If Al Gore was president....

[MysticCat]

Tom, you can boil down shinerbock's definitions pretty easily:

Conservative - Good
Moderate - Bad
Liberal - Worse

Not sure where I fit in, though. I love to eat animals and I love religion, SUVs, trucks, but I also love women. Hmmm.

But seriously, it would take a lot more than can be accomplished in this thread to explain these terms. "Conservative" and "liberal" just have too many meanings, and everything depends on context and who is using them. And then there's "moderate," which really only means "somewhere between conservative and liberal."

For example, "conserative" can mean, among other things, "fiscal conservative" or "social conservative." A person can be a fiscal conservative but libertarian (meaning the government should stay out of it) or even liberal on social issues. Some say that is the problem Giuliani will have.

Or to use the example of this thread, Bush has shown himself to be socially conservative but not fiscally conservative.