You might be a liberal, No. 2

A few weeks ago (Right Hook, Oct. 20), I did a column on what I imagine people actually have to believe in order to consider themselves liberals (or really confused moderates).

Consider this Part 2 of “You might be a liberal if …”

• You believe media bias didn’t show up until after Fox News did.

• You believe Saddam Hussein had no links to international terrorism—which explains all those $25,000 checks given to the families of “successful” Palestinian suicide bombers.

• You’re entitled to inexpensive gasoline, prescription drugs and cable television.

• You believe in social justice, which apparently means “taking” from people that you deem undeserving, and “giving” to people that you deem more deserving.

• You believe tofu-farting celebrities and high-school graduates Barbara Streisand and Jeanine Garofalo are qualified to call the president (who has an MBA from Harvard) “a moron.”

• You support a woman’s “right to choose” an abortion but don’t believe that same woman is competent enough to home school the children she raises.

• You believe there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.

• Calling for “heightened alert” before a potential terrorist attack is “political opportunism,” but calling for gun control after someone goes postal in a McDonald’s is a “logical solution.”

• You believe those who couldn’t work a ballot in southern Florida should have chosen the next president of the United States.

• You believe someone becomes wealthier only because someone else becomes poorer.

• You begin any sentence with the words “I feel.”

• You believe people who stroll across the border in violation of U.S. immigration laws are “undocumented workers,” but people who participated in the Minute Man Project were “vigilantes.”

• Poverty causes terrorism, which explains why the leaders of Al Qaeda were mostly educated in the West and raised in wealth and privilege.

• You believe it’s a good thing when sitting Supreme Court Justices use “international law” to interpret the U.S. Constitution.

• You believe family values are passé.

• You regularly excoriate “big business,” “greedy corporations” and “record profits,” which explains why your own 401(k), 403(b), IRA, or pension plan is invested in the stock market.

• You believe that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Sheila Jackson Lee are better role models for all Americans than Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

• You believe that disarming law-abiding citizens protects them from criminals.

• You believe Dan Rather was “a victim.”

• You believe Social Security isn’t “broken,” or “in crisis,” which explains why 20 percent of all recipients who rely solely on Social Security live at or below the poverty level.

• You believe scientific claims that “global warming” is a threat as firmly as you believed similar threats of “global cooling” in the 1970s.

• You believe that the phrase “separation of church and state” is written anywhere in the United States Constitution.

• You believe that the USA Patriot Act is a horrendous breech of Constitutional rights, which explains your belief that only government agents should be armed.

• You believe that given a choice, any child would prefer to be raised by daycare, (heretofore known as “a village"), rather than by a loving, committed parent at home.

• You deplore prejudice and bigotry, but anyone who’s a conservative is either “a moron” or “a fascist.”

As I said, the liberal philosophy makes perfect sense. Or again, perhaps not.