Ebook: Leaving the Left: Moments in the News That Made Me Ashamed to Be a Liberal

A rare chance to hear an honest liberal admit, "I was wrong"

"Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's 'peace' movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering third world country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom."
-Keith Thompson

And so, beginning with his 2005 San Francisco Chronicle essay also titled "Leaving the Left," Keith Thompson has defected, terminating a relationship forged as the nation's youngest McGovern delegate in 1972, and later as a staffer for the liberal Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio.

A baby-boomer father, outdoorsman, and northern California writer, Thompson spent decades considering himself a "liberal" and opposing "conservatives." . . . Until he had to confess that the racism, sexism, and oppression he deplored had taken root in the modern-day left.

In this remarkably frank memoir, Thompson admits to the many occasions before the liberation of Iraq when he-and probably many other people like him-felt ashamed of the left . . . but stood silently by rather than criticize it. For example, when:

*Professor Ward Churchill labeled the World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns" and novelist Norman Mailer likened their deaths to "traffic accidents"
*Senator Ted Kennedy claimed Abu Ghraib had simply "reopened under new management" when American troops took over from Saddam.
*Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was "lynched" on television by white liberals who despised a black conservative, while feminists rushed to defend the flimsy sexual harassment allegations of Anita Hill.
*Bill Clinton robbed children all over the world of their innocence with his tawdry Monica Lewinsky escapades and taught them how to perjure themselves under oath . . . while Hillary Clinton tacitly endorsed the whole sordid affair.
*Terry Schiavo starved to death because liberal judges refused to acknowledge her basic right to life

Thompson writes that "the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house that the left has built." The good news is that more and more people are doing just that.