Reply #56: You betcha!

[charlie]

Hell, just watching the confrontational political shows should give anyone a clue. When they introduce the liberal chair -- FROM THE LEFT! ***drumroll*** -- and it's invariably some tepid moderate, ill-suited to do battle with the teeth-baring ideologue on the right, you know the landscape is anything but level.

When the label "liberal" carries a taint of the irrational ideologue, so that politicians with national aspirations must carefully firewall themselves from its contamination -- "I'm kind of a liberal of sorts, but not THAT kind of liberal" -- and conservatives are free from concomitant contortions, then it's a bit obvious that the political bell curve is artificially skewed to the right.

It's a pretty amazing con, the way the right has buffaloed the left into self-policing for elements that might appear immoderate to the right.