Liberal College Kid

William F. Buckley Jr. died this morning, hunched over his desk, still writing away at the age of 82. He was one of the greatest champions of conservatism that the movement has ever seen, one that’s had an immeasurable effect on the direction of political thought since the end of WWII.

He’ll be missed, not only by conservatives, for whom Buckley was a super-star, but for anyone that values thoughtful, intelligent discourse. His sesquipedalian tendencies will be deeply missed in a age when profound, penetrating debate has largely been replaced by moronic, hate-filled rhetoric. Even though many of us on the left deeply disagreed with Buckley’s ideas, he was the kind of man you could have a serious debate with, unlike many on both sides of the aisle today. The New York Times calls him “liberals’ favorite conservative” - a moniker that personally, I’ll be happy to confirm.

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Ralph Nader is running for President again. As expected, the announcement of his candidacy has sparked a wave of angry criticism from the left. Those who are speaking out against Nader are concerned that, as it may have done in the 2000 election, his presence in the race will siphon votes away from the Democratic nominee and allow McCain (presumably) to narrowly pull out a win. They are calling for Nader to drop out of the election, accusing him of running more out of hubris than concern for the nation. But whatever fears Democrats may have about his influence this November, those demanding that he end his campaign should stop for a moment and think about the idea that they are subscribing to: namely, that because a third party candidate may prevent the outcome that they are hoping for, he has no right to run.

The danger in taking this position is obvious. If there is to be anything resembling a democracy in this country, any significant third party should have the right to enter a candidate into the presidential election, regardless of its effect on the outcome. As much as this pains Democrats, the alternative is far more dangerous. If you argue that Nader does not belong in this race, you are arguing that the only two positions that can ever be legitimately taken are those of the Democratic and Republican parties. The third parties, as seemingly irrelevant as they are now, are important to this country in their ability to highlight issues that are not even being discussed among the main party candidates. If we eliminate their capacity to do so, eventually ideas that huge numbers of Americans actually care about, ideas that are already in many cases largely ignored, will fade completely from the political discourse. Ralph Nader knows that he will not win this election, and that it’s very unlikely that he will win even one state. But he is talking about things that John McCain and Hillary Clinton wouldn’t dream of and Barack Obama seems increasingly hesitant to bring up. He deserves to be heard. And if he forces the Democratic nominee to be tougher and more articulate on certain issues, then we all benefit.

The videos below are from the Meet The Press interview during which Nader announced his candidacy. Speak up if you disagree, but I think its hard to argue with his logic.

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If you are a current or former college student, try to think about all of the professors that you have taken over the years. On which side of the political spectrum do you believe most of them fall? If your experience was, or is, like that of most American students, you’ll find that the majority of them were either explicitly liberal, or at least gave you that general impression. Traditional logic says that the Ivory Towers are, in most cases, a Leftist stronghold, and empirical data is beginning to show that this may be the case, particularly within certain disciplines.

In the February 22, 2008 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, there is an article spotlighting the work of a married couple, Dr. Matthew Woessner and Dr. April Kelly-Woessner, both of whom are professors, looking into why there is a gap between the number of liberals and conservatives in academia. What is particularly interesting is that Matthew, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, is a conservative, while April, associate professor of political science at Elizbethtown College, is a liberal. Later this year, they will be publishing a piece titled “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates” in an American Enterprise Institute book. Seeing two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum come together professionally (not to mention the fact that they are married) is very refreshing in the increasingly polarized political environment in which we have found ourselves. Their work is integral to the discussion of politics within the academic world. Everyone should check out their forthcoming paper, “Left Pipeline,” which can be found here (pdf) (great thanks to the Woessners for linking permission). It may be of particular interest to those of you who consider yourself “far left” or “far right.”

As the Woessners’ paper explains, there is a wide array of possible explanations for why this phenomenon occurs. It could be personality differences between liberals and conservatives that lead them into different fields of study. Maybe conservatives are more achievement-oriented, and therefore predisposed to the professional majors, like accounting and computer science. Or, its possible that the liberal environment on many American campuses dissuades conservatives from pursuing a doctorate and the life of a professor. Conservatives may have a stronger desire to make more money and raise a family, desires that may not be compatible with a career in academics. The answer isn’t entirely clear, yet. What is clear, however, is that the reason there are more liberal professors does not relate to intelligence or performance in school. It’s not, as I am sure many of you are eager to conclude, because conservatives are stupid.

My intention in publishing this post is to ask some questions of our readers, and hopefully start a discussion on the role of politics in academia. I would like to see what your personal opinions on the issue are, and how, if at all, the political ideology of your professors influenced your experiences. Again, if your not entirely familiar with the issue, I would highly recommend the Woessner paper linked above. If you want a more fiery and partisan take on the topic, check out David Horowitz’s Students For Academic Freedom website (caveat: there are some pretty extreme ideas being promulgated on the SFAF site (i.e. “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”), and personally, Horowitz turns my stomach, although his Academic Bill of Rights is worth reading into).

So, if you’ve got a few extra minutes and want to add to this conversation, here are a few questions to answer in the comments section below this post:

1. Have you, or did you, notice that your college professors were, in general, more liberal or conservative? If so, which one?

2. What do you think best explains the disparity between the number of liberals and conservatives who pursue doctorates and go on to be college professors? Is there one good answer, or is it a combination of many factors?

3. Do a professor’s ideological convictions have a serious influence on their job as academics and teachers? If a professor actively tries to keep his or her politics out of the classroom, is that enough to prevent bias from influencing the way material is presented or how they interact with their students?

4. For conservative readers: Did, or do you, feel isolated or discriminated against because of your ideological beliefs? Does it seem that special preferences are given to liberal students or that their opportunities for post-graduate studies are greater?

5. For liberal readers: Do explicitly liberal professors ever seem to appreciate your presence in their class more because you agree with them ideologically? Is all this talk of bias against conservatives just delusion?

6. For everyone: Do you feel that your political beliefs relate in away way to the major, and therefore the career that you chose?

Hopefully we’ll get some good comments, and maybe some vicious arguments going here. I look forward to it.

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Back in December, I published a post about William Kristol and his then-recent appointment as a contributor to the New York Times’ Op-Ed page. Since then, I have often wanted to follow up on the original post and attack the kind of intellectually dishonest rhetoric that I predicted he would produce and which he has gladly delivered. But I held my tongue, knowing that readers of this site are capable of sifting through his nonsense on their own.

Today, however, I read his piece titled “Democrats Should Read Kipling,” and couldn’t believe the level to which his manipulative proselytizing had risen. In this column piece, Kristol is attempting to justify the Bush warrant-less eavesdropping program, chastise the House for failing to immediately pass the bill legalizing it, and scare the general public into sacrificing their Fourth Amendment rights for the sake of security; all with the help of… George Orwell? For those of you who see the glaring contradiction in this strategy and are confused by the fact that Kristol and Orwell make extremely strange bedfellows, you are not alone.

Kristol, while apparently perusing a used bookstore in the Milwaukee airport, stumbled upon a volume of Orwell’s essays. One of these, written in 1942, dealt with Rudyard Kipling, the Indian-born British author and poet. Kristol says:

 […] Kipling “identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition.”

“In a gifted writer,” Orwell remarks, “this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality.” Kipling “at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.” For, Orwell explains, “The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.” Furthermore, “where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.”

If I may vulgarize the implications of Orwell’s argument a bit: substitute Republicans for Kipling and Democrats for the opposition, and you have a good synopsis of the current state of American politics.

This is very typical of Kristol. He has found a few passages in a five and a half thousand-word essay that he sees can be easily construed to fit in line with his warped world view, and ignored the portions that cannot. It could be acceptable, albeit embarrassing for Kristol, to omit certain ideas contained in this essay, if, because of its length and his tight schedule, he had not read the entire piece. But even if he hasn’t read it all, it seems impossible to have missed these two lines, the first of which comes directly before the portions Kristol quotes (above), the second coming immediately afterwards:

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested–his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.

And:

Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery […]

Again, all of these statements are in the same paragraph, which happens to be the last of the essay. Strangely, Kristol has not chosen to include these in his article, because they are not flattering to conservatives in the first instance, and tarnish the one dimensional image of Kipling that he is trying to convey in the second. Instead, he hopes that he can quote the sixty-six year old essay selectively, and because of its age and relative obscurity, no one reading the NYT will know the difference. This is the picture of academic and journalistic deceit.

Kristol’s aim in  writing this piece is to portray the Republican Party, which he considers to be the real “governing” party, as the bearers of an immense burden, that of being forced to make important, complicated decisions. “Many Democrats, on the other hand, no longer even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like,” he announces. This is the worst kind of self-pitying mixed with self-glorification; he means to insinuate that he and his buddies in the GOP are the only ones that truly understand the weight they carry in protecting the country from Evil. He points out that over the last forty years, Republicans have controlled the White House for a total of twenty-eight. That statistic, though it does show that, in general, Republican have had a larger share of power, hardly renders the Democratic Party and all of its members a “permanent and pensioned opposition.” I really, honestly, wonder whether Kristol even knows what the word “pensioned” means in this context, because if he did, he would immediately see the idiocy of this argument. Obviously, the Democrats are not pensioned or resigned to a position of permanent and inferior opposition against the Republicans: they took control of both Houses of Congress, and are in serious contention for the presidency. Kristol is very right when he mentions, at the beginning of the article, that the works of George Orwell are often applicable to modern American politics, but not in this particular instance, and not in the way that he seems to think they do.

After dismissing the Democratic Party as irrelevant and unable to imagine What It Takes To Lead, he applies these assumptions to the members of the House, who, rightly, declined to unquestioningly pass legislation giving law-breaking corporations immunity for past actions. As already mentioned, the bill in question, if passed, would give the president and telecommunications companies the power to eavesdrop on American phone calls, emails, and other types of communication, without a warrant, and in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. Kristol believes that our right against unreasonable searches and seizures should be considered trivial in the face of the threat of terror. He says that:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of national intelligence, the retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, and the attorney general, the former federal judge Michael Mukasey, are highly respected and nonpolitical officials with little in the way of partisanship or ideology in their backgrounds. They have all testified, under oath, that in their judgments, certain legal arrangements regarding surveillance abilities are important to our national security.

Not all Democrats have refused to listen. In the Senate, Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, took seriously the job of updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in light of technological changes and court decisions. His committee produced an impressive report, and, by a vote of 13 to 2, sent legislation to the floor that would have preserved the government’s ability to listen to foreign phone calls and read foreign e-mail that passed through switching points in the United States.

Even assuming the questionable characterization of these men as being “nonpartisan” is true, this is still an example of how Kristol and his cronies are trying to downplay the implications of the revised FISA bill. The phrase “that passed through switching points in the United States” completely miscontrues what the bill does. Rather than allowing the government to spy on foreign-to-foreign communications only, it allows them to spy on any call or email between any normal American and anyone overseas, whether it be a terrorist in the mountains of Pakistan or your cousin in London. The real danger is the precedent it sets, namely, that warrants are a inconvenient waste of time. This is the most important issue. The government would be free to eavesdrop all they wanted, if they would bother to get a warrant. But they cannot do that, because then they would need a good reason to spy on you. With this bill, they do not. The next step is listening in on every communication, regardless of its destination or origination, even if it is from Cleveland to Columbus. Similarly, he uses the words “certain legal arrangement” to describe the legalization of obviously illegal actions that have been taken by the government. There is a term generally used for this kind of PR strategy: Orwellian.

And herein lies the greatest irony of this article. Kristol attempts to employ the words of George Orwell, the original, most respected, and most articulate critic of the modern police state, in defending legislation that all but establishes one. Orwell wrote 1984 and countless essays warning us of the dangers of allowing the government to monopolize too much power and of surrendering our privacy to them, especially when it is being coerced away from us with fear tactics, threatening us with annihilation at the hands of Goldstein Bin Laden. He is the last person Kristol should be looking to for a justification to trample on the constitution.

Let’s pretend for a minute, as Kristol would like us to do, that the analogy between Kipling and the Republicans is a valid one. I wonder how Kristol would feel when his beloved party was compared with Orwell’s view of Kipling in this passage, also from the same essay:

It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct–on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have.

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Today, the “Democratically controlled” Senate voted to legalize the President’s warrant-less spying program, with 18 Democrats siding with the unanimous Republican party. In addition, the Senate also passed retroactive immunity for all of the telecommunications companies (AT&T, Verizon, etc.), protecting them from any legal ramifications that may have occurred because of their blatant law breaking and greed.

The precedent that this law sets is absolutely chilling. Those members of the Senate that tout their devotion to the Constitution have trampled all over the Fourth Amendment that protects US citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures, and they have spit on the power restrictions that the Founders intended to be put on the President.

They have awarded multi-billion dollar corporations for breaking the law by protecting them from prosecutions and ensuring them government money to help them spy on Americans. The President and his allies claim that if these telecoms are not given immunity, then they may be hesitant to break the law for “the good of America” in the future. These are the same telecoms that cut off the “necessary” wiretapping programs when the government was late in paying them. These companies have no interest in the common good of the country, only in fattening their wallets, which, if the House decides to pass the renewed FISA bill, will become much easier.

When President Richard Nixon was exposed for his involvement in the Watergate scandal by the Washington Post, the nation was horrified and the Congress joined them in their outrage. Today, our leaders, selected to represent the American citizens’ interests within the government have decided to, instead of punishing an outlaw President, manipulate the laws in order to make his actions in the past (and now, inevitably in the future) legitimate.

Those of us on the left believed that when the country elected enough Democrats to hold a majority in Congress civil liberties would be protected and there would be at least an attempt to challenge the abusive and illegal tactics used by the Bush administration. But they have betrayed their constituencies and the nation (with some notable exceptions, like Sen.’s Dodd and Feingold, who have been valiant in their resistance here). They have set in motion events that will strip us of all the liberties provided for us and put us onto the slippery-slope leading an authoritarian police state.

I would like to go on about this breathtaking, terrifyingly myopic decision, but I think that Glenn Greenwald has a much firmer grasp on the situation. He has been covering this ongoing struggle within the Senate for a while now, and I urge you to look over his work, both from today and over the last few weeks. On today’s post, he has a link to a petition you can sign to be sent to the House Representatives, asking that they do not allow this bill to go through.

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While roaming around the web, hitting up all of the most popular political commentary magazines and sites, you may notice a growing trend. More and more, you’ll find articles and opinion pieces that have titles written in question form. For example, these are some just from this week:

• “Is voter turnout better than ever?” (Slate)
• “Are Bush’s Tax Cut’s dead?” (Slate)
• “Was Irene Nemirovsky an Anti-Semite?” (Salon)
• “Is the Dem’s Fox News Boycott Over?” (Salon)
• “Iraq: Dem’s Dream Dashed?” (Mother Jones)
• “Obama, ‘Establishment’ Candidate?” (New Republic)

Now, some of the articles, posts, and opinions that fall into this category are definitely worth reading. Sometimes they are very informative or insightful. But their titles alone often say something about their contents’ substance, namely, “get ready for some speculation.”

Most of these pieces are simply the author playing around with some idea that he or she thinks is novel and original, especially if this idea contradicts what most people believe. In “Are Bush’s Tax Cuts Dead?“, (subtitled “Does McCain’s Victory Doom Them?”) Daniel Gross strings out a long line of hypothetical scenarios and less than concrete assumptions to reach the conclusion that the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010, will not become permanent. In reality, there is no way of knowing this. True, McCain did vote against the measures when they were first before the Senate (twice, in fact), but Gross assumes that he is lying now when he says he’ll make them permanent, or that even if he is not lying, McCain will see the fiscal irresponsibility of them once in the presidency. He points out that any Republican will be facing a Democratic Congress, as if this changes much of anything. The current crop of Democrats we now enjoy have no problem rolling over for Bush, why not McCain or Romney? Now, what Gross posits could happen; its not entirely unlikely. But there is no way to accurately predict something like this, especially so far in advance, so why bother?

Another kind of question-form-headline is one in which the author is reacting to some recently made claim, again, usually one that doesn’t fit into preconceived notions. For example, the New Republic post, “Obama, ‘Establishment’ Candidate?” Those of us that are familiar with the TNR know that they are generally a right-leaning publication. This particular post is merely referring to a statement made by Mark Penn (of the Clinton campaign) that Obama, rather than Clinton, is the real establishment candidate. But rather than title the post, “Mark Penn Calls Obama the ‘Establishment’ Candidate,” the author or the site’s editor decided to turn it into a seemingly provocative question. Normally, I probably would have never even hit that link, having assumed that this was just another speculative piece like the one mentioned above, just from the title alone. It’s far more interesting, to me, that Mark Penn is trying to manipulate Obama’s image in favor of Clinton’s than it is if some writer is doing it just as some sort of academic exercise, so why not allude to the real story in the title itself?

In general, I think that when you decide to present your piece in question form, it makes your ideas seem weak and unfounded, and frankly, it makes me want nothing to do with them. If you really do believe that voter turn out is better than ever, just say so, and try to prove your case with some hard facts. It’s almost as if the authors of this kind of article or post want to make a point without actually taking on the responsibility for the conclusions it reaches. It allows them to make speculations that are not necessarily grounded in any truth and get away with it. If they turn out to be wildly wrong or end up offending someone (as in the one of the articles listed above), all they have to say is, “Hey, I was just asking a question,” and suddenly it’s as if they do not need to be held accountable for their work and its implications. It’s just a form of cowardice, one that, it seems to me, is becoming more and more prevalent.

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Updated: I’ve been thinking about this some more since I published this post, and I believe I failed to note an important distinction. The articles that I am specifically referring to here are usually ones that have a “closed-ended” question format, like all of them listed above. In these pieces, there can only be a “yes” or “no” answer, and almost all of the time, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to actually answer them. Yet, the author almost always does have an answer, but would rather not just state it plainly in the title for lack of hard evidence. In this way, the author is merely positing a theory that might not be able to be fully defended, and skirting their responsibility for making it. On the other hand, “open-ended” questions are a different story. For example, Slate regularly posts a column called “The Explainer,” many editions of which are titled in question format. But the questions are on topics such as, “How Do You Learn a Dead Language?” and “What Do the Cops Have On Me?”. These are things most people have wondered about, and “The Explainer” is very good at enlightening the reader. There is nothing wrong with articles like those. Sorry for the oversight, and I hope I cleared up this admittedly somewhat confusing post.

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Over the last decade of American politics, the term flip-flopping has become a ubiquitous insult and one of the ultimate undesirable characteristics for public officials. It seems like no one knows the first time that this particular expression, normally a name for a certain type of sandal, was used in reference to politics. Originally, as I understand it, this term was applied when a politician changed his rhetoric, policies or opinions from one side of an issue to another, while maintaining that the two positions are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. This accusation became especially vocal among critics of John Kerry in the run up to the 2004 elections. Specifically, his statement concerning Iraq funding, where he said that he “voted for it before voting against it,” was cited as proof that he was an unreliable man and could not be trusted to stick with his convictions. Recently, the term’s meaning has broadened to not only include someone who attempts to hold two contradictory positions, but anyone who changes their mind on anything, ever.

Throughout this election season, one of the most common justifications for supporting Barack Obama over candidates like Clinton and Edwards has been that he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. That’s a reasonable position, but I would be willing to bet that many of those that defended Kerry when he was being demonized for altering his stance are now using that same tactic to promote Obama over his competitors. The flip-flopping card seems to emerge only when it is politically expedient.

Now, whether or not some members of the Democratic party have embraced the term “flip-flopping” after resisting it originally isn’t particularly important, because we can all agree that its usage has risen dramatically. The real question is, why has changing your mind become one of the cardinal sins of American politics?

When Kerry used the wrong choice of words to describe his votes on Iraq war funding (a mistake he has made more than once), the Bush campaign jumped all over it. They saw that it was an opportunity to make Kerry look weak and indecisive. It worked incredibly, probably even better than Rove and his compatriots could have imagined. It worked because it struck a chord with the American people, manipulating a human characteristic that all voters share in order to make Bush look strong in contrast. But it is important to differentiate strength from foolish thick headedness.

People like to know that their leaders are consistent, because people themselves like consistency. They want to believe that their leader has a well-thought out and strong opinion that will hold up under rigorous tests. But the truth is, many leaders make decisions without thinking them through as thoroughly as they should, and even the most informed decision has its limitations, as no human being in omniscient. Strict ideology and the resistance to anything that does not fit into tis worldview has been the Achilles heel of many governments, from both ends of the political spectrum. The utopian dream of the Bolshevik Revolution morphed into a bloodbath of tyranny because its leaders were unable to integrate any information into their decisions that did not adhere to their own personal interpretation of Marxist philosophy. When inconvenient information and dissenting viewpoints are ignored or stifled in order to maintain consistency, reason is thrown out the window and everyone pays the price.

Americans can see this same pattern emerging today. If there is one “negative” political characteristic that our current president does not embody, it is certaily flip-flopping. More than any other American leader that comes to mind, he truly does find his position and refuse to budge from it even in the slightest way, at least since he became president. I specifically remember him saying, during a debate in 2000, that he “just [didn’t] think it was the role of the United States to come into a country and say, ‘here’s how we do it, so should you.’” That is definitely a foreign policy outlook that he has not stuck by, and I’m sure if we were to go back and scrutinize everything he said in his first bid for the White House, we would find additional examples of this transformation. But since he has been in office (and especially since 9-11) he has been remarkably consistent in his worldview and the way that he approaches it. On every major issue, he has stuck to his guns, most poignantly demonstrated by his “stay the course” attitude with respect to Iraq. Every person who is critical of George W. Bush and is also vehemently opposed to flip-flopping should take a step back and see the contradiction between those two viewpoints.

Would any of us say that this quality of Bush’s has been a noble one? One that has helped the United States and the world? Wouldn’t it have been better if he and his administration could have seen the err of their ways and decided to change them? Obviously, those that still agree with him that a long term occupation of Iraq is the best choice see his steadfastness as a positive. But now that the majority of Americans are in favor of pulling American troops out, it seems that the country is desperately begging for Bush himself to become a flip-flopper, albeit without using that term specifically.

It is important to remember that there are different situations in which politicians opt to change their minds. If the shift in view is motivated by political expediency, than certainly we should criticize it and be wary of that politician in the future. But when a change of heart occurs because new information has become visible, unexpected results and challenges have presented themselves, or because he or she simply realizes that they were wrong, then it is to be applauded.

This phenomenon has even leaked into the non-political world. Anthony Flew, a long time leading figure of atheism, recently announced that he had changed his mind and now believes in God. Many high profile members of the atheist community have ridiculed him and attacked him aggressively. None of them have used the term “flip-flop,” but the parallels are glaring. Why can’t he change his mind, especially on an issue with such universal implications? They would rather he ignore any information that might change his mind, and, effectively stop thinking altogether, rather than betray them and their ideas. Politic discourse, a world that already seems to involve much less actual thought than academic disputes over the afterlife, is even more threatened by those that would rather our leaders permanently solidify their stances than constantly challenge themselves and have the courage to change their positions.

It is far more dangerous to choose a leader who makes up their mind and is unwilling to reconsider than one who is open to new viewpoints and doesn’t refuse to forego their own ideas and preconceived notions to pursue a more prudent course of action. The real world is full of mistakes, and every day people are forced to challenge everything that they hold to be true. Why do we believe that this does not apply to our leaders? If there is anything to be us afraid of, its the unrelenting ideologue, not the flip-flopper, regardless of what the Right has trained us to believe.

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