An ideologue, by any other name, would smell the same.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across my name in a comment appearing on a politically-oriented web site. The writer referred to me in a dismissive manner as “a liberal ideologue”.

May I say, for the record, he is not only wrong, he has no idea what a liberal is. In fact, “liberal” and “ideologue” are contradictory terms.

We liberals are open to all new ideas and can just as easily as not decide that some new initiative would better be provided by the private sector than by government. But an ideologue will reject any idea that doesn’t conform to his ideology.


Example: Grover Norquist. He’s the sweetheart who says his goal is to shrink the size of government down to where it’s small enough to drown in the bathtub.

And he’s the guy who intimidated every single Republican in the U.S. House into signing his No-tax Pledge and swears that he will work to defeat any of them who might violate that pledge. In other words, according to Grover, there is no circumstance whatsoever that could justify any new tax on any segment of our society.

Now that, folks, is an ideologue!