Here's what I keep thinking: Newt Gingrich was very deliberate in 1993 about turning the word "liberal" into something nasty. And he succeeded probably beyond even his own grandiose fantasies.
Liberal is an epithet.
That's why we had to invent "progressive".
It's impossible to scan the channels on my radio without hearing some psychotic prick using the word as if it meant something cuddled right up next to fresh steaming dog shit.
Have we done anything close to this? Good fucking God, the conservatives have absconded with our name, and as any literate person knows, defining the name of something is the same as owning it.
(They also, just by the way, took over the word "Christian", and made a generation of liberal Christians feel ashamed to tell their friends what they were doing on Sunday morning.)
I want to know what the counterattack is. I want to know why, when I listen to liberals on the radio, they are not using the word "conservative" as if it meant child molester, as if it meant slimy slug, as if it were dirt on their tongues.
I want to know why we concede the right to be brutal and serious to them.