Thanksgiving is, as the name suggests, a good time to take time from the daily grind and give thanks. And so here at National Review Online, we’re doing the predictable: We’re giving thanks for liberals — some sincerely, some with a twist. For now, we serve up 15.
He pays you the courtesy of smelling like brimstone so you can tell when he’s getting closer. — Jonah Goldberg
He fights the good fight for school choice on the frontlines, as Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey. — John J. Miller
He can tell the NAACP what Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell can’t, because they’re not let in the door. — Kathryn Jean Lopez
For choosing to be liberal enough on enough issues to get elected to run my city. If he hadn’t been willing to make certain tradeoffs, he would never have had the electoral support needed to clean up this previously ungovernable place with a raft of conservative policies. — Lisa Schiffren
He’s the pro-life liberal atheist who proves that you don’t have to have good judgment on everything else, to appreciate the sanctity of human life. — Ramesh Ponnuru
He may be dead, but he still provides a living memory of what the loyal opposition should look like. — Jonah Goldberg
Intellectually honest, brilliant at dissecting liberal strategy. — Jonah Goldberg
Because if he didn’t exist we’d have to make him up. — Jonah Goldberg
He’s just about the last feather in the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party.
There was a time when liberals honored FDR for demanding “unconditional surrender” of the German and Japanese fascists sworn to destroy us; praised Truman for ignoring the polls and refusing to give up the fight on the Korean peninsula; and applauded Kennedy for pledging to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Lieberman still believes in the principles on which those positions were based. Of how many other contemporary liberals can that be said? – Cliff May
He’s tough on his opponents on the Right but is never less than sober and collected in his critiques. (I can’t, however, say that for the rest of his compatriots at Talking Points Memo.) — Mark Hemingway
She makes our job easier by being ineffectual in pursuit of policy, and a caricature (of an overprivileged twit who is in over her head).
I will admit that, for a moment there last year, I thought she might be as savvy a politician as she is a clothes shopper. — Lisa Schiffren
Every time I despair of conservatives I see that self-delusion and folly can be found at the top of the liberal food chain too. — Ramesh Ponnuru
My favorite liberal is my wife. Among many other benefits she has conferred on me was her reaction when I told her, as we stood together in the receiving line at some National Review function, that she had just shaken the hand of the inventor of the hydrogen bomb. — Rick Brookhiser
He tries to be honest about politically inconvenient data. — Jonah Goldberg
He’s also formidable and fair-minded. As proof of the fact that he engages people in a productive and civil fashion, when he singled me out for criticism on his blog recently, a number of his readers emailed me to tell me they disagreed, and they all did so in a respectful fashion. That’s almost unheard of in the blogosphere. — Mark Hemingway