excellent piece, Adam. Hope to hear more from you. BTW, still pissed about Firefly!!!

Oh, and remember Ron Paul? Another conservative Libertarian, pricipled pacifist. Remember his position on both Gulf wars, Vietnam, Korea and even his treatise on WWII? He felt that we should have never entered the war in Europe and only engaged in the Pacific to the degree necessary in order to protect Hawaii and our protecorates. He, of course, moderated that position during the nomination process.

And while I hate to disagree with Ann Coulter, we have to remember that Democrats have been trying to re-shape America in thier own image since before the ratification of the 19th amendment. Remember Boss Tweed or the early, almost wholely corrupt unionizing efforts. While the Democratic party was founded as anti-federalist, they almost immediately began supporting federalist causes and supporting legislation that diminished states rights in favor of special interests. In fact, it was the Tammany Hall scandal, among many others, that pushed Republicans to pick up the anti-Federalist banner.

Ms. Rankin was raised a pacifist and believed that if she, as a woman, couldn't be ordered to fight and die in a war, then she couldn't, in good concience, order others to fight and die on her behalf. Not the most unreasonable of principled stands, even if I don't agree. BTW, she did support WWII after both the house and senate supported the declaration.
I know that she held other liberal views, especially later in life, but there's no such thing as a 'pure' conservative or libertarian, is there? The point of my comments was to illustrate that conservatives and constructionists have always led way in the civil rights arena until LBJ co-opted the language of civil rights to further his own agenda and the agenda of the Democratic party.
I think I was pretty clear in using the historical context of the word 'progressive', while you chose to focus on the contemporary usage. I'm as disgusted with the current usage as you are, especially since it's used as a cover for liberalism and socialism. Yesteday's progressives were civil libertarians, read 'libertarian'.

Ms. Rankin was instrumental in securing the vote for women in Montana in 1914 and, even after a failed re-election bid in 1919, she led the charge to ratify the 19th amendment in 1921. Further, she was the founding vice-president of the ACLU, an organization whose only purpose was to protect and expand individual civil liberties while protecting the original, founding principals of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Once again, please remember that while your liberal friends are busy patting themselves on the back for their humanitarian views, Republican, conservative, constructionists were the original progressives and are responsible for every meaningful civil rights movement in the history of America. From emancipation and suffrage to the modern equal rights movement of the 60's, which would have failed thanks to Kennedy's own party without the strong, almost unilateral, support of Republican legislators (until LBJ co-opted the movement, that is). It's just that Conservatives understand the difference between equal rights, which means equal opportunity, and free handouts, cynically used to create dependence and buy voter loyalty....

The Republican party was created specifically to fight the pro-slavery whigs and Democrats. For more than a hundred years, they were the progressives that everyone was afraid of. They were staunch Constitutional constructionists whose core principal was that all men were created equal.
Perhaps Andrew needs an historian/columnist who could help untange the lies and regularly bring some factual, historical perspective to the table.

How can the black community support Democrats when that party is primarily, almost exclusively, responsible for 200 years of slavery, then gross social and political inequity. How can American Jews still support a party that continues to marginalize Israel through cuts in fiscal and political support. Clinton tried to pressure Israel into making concessions that would have been suicidal and was reined in immediately by a passionate conservative majority in the legislature. Carter is just a blatant anti-Semite who has become an insufferable embarrassment. LBJ actually voted against legislation that would protect blacks from lynching back in the late 50s and he regularly called the White House staff, then mostly black and Filipino, the N word.

Apparently Reid forgot that it was a Republican and the whigs who emancipated the slaves, the Republican party that supported the American suffragist movement and voter rights for blacks or that Kennedy was the first big D Democrat that EVER supported equal rights. In fact, without the strong support from the right, Kennedy would have hit an insurmountable wall erected by his own party which strongly opposed the equal rights movement of the sixties. The fact that a Democrat that currently sits in the House was a former Grand Wizard in the KKK should forever ban any Democrat from EVER being allowed to call another a racist.

Since President Obama hasen't yet accomplished anything, other that tripling our national debt and pushing unemployement into the double digits and throwing Isreal under the bus, than this award must be for simply NOT being George Bush.