William Thorsell, CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, after dismissing the Summer Olympics as boring and inferring that its participants are unworthy of history – one asks oneself where in history Mr. Thorsell would like to find himself – takes on the Republican Party of the United States with a worthy enough assessment of its self-image, that of a lion.

However, I realize by the end of his editorial that despite his respectful estimation of American conservative convictions and the Republican Party's leonine commitment to hunting down terrorists and protecting what's left of Judeo-Christian values, Mr. Thorsell wins my Olympic Gold Medal for Liberal Editorial of the Year.

Being a conservative myself, the honor is dubious and, like other Olympic Awards, according to Mr. Thorsell, will not go down in history. Jesse Owens' victory in the 1936 Olympics certainly had its page in the history books but, oh well, there really couldn't have been anything similar going on in Athens. The increasingly rabid anti-Americanism displayed, the Olympic Organizing Committee's decision to hold the next Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, as profoundly a totalitarian city as Berlin ever was in the 1930s, the long highlighting of Beijing's ballet company, broadcast worldwide by the major networks – those same networks that have refused to broadcast the Republican Convention on live transmission… none of this is the stuff of history. Or is it simply the Liberal's desire to not give away what's really going on beneath Marxist entertainment.

Mr. Thorsell's liberal whitewash should win him, if not a Nobel Prize -- which is really the Marxist's Academy Award – a novelty award for the first liberal to realize that calling a frightening message, like the recent Olympic festivities – a declaration tantamount to "Communists Own the Olympics" --- dismissing it as boring and unworthy of further attention, is to my intelligence-gathering mind almost a first. It is the Liberal's growing arsenal of polite-sounding offensive weapons that impress me most. After demonizing anything remotely reactionary as "moronic," a liberal proselytizer such as Mr. Thorsell will share a secret smile with his readers as they realize his real label on Bush’s America is not lion but "barbarians." At least Osama bin Laden, to quote the gentleman, has the "courage of his convictions."

It's left up to the reader to guess, but we never know if Mr. Thorsell was really labeling Americans the worst of the "barbarians" or simply lions who have the courage of their worst convictions.

Mr. Thorsell deftly buries the real message beneath references to the Roman Empire. This is another ploy of the Marxist spin-doctors. Label America either as a collapsing rerun of Ancient Rome or infer barbarian origins to its claims upon world leadership. Why these neo-historians wish to avoid discussing the sins of Stalin and Mao and refuse to remind us of Nikita Khrushchev’s promise to bury the free world on the "ash heap of history," while banging his shoe on a table at the United Nations, is fairly obvious. Liberals are really fence-sitting careerists who play both sides to assure themselves that whichever side wins, they cannot be accounted as enemies of either ruling empire, whether a Free World Republic or a Worldwide Socialist Federation.

We all know that the Chinese Communist delivery is quieter and musically more politically correct than the Soviets were but let’s not delude ourselves. The message is the same: "We of the People's Revolution will bury you…. and do so with the help of Islamic fundamentalists!"

That some Liberals bend over backwards to make sure they haven't offended any faction of Islam, throwing in the occasional compliment on the "peaceful religion" is total Liberalese.

The Age of Enlightenment in France was rife with diploma-toting careerists hunting their place in what became the French Revolution, a bloody nightmare that culminated in the crowning of the Emperor Napoleon. Revolution was the future, the be-all and end-all of Evolution itself. Voltaire, one of the few giants of the 18^th Century, labeled these opportunists "enlightened despots."

The author of Candide, the world's greatest satire of radical chic, far surpassing Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, described these literati as "enlightened despots." Their degrees and publishing efforts were, to their minds, veritable scepters of authority in the court of Descartes.

The socialist "utopia" is hardly different from the fashionable dream of "the best of all possible worlds." Voltaire knew that no good could come from either the rabid vengefulness of the poor when married to the clever exploitation of that rage by the liberal elite. The first monster to rise up was Maximilien Robespierre, the Stalin of his age, and then France threw her heart and soul into the arms of a Corsican bully who was a major inspiration to Benito Mussolini.

And who made all of this possible? The enlightened despots. When you realize that apologies for the likes of Osama bin Laden and the butcher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are now endemic to the free world's universities and liberal press, you know the guillotine will be resurrected and the purists of the Revolution will start cutting each other's heads off.

For knowing all this, for seeing it, as Winston Churchill saw Hitler on the horizon, Voltaire was exiled. He was then deported from Germany for many of the same reasons. Finally, France begged him to come home. He did, but, I'm sure, as he was paraded and feted down the Champs Élysées, he looked out at his compatriots and said to himself, "They haven't changed a bit."

Judging from history, and even Mr. Thorsell would have to agree with me on this, even some people who know history are destined to repeat it.

(Editor’s note: Mr. Thorsell’s editorial Hear the wounded U.S. lion roar appeared in the August 30 edition of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. It can be accessed online at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040830/COTHORS30/Columnists/Columnist?author=William+Thorsell)