they can have their george w. bush....

Pertaining to your statement about big government, did you know that historically the Republican party is the party of big government, big spending and slow economic growth?

Here's a good description from the Economist on the problems with the word and how it means two very different things in the US and Europe.

There's a word for that

Nov 4th 2004
From The Economist print edition

And we want it back

ALL through this election campaign, George Bush has flung the vilest term of abuse he knows at John Kerry. You name
the policy—Mr Kerry's support for punitive taxes and reckless public spending, as Mr Bush put it; his preference for
stifling government and overweening bureaucracy; his failure to stand up for, oh, expensive new weapons systems,
microscopic embryos and the sanctity of marriage—and the president's verdict in each case was the same. “There's a
word for that,” he said, again and again. “It's called liberalism.”

What more need one say? And Mr Kerry was not just any sort of liberal: he had actually been the most liberal member
of the Senate. When told this, appalled Republicans jeered more loudly than if Mr Bush had accused his challenger of
eating babies. (That man dared to run for president! Did he think he would not be found out?) Understandably, Mr
Kerry was sometimes wrong-footed by this egregious defamation. Occasionally, smiling nervously, he said he was not
ashamed to be liberal. (Audacious, but perhaps unwise.) At other times he tried to deny it. (You see, he protests too
much.) In America, that kind of accusation cannot easily be shrugged off.

“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well—even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the
opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably
in France) for seeking minimal government—in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from
pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in
continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is
consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms. And again, in its most extreme
expression, it tests the boundaries of tolerance. Worse than ordinary liberals are Europe's neoliberals: market-
worshipping, nihilistic sociopaths to a man. Many are said to believe that “there is no such thing as society.”

Yet there ought to be a word—not to mention, here and there, a political party—to stand for what liberalism used to
mean. The idea, with its roots in English and Scottish political philosophy of the 18th century, speaks up for
individual rights and freedoms, and challenges over-mighty government and other forms of power. In that sense,
traditional English liberalism favoured small government—but, crucially, it viewed a government's efforts to
legislate religion and personal morality as sceptically as it regarded the attempt to regulate trade (the favoured
economic intervention of the age). This, in our view, remains a very appealing, as well as internally consistent,
kind of scepticism.

Parted in error

Sadly, modern politics has divorced the two strands, with the left emphasising individual rights in social and civil
matters but not in economic life, and the right saying the converse. That separation explains how it can be that the
same term is now used in different places to say opposite things. What is harder to explain is why “liberal” has
become such a term of abuse. When you understand that the tradition it springs from has changed the world so much for
the better in the past two and a half centuries, you might have expected all sides to be claiming the label for their
own exclusive use.

However, we are certainly not encouraging that. We do not want Republicans and Democrats, socialists and
conservatives all demanding to be recognised as liberals (even though they should want to be). That would be too
confusing. Better to hand “liberal” back to its original owner. For the use of the right, we therefore recommend the
following insults: leftist, statist, collectivist, socialist. For the use of the left: conservative, neoconservative,
far-right extremist and apologist for capitalism. That will free “liberal” to be used exclusively from now on in its
proper sense, as we shall continue to use it regardless. All we need now is the political party.

Now there certainly is a good foundation for basing things off of.

I find that just the mere statement by a liberal  that he or she is a liberal, will at least catch many off guard and once done allows for the conversation to begin anew.

However, we have to have a message and be able to discuss it plainly so that it makes sense to folks when your discuss you positions an views. Don't even waste your time trying to have reasoned debate with someone who has been programed with the poison of the right wing media structure, there is a reason CULT members have to go through extensive deprogramming after being brainwashed. And I'm not saying that everyone that votes vor a republican is brainwashed, but some of them, especially the ones who are holed up in the fox news/Limbaugh world most certainly are and have a problem dealing with reality.

This is not something that you can get by unless your experienced in psychology so don't even waste your time.

The funny thing is in my conversations with conservatives, when we have reasonable discussions about issues, most of them state quite clearly that I'm a conservative because they agree with me on just about everything, when its the other away around. I suppose that is because most folks think that if they vote for a Republican they are conservative, which is as false as saying that if you vote for a Democrat, your a liberal...

Keith