Sometimes you just know when something truly important has happened, and your brain doesn't need to understand it.
Your story of shedding tears of thanks when it appeared that Bush had won the election struck a chord. We gave an election party for about 40 people that night and everyone had left by about 1:30 a.m. Around 4:30 a.m. I went outside and prayed to the heavens and kissed the flag - hoping against hope that the outcome would be a Bush presidency.
Like you, I wondered why I cared quite so much. I decided that ultimately, my fears were that after 8 years of Clinton, we could not survive as a nation if Gore won.
My mother was a Democrat. She was the finest person I've ever known, despite that. I think she was a little naive, though I feel guilty criticizing her. She died in January, 1993. I was grateful that she lived long enough to see Clinton elected, because _she_ wanted it. She had a thing for a national healthcare plan. I was equally grateful that she died before watching her ideals pissed on by the scum that was Bill Clinton. I hadn't made my transition to the Republican Party yet that year, the first time I voted in a Presidential election. I voted for Perot. Utimately it didn't matter, as my state (Connecticut) went for Clinton by a large margin. But at least I was smart enough not to buy what the Dems were selling.
My mother is the sole reason I can't paint liberals with the broad brush I ache to. She was misguided, but a beautiful human being all the same. There must be others like her. I hope like hell there are. My sister is also a liberal, and I fear she will always be so. She thinks Ebonics is a real language (to me, calling Ebonics a real language is like calling a scarecrow a real person). She once said, and I paraphrase, "I don't believe that there are such things as good and evil -- it's all in how you look at it." To which I asked, "So Hitler wasn't evil?" And she responded to the effect of "Not to those who believed in him." It absolutely flabbergasts me how an intelligent person can be so dense, so unfamiliar with the concept of moral relativism. How can they not see the glare ice on that slippery slope? By their twisted inductive reasoning, if a given act can not be judged as wrong, then everything is right. They can't imagine how I can live under such 'constricting' beliefs, while I can't imagine how they can have a valid thought without any fundamental axioms on which to base them.
Liberalism is taking the easy way out, when given any choice in a matter. I don't know how else to put it any more succinctly. It's easy to complain about the war when you don't have to fight it. It's easy to call Republicans evil when you don't ever bother making the hard choices that come with personal responsibility. Maybe the DNC's motto should be "The Democratic Party: Taking the Path of Least Resistance Down the Slippery Slope to Oblivion".