(...) The modern liberal paradigm of America's role in the world is not new. Whispered by Jimmy Carter, bellowed by Al Gore or parroted by John Edwards, vocalized by a young John Kerry or an old John Murtha, the notion that America is an imperial war power run amok alienating the world has a longer lineage. It is a paradigm born exactly sixty years ago this September in Madison Square Garden.

(...) Looking back sixty years later, the core ideas now the ideological heart of the Democratic Party are right there in Wallace's speeches, the first of which was that night. Moral relativism? Wallace believed Soviet military control over Eastern Europe was no different than American influence in Latin America. The United Nations? Wallace wanted the UN to reign supreme in areas not under the control of Russia or the United States, giving the UN control over all nuclear weapons and all major military bases around the globe. Blame America First? Unless America listened to him Wallace predicted the United States would "sooner or later" become "the image of that which we have hated in the Nazis."

(...) Truman fired Wallace. In his diary, an incredulous Truman wrote that Wallace "is a pacifist 100 percent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin.... I do not understand a 'dreamer' like that." Wallace and his followers, the intellectual ancestors of today's Angry Left, were "becoming a national danger."

(...) No, this liberal paradigm didn't start with Iraq or President Bush. But I bet this is news to its latest -- if predictable -- champions: the Dixie Chicks.