here's a bad paraphrase of the joke that led off paul krugman's column in the times this morning:

a conservative and a liberal (in the popular, rather than the political-theory, sense of the word) are sitting alone in a bar. suddenly bill gates walks in, and the conservative starts jumping up and down. "we're all rich!" she says. "the average net worth of everyone in this bar is now over a billion dollars!" the liberal looks at her like she's crazy and says, "bitch, are you smoking crack? [see, this is the part where i'm paraphrasing. i don't think they print "bitch, are you smoking crack" on the op-ed pages of the times. fun, huh?] bill's really rich, and that's a nice increase in total wealth for the bar, but nothing's actually changed for us. he'd have to, you know, give us the money first." the conservative looks nonplussed for a moment, but then she puts on her best bush-administration voice and says, "i'm sorry to see you're still avoiding personal responsibility through the outmoded politics of class warfare..."

distressing, isn't it, that what should be just a joke is actually so accurate. and for all that many people are recognizing that bush's latest tax break for the wealthy is economic idiocy, many people are also afraid to say it. conservatives have beaten so many progressives with the "class warfare" stick that progressives, by and large, have basically given in and started speaking the language of "personal responsibility."