VOTE JOHN QUNICY ADAMS!

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The British Liberals changed quite a bit - I mean there was a time when the Disraeli Conservatives were said to be the party with the social conscience whilst the Liberals were for "laissez faire". Later the Liberals had a more socially responsible wing and the Conservatives became meaner after Disraeli. Nick Clegg and the other Orange Bookers see themselves as heirs to the Laissez-Faire Liberals, one of the excuses used to justify his U-turn over austerity has been that political junkies were aware of this but the general public unfortunately was not and he ran against austerity and then did a bait and switch on the public, an example of false advertising and fraud. Unlike most politicians who run on a popular platform and do a u-turn, they usually first look at the books and say "gee, I didn't think it'd be so bad, I guess there's no choice but to break all my promises", Clegg said that he made this decision BEFORE the election campaign and didn't even tell his Shadow Chancellor! That's fraud, that's false advertising, and he belongs in the iron hotel for that.

How many times do Republicans play the game of "the Democrats were for slavery" and "Robert Byrd, Democratic senator, was in the Ku Klux Klan"? It's a bad joke when they do that. The Republicans are the heirs to the Whigs, effectively the Liberal Party (the British Whigs became the Liberals)... It used to be between the Democrats and the Whigs, but the Whigs weakened over slavery and the Know-Nothings emerged as a populist nativist party that exploited the breach, and the explicitly anti-slavery Republicans took over from the Whigs and absorbed them. The left-right division between the parties wasn't so simple though as it was often a question of a coalition - some ethnic groups went with one party, and others with the other. There were divisions in the parties that were very important - when Republicans were in the ascendancy, there was the civil service reform dispute with the factions (Half-Breeds, Stalwarts) that led directly to the Garfield assassination as this was a case of a Half-Breed President and a Stalwart Vice-President. With the Democrats, when they returned to power it was under Bourbon Democrat domination (big money, conservative, essentially) and with the Bryan nomination this was the overthrow of the Bourbon domination in 1896. This was effectively the result of the repudiation of Grover Cleveland and the Bourbons' performance during the Panic of 1893. Imagine leftist populists taking over the Republicans and nominating a presidential candidate in 2008... it would be like that.