Curmudgeon:a crusty, ill-tempered old man.

When my boy Bill was in office, Rush was in a rage and all the rage, at least on the right, was Rush. Rush is right, we were cautioned with calculated irony.

Today the left is in a dudgeon. I suppose that is the outcome when people feel hopelessness, just like the (now) leaderless followers of Rush have become, but not to worry--they have leaders aplenty at the top and Rush is a joke, or at least a dusty embarrassment, amongst the once faithful.

What bothered some of us about Rush was the level of anger. Anger sells--there's no doubt about that. Rage rules and reaps profits!

I got seats to a game at the old Fenway park--Sox against the Twins. The streets were choked with fans and hawkers roamed selling fan memorabilia. Nothing unusual there, expect that among the bric-a-brac were black baseball caps, shirts and bumper strips declaring "Yankees Suck," and from the emblem, I knew it wasn't New Englanders attacking themselves, but the logo was of the New York team.

I browse the blogs. I see bric-a-brac that says "Bush sucks." The sentiment has the virtue of being true. It sums him up, but it comes out like Rush. I want to ask, "and so?"

I want to print up my own t-shirts, "Bush and the Right Wing control the government, but all I can think to do in answer is wear this lousy t-shirt."

Say what you will about him, General Patton in the great speech before the huge flag reminds us in the film version of "Patton." "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser."

The word "liberal" is being twisted into the word "loser."

I'm all for biting satire and get the message with the bumper strip in Bush/Cheney colors that reads "Re-elect Halliburton" and the fish-like symbol decal that says "Darwin." I'm all for free enterprise as much as the next person, maybe more, and if someone wants to make money off of anti-Bush coffee mugs, bumper strips, caps, and other mouseke-merchandise, who am I to say that free-market forces and the invisible hand be kept from its ultimate mission? But what's the message?

The strongest word we liberals have is "liberty." The right wing tries to use it, too, but notice how uneasy it is for them to say it, as if it burns their tongues. They claim it, but it doesn't ever really hold because liberty and liberal comes from the same Latin root word, libertas. Notice how "W." stumbles every time he used the word "freedom," or "liberty." It always seems to hang out there in the ether, not exactly attached to anything. He shifts uneasily. He smirks a bit and those words come out like hiccups. When "W." says we live in a land of "freedom" or that the other nations hate the United States because America is land of "liberty," it always sounds, at least to me, that "W." is halting and seems almost lost and out of his text.

When the Soviets used to say their land was one of freedom and liberty, it had a hollow ring to it. Not for one moment did I believe it and you could tell, neither did the assemblage on the top of the Lenin-Stalin Tomb.

And did the west have hats and mugs and t-shirts that said "Communism sucks?"

What totalitarian regimes cannot stand is the idea of liberty. I am only one person, but when I hear the word liberal thrown against me as a pejorative, I will remind myself it actually means that I am someone who believes in libertas and that it is a word not to associated with left losers who are for all the "wrong things."

The idea of liberty still sells well in mainstream America and the progressives ought to be reminding the silent, snoring, majority, that it's about to be taken away.