If the party of gloom is ever to regain its footing, it will have to start by understanding that those who defeated them are not a bunch of ignorant yahoos looking forward to Armageddon.

To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).

Liberal child welfare experts decided that child abuse was not evidence of a moral or character flaw in the abusing parent. Instead, like poverty, crime, and homelessness, child abuse came to be viewed as evidence of a societal failure.

The recommendation by the Arkansas Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee that President Clinton be disbarred is like a tender green shoot of integrity rising from the stinking junkyard of American public life. At last, some official body has come to a decision about Clinton's conduct that is untainted by politics, cowardice or cynicism.

Feminists are forever discovering subtle new forms of sexism and then beating men around the head and shoulders with it. It is left to the rest of us to suffer the inevitable backlash this provokes among men. Besides, the feminists have the Federal Government behind them.

The proposed liberal solution was always negotiation. Just as they believed in nuclear arms negotiations for their own sake, they believe in a "peace process" without regard to what its consequences might be....It was impossible for any peace plan to fail in their eyes, since lack of progress was nearly always interpreted as evidence that new talks were now "urgent".

Just as the baby boom generation seemed to believe it was the first to discover sex, many of its members also seemed to think they were the first to discover the horrors of war.