Particularly in response to Songwronger's post of 02 Oct 13 - 12:13 AM just above.

Political primer:

Liberalism first became a distinct political movement during the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among philosophers and economists in the Western world. Liberalism rejected the notions, common at the time, of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings.

The 17th century philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition. Locke argued that each man has a natural right to life, liberty, and property and according to the social contract, governments must not violate these rights.

The Founding Fathers of the United States were Liberals.

This should be obvious to anyone who stayed awake in high school history and civics classes.

Liberals opposed traditional conservatism and seek to replace absolutism in government with representative democracy and the rule of law.

Liberalism is strongly opposed to systems such as Communism and Fascism, both of which rely on a strong, arbitrary central government, which Liberalism, by its very nature, opposes.

Songwronger, your attempts to juxtapose and equivocate these quite different political concepts is pure Orwellian "doublespeak" and displays either your ignorance or your duplicity.

Don Firth