like Obama and Barney Frank, whereas when people speak of liberalism they're often referring to what might today best be described as Libertarianism.