I remember a time when "liberal" wasn't a bad word.

And I've never understood how we got to this present situation where politicians of both left and right use it to smear their opponents.

Here's how my Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines it.

Open-handed, generous, not sparing (of), abundant, (of persons, conduct, provision made etc); open-minded, unprejudiced, free from pedantry; (Pol.) advocating democratic reforms......

So what's not to like? I'm seeing a bowl full of scrumptious rosy apples- and you're telling me they're rotten?

I think there's some sort of mean trick being played on us here.

I'm a liberal. Or try to be- it's a high ideal. And I want to live in a liberal society.

I am sick of reading political news and comment.

It used to be the first thing I did every morning after making breakfast. I'd call up my on-line Guardian and flick straight to Comment to find out what those clever folk in Lunnon were saying about smiley Mr Blair or grumpy Mr Brown.

I won't say I never do it any more, but the fun has gone out of it.

These characters bore me. It's like soap opera. The same stories keep coming round. The shark has been jumped.

And I begin to understand why 17 year olds, interviewed on the street, can't name the leader of the conservative party.

Politics used to be about ideology. That ended with the defeat of socialism. Now everyone's a little Englander and mildly racist and equally afraid of Rupert Murdoch.

The next election will be a contest between clones. It doesn't matter who wins because either way the product will be the same.

It's like All-Saints v the Spice Girls- only with ugly men in suits.

Hey, so we're not going to have Ashcroft to kick around any more.

It seems to be obligatory to describe him as the lightning rod of the Bush administration- an odd image that calls up visions of Dr Frankenstein's laboratory. Don't worry, I'm not going to pursue that idea any further.

When he wasn't scaring the bejayzus out of wimpish liberals like myself, he was jolly good fun. Remember the anointing with cooking oil? Remember the draping of the bare-breasted statue of Justice? Remember "Let the Eagle Soar"?

So what rough beast is going to slouch into that office next?

But it's a pleasant reminder that no politician is forever.

Only four more years......

I did think of staying up to see the results come in. I'm glad I didn't. It's turned 9 o'clock and we still don't have a result.

But it looks like four more years of Bush.

I'm not going to make a fuss. I'm going to be stoical about this. If Ohio goes for Bush (as looks likely) it'll be a convincing victory. Demos will have spoken.

Look, I'm a European; I don't get Bush at all. Apart from a certain folksiness and ease around people, I don't see anything about him that would make me want to vote for him. I think he's unintelligent. I think he's a front man for the corporations. And I think his foreign policy is wrong in every particular.

Alexander the Great and his gang come clattering up the street. Horsehair plumes and flashing bronze. And they come across Diogenes sitting in his barrel. The greatest living general meets the greatest living philosopher. It's the ancient Greek equivalent of a photo-op.

So Alexander says to Diogenes, "Anything you want I'll give it you. All you have to do is name it."

And Diogenes says, "OK. Please get out of my light."

George Washington's parson took him aside and suggested that Washington was setting a bad example by leaving church (as was his habit) before the administration of Holy Communion. Washington agreed- and stopped going to church altogether.

Jonathan Miller told that story last night in the first episode of his TV History of Unbelief. He also quoted from Jefferson, Adams, Buchanan and Lincoln to demonstrate that all of them would have been unelectable by today's strict standards of religious conformity.

Lincoln wrote that the more he thought about it, the more he felt bound to reject the Christian scheme of salvation.

But, then again, back in those days, the politics of the Republic attracted men of genius. Who was the last president you could describe in those terms and it not seem utterly ridiculous?

The House of Commons debates fox-hunting. Protesters storm into the chamber- something that hasn't happened since the time of Charles I. Outside a huge crowd has gathered and a section of it charges the lines of police. The TV cameras capture scenes from a medieval battle. Men hurl themselves against the shield wall, weapons rise and fall, men reel back with blood on their faces.

Opponents of hunting say it's about cruelty to animals. I don't buy that. If hunting with hounds is banned foxes will still have to be killed (or so the chicken farmers say.) Instead of being torn apart by dogs they will be shot, poisoned or trapped. Whichever way things go, there's nothing much in it for the fox.

No I'm with George Monbiot, the Green campaigner when he says that what we're seeing is class war. The Normans came over in 1066 and turned most of England into a deer park. Anyone caught poaching had his eyes put out and his ears cut off- stuff like that. It was a system that remained in force (with modifications) right up into the modern era.

But now the peasants are in power and they're looking to humiliate their former feudal overlords. It's about who owns the land. It's about revenge.

Normally I side with the underdog, but who's the underdog here- the former overlords who are getting clobbered or the former peasants who are doing the clobbering? The huntsmen say they're fighting for Liberty. Their enemies say they're fighting for Democracy. Liberty v Democracy- what a difficult choice.

But it's one I don't have to make. I keep telling myself that. Why when I see public conflict do I feel compelled to pick a side?

There must be some deep conditioning that makes the male of the species want to get stuck in.

But I’m a townee. I’ve never even seen a hunt. I’m not touched by this debate in any way. This is not my fight.

So let me enjoy the luxury for once of floating above the battle, enjoying the historical resonances, but myself unstirred, unfluttered. Let me be Zen-like, Buddha-like and smile and think, "fools."

I did a foolish thing yesterday; I let myself get drawn into a debate on gun control in a friend's LJ. Now his friends are coming after me wielding statistics.

Apparently there are more guns per head of the population in Switzerland than there are in the USA. Erm- I must say I didn't know that.

But whatever the statistics say, I stick with my gut feeling that it's a bad thing to have so many guns washing around in the culture. Before guns came along murder was pretty much a contact sport (and involved much greater immediate risk to the murderer.) Guns facilitate killing and maiming.

But the fetish for guns is one of the things about America that baffles Europeans. We don't understand why feelings run so high. We stick our snooty noses into the debate and we get trashed- as is the fate of all who interfere in family quarrels.

Minute men, Bunker Hill, the Continental Army, Davy Crockett, we fired our guns and the British kept a comin', Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, John Wayne, G Men- we know the myths and even love then at a distance, but I guess we don't feel them here (strikes chest.) We think that they can be sweetly reasoned away. Huh!

Young men are very suggestible. They're fragile and they have a great need to belong. And so they're very easily roped into wars, sects, jihads and the like. If the war, sect or jihad is something that pisses Daddy off then so much the better.

I was watching Channel 4's drama about the 9/11 hijackers last night. They were rootless rich boys, most of them, adrift in a society that didn't give them enough respect. Al Quaeda offered them brotherhood, charismatic father figures, dogmatic certainty, a strong sense of purpose. As one of them said as he made his commitment to the Hamburg cell- "I want my life to count."

They weren't demons. At least, they weren't demons to begin with. At some point or other they crossed the line. And the scary thing is it was impossible to say exactly when that happened. When did imagination fail? When did they stop asking questions? We watched as noble idealists morphed into murderous fanatics and it was a smooth, unbroken process.

War on Terror? Bush was right the first time; it's unwinnable. Why? Because it's a war on human nature. So long as there are needy young men there will be recruits for Al Quaeda and the like.

For the best part of the 20th century politics were a heroic pursuit. What with war and cold war and the collapse of the European empires, we seemed to be living in a time of giants- Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Gandhi, Mao, Kennedy, Kruschev, Castro, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Mandela. And then, suddenly, the Berlin Wall came down and- piff- the giants were gone.

Our current leaders are having to talk up the threat of terrorism in order to seem as big as their predecessors. They've got us jumpy and twitchy, but we're not really fooled. We've faced terrorists before. In the truly terrifying context of the Cold War they were an irritant; and that's all they really are now. Al Quaeda is not the new Soviet Union.

People of my generation (me included) fret about the decline in the membership of political parties and attendance at the polls, about the lack of ideology and passion in political debate. We shouldn't. What we're seeing is a return to a peace-time normality where politics are not about the "vision thing" but simply about getting trains to run on time.

I need to change my programming.

Politics are not important
Politics are not important
Politics are not important.....

Kerry doesn't make eye contact. The arm movements are stiff. He bounces about behind the podium like the Swedish chef.

Bush has a more natural stage presence, but when he speaks he seems only inches away from panic and collapse. He talks gibberish and flunks his punch-lines.

Few public figures have any talent for public speaking. I find it odd. You'd think it was a core skill and that they'd work at it.

Look at the Queen. We pay her millions to open things and make gracious speeches, but she's as rubbish at it now as she was fifty years ago; no empathy, no wit, no warmth. She's been doing it for a life-time and she still puts on the reading glasses and hides behind a script.

When a real communicator comes along- a Churchill, a Reagan, a Clinton- we're amazed. O look, a politician who's good at the job, a leader who can lead. What a prodigy!