George W. Bush is a man of peace, the moon is made of green cheese, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is a liberal. Put these three indisputable facts together, and you'll have an ontological cocktail guaranteed to put a woman in the White House at long last, and make it morning again in America--again!

And reality-based government might have to wait another four or more years, judging from recent reports of the mercurial Ms. Clinton's public support for Bush's 2004 proposal to revive America's manned space exploration program--an obvious financial priority for a nation flush with crumbling infrastructure and medically-uninsured multitudes. It's almost enough to make one consider taking near-seriously the folks who believe that the US government is controlled by shape-shifting reptiles, judging from Clinton's ongoing oscillation between her chimerically liberal reputation and her conservative legislative record.

As reported by the Washington Post on Nov. 23, Clinton has staked out a formal campaign position on future manned US space exploration that essentially supports the multibillion-dollar Constellation program, proposed by Bush in 2004, which envisions the establishment of a permanent

US settlement on the moon, which would partially serve as a base for an eventual manned US voyage to Mars. Her campaign's statement on the subject was provoked by a statement from Barack Obama, who, in a position paper on education unveiled in New Hampshire, advocated delaying the Constellation program for five years and using the savings to fund a variety of education initiatives. In response, a Clinton spokesperson said, "Senator Clinton does not support delaying the Constellation program and intends to maintain American leadership in space exploration."

Clinton has previously pledged support for a surge, so to speak, in the US space program. On Oct. 4, in a statement on science policy, Clinton said she "is committed to a space exploration program that involves robust human spaceflight to complete the Space Station and later human missions, expanded robotic spaceflight probes of our solar system leading to future human exploration, and enhanced space science activities."

All of which leads to the question, especially relevant for the Democratic Party as the Reagan Revolution slowly but surely recedes into the past: What, in fact, essentially defines who is, and who is not, a "liberal"? In the curious context of Democratic candidates for high public office, I've long been fond of invoking the Democrats' own famous slogan from the 1992 Clinton/Gore campaign: It's the economy, stupid!

That slogan, which implicitly promised renewed economic prosperity, became especially ironic as Bill Clinton, elected that year on the strength of a liberal base deeply discontented with the Reagan/Bush I era, proceeded to gut much of the legacy of the New Deal and other examples of genuine economic liberalism from the Democratic past. Hillary Clinton, for her part, has of course given much more meaningful support as an elected official to the invasion and occupation of Iraq--financially, if not rhetorically--than to any meaningful education or health care initiatives, real or potential, that could have been funded with the taxpayer largess that has instead gone towards the ongoing Iraq debacle. That's just one item in a growing litany of grievances that many genuine liberals have long held against Hillary Clinton. That includes, most recently, her vote to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guard a "terrorist organization," thus lending pragmatic support to the Bush Bunch's ongoing attempts to provoke a war against Iran.

Add now to that litany Clinton's admitted support for spending billions on a revival and expansion of the US space program--itself, truth be told, ultimately a military project for military purposes--when the money involved in such frivolity could be spent so much more progressively on education and health care, among other genuinely "liberal" priorities. A picture emerges of a politician who can credibly be called a "liberal" only in the misogynist fever dreams of the troglodyte likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, ad nauseam. You can fool all of the troglodytes all of the time, but will the American public get fooled again in November 2008?

Polls have shown, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the 2006 Congressional elections, that the American public's political pendulum is moving steadily in a liberal direction. Most recently, polls have shown that we're ready for a woman president, we're ready for a black president, and, most crucially, we're ready to put a genuinely liberal president--as well as reality-based government--in the White House at long last. Hillary Rodham Clinton, despite her noteworthy gender, would be a sorry substitute for the realization of that long-deferred national dream.