I can prove you wrong. No, it’s not you I’m writing about, but — more boring still is a blogger contemplating his or her own belly button or anything and everything else about themselves (“all about ME!”).

So I’m respectfully asking that the discussion remain on the topic of the post. We aren’t doing a blog about discussing the label of the blog. We write about and comment about issues and events and ideas and we have people from all of the world who do not even agree with each other writing for this site. But we all respect each other’s right to say what we want.

I have to periodically write this. But comments about TMV being too far left on posts, too far right on posts, to anti-Hillary on posts, too pro Hillary on posts, too wishy washy — been there, done that.

Let’s stick to the big issues and events. Nothing is more boring than a blog contemplating its own belly button.

I would suggest that the term moderate is pretty relative.

I mean, I’m certain you and Tom Delay honestly believed you were both moderate.

So if it makes you feel better to call yourself a moderate go for it. Just don’t be suprised when you hear laughing in the background.

I don’t think most of the posters here consider themselves radical lefties.

They don’t. However, they also often call themselves “centrists” or “moderates” when they really aren’t. This isn’t the 1950s, the 1960s, 1972 and the McGovernite Moment, any more.

I don’t know anyone here who would consider you a moderate

Not given the nature of who else is on this site and how the terms “moderate” and “centrist” have been misappropriated.

Now excuse me while I give that commie, Atilla the Hun, a good bashing just to keep him oppressed through fear and intimidation.

I think you would consider Attila the Hun a Lefty

That shows more about you than it shows about me.

I’m actually quote moderate to mainstream, but a modern American, not someone stuck like the UAW and Detroit and many liberals in the 1950s and 1960s, assuming the solution to everything is to be found in an ever-enlarging, ever-encroaching federal government in Washington. That was rejected formally by the public in 1980 and attempts to go far to the Left (and in a partisan as well as ideological way) after 1992 resulted in the 1994 election results and even a brief muscle-flexing by the true far or extreme right (notably the militias). Not that it may stop people from wishing and trying, I cannot be grouped with the true “far right” or “extreme right” (which people on here all too often say about anything that is mainstream after 1980 if not earlier).

I’m certainly not going to be mushy about what is normally a moderate set of positions on political issues (largely libertarian, divering from it where reality forces a diversion, and then, usually to the right). That wouldn’t stop me from trying to accomodate others where it was possible or advantageous. For example, I’m among the very few who is not a radical, truly far-left person, who supports a multi-party system and proportional representation. Deal-making to build coalitions (notably with new parties from the fracture of the Dems and the GOP) would be inevitable.

If it’s the list at Radical Middle

Yes. Snowe, Collins…Lieberman getting put on it most likely due to a real-world stance or two on foreign policy…

Anyone who is stuck in the 1950s and 1960s when it comes to what should be the size and role of the federal government in Washington, or assumes an increase in the future is not to be questioned, or should be defended, is not truly any kind of centrist or moderate in this day and age. They’re a generation behind and to the left.

I sincerely don’t understand this perception of “left-skewed centrism” at TMV.

The site is called “moderate,” which can here be considered synonymous with “centrist,” but it is much the same as that radical “middle” [sic] list elsewhere given what the stances actually are. When mainstream, normal ideas (the flat or single-rate income tax, questioning government efficiency and its role in society, noting failures in government programs and the assumptions underlying them which have been wrong in the past) are called, as they have been on here “far right,” or “extreme,” which they never have been — it tells more about the (real) complexion of the user community on this site that may not be realized, or admitted.

Here on this site, “moderate” or “centrist” means about at that list from elsewhere, or Brookings (more liberal than conservative), or the DLC-DNC (complete with “Third Way” stuff in the past), or just maybe or barely, the GOP Congressional coalition(s) created after the 1994 elections in order to defend the (left-shifted relative to the US public) status quo, such as Arlen Specter’s so-called mainstream (DC) GOP coalition or the other one that was announced once on C-SPAN.

And as a tangent to your point……….I suspect those who are 35 or younger here probably do not know which Vice President was actually commonly recognized as one of the best across-the-aisle legislators of recent eras.

What’s more — while I don’t mean to be argumentative, not at all — I sincerely don’t understand this perception of “left-skewed centrism” at TMV. If you look, for instance, at the votes for presidential candidates in our sidebar, 65% posted votes for a decidedly right-leaning candidates like Ron Paul and Fred Thompson. Granted, that universe of voters is likely, primarily readers (rather than authors), but in my experience, readers of any given site tend to “read” it because they track with the authors.

Again, not trying to create an uproar, just better understand the criteria behind your perception.