Friday, May 2
Editor's note: We are pleased to welcome Michael Williams of Williamstown as a new columnist. Mr. Williams, who recently challenged the Transcript to provide more local columnists with a liberal point of view, was the only one who responded to our invitation for such columnists to come forward. Here is his first effort. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

According to Ann Coulter, we're either "traitors or idiots." Sean Hannity thinks we "loathe and ravage many of our core values and traditions." Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners that we "care more about whether European leaders like us than they do about whether terrorists are killing us."

It's been 28 years since Ronald Reagan and Roger Ailes turned the word "liberal" into an uber-pejorative. We've been defensive ever since. Enough already.

A dictionary -- in this case, Webster's New World, Second College Edition -- is far kinder in its definitions than Coulter, Hannity and Limbaugh. One suspects that it is probably more objective as well. Here, we are "tolerant of views differing from one's own." To be liberal is to favor "reform or progress, as in religion, etc.; favoring political reforms tending toward democracy

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and personal freedom."

That sounds more like most liberals I know.

The distortion and manipulation of words to serve political objectives is nothing new. But this generation of conservatives has refined the exploitation of fears to achieve its own ends in a way that is as ingenious as it is deplorable and downright scary. Want to pass legislation that in one swoop eliminates more safeguards to our personal liberty than anything since perhaps the Alien and Sedition Acts? Easy. Call it the "USA Patriot Act."

Want to make your Andover-, Yale- and Harvard-educated candidate, son of a U.S. president, grandson of a stockbroker-senator, seem like a regular guy? Find a picture of your opponent windsurfing and voila! Mission Accomplished!

And so it is with "liberal."

The current political climate favors change. We have a historically unpopular president, gas approaching $4 per gallon and, more important than all, a war that has killed 4,000 Americans and continues to chew up $200 million every day (according to a March 17 story on MSNBC). Sorry, Ann, Sean and Rush, but you can't pin this stuff on us.

It is time for the Democratic Party to reclaim the word "liberal." Liberal positions -- on the war, on health care, on personal freedom, on the environment -- are popular, but more importantly, they are sound.

Yes, I am liberal.

And I bet you are, too.

Michael Williams of Williamstown wants readers to know that some of his very best friends are Republicans.