Matt Stoller

I was surprised that his latest book, Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Post-Bush America, confused me. It's a compendium of attacks on liberals, from his entire chapter on why liberals are not considered patriotic, with a useful analysis of the arguments conservatives have made about our relationship with the military and why those arguments are incorrect. He systematically goes through the litany of conservative arguments about liberalism, and explains why each of these stereotypes is strongly held by the public at-large, how the conservative movement created those misimpressions, and what mistakes liberals made to encourage those beliefs. For all of my questions about some of his subsequent arguments, this is a forcefully argued book in which Alterman describes in detail how liberalism came to be put into such a sorry state, and why it is in such dire need of renewal. We have a broad tent ideology, focused on argument, debate, and social justice, and it is an honor to welcome Eric Alterman here today.

(Please welcome General Wesley Clark, A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country author of in the comments -- jh) And they did. They really did. They stood up, men from South Texas and the Bronx and Kansas and California, in a firefight in a jungle in Southeast Asia.