Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Oh no, we've lost another one.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

T-bogg notes that this has all of the ingredients of the right wing conversion, the youthful idealism, the marching, the card-carrying.

But, of course, 9-11 and the America-hating of our leading Democrats, Susan Sontag, Chomsky, Vidal, Mailer, etc., just ruined the whole progressive thing for him.

Perhaps I'm worrying for no reason, but I am beginning to think we're losing liberals faster than Dayton is losing drivers.