When I talked to Democrats and listened to their spokesmen on TV following the Bush-Gore post-election battles, I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. Now, with the Democrats' take on the war against Iraq, I'm getting that feeling again.

 One author wrote that "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." But what about Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives?

 Seriously, it amazes me, from time to time, just how differently we view the world. We experience history together, looking at exactly the same events yet often coming to entirely different conclusions.

 Just think of some of the major events in the last half-century. Was America's intervention in the Vietnam War justified to stop the expansion of totalitarian communism or imperialistic intermeddling in a civil war? Were America's cultural elites really committed to opposing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as they now claim, or were they communist sympathizers? If they'd had their way, would we have prevailed in the Cold War?

 Speaking of the Cold War, was Ronald Reagan instrumental in America's victory and Mikhail Gorbachev a reluctant obstacle until the very end, or was Reagan a jingoistic bully and Gorbachev the enlightened progressive whose glasnost and perestroika ended the Soviet's reign of terror?

 Were the Reagan Eighties a period of prosperity where the financial well being of all income groups in America greatly improved or a decade of greed? Was Bill Clinton responsible for the economic prosperity of the Nineties, or was that period a continuation of a longer boom beginning in the Eighties and only possible because the 1994 Republican Congress saved Clinton from his own excesses?

 Were the Clinton scandals "high crimes" or much ado about nothing? Was Ken Starr a committed public servant or a man preoccupied with Clinton's sexual peccadilloes?

 Is there a legitimate debate in the scientific community about the existence, severity, cause and effects of global warming? If it turns out that this phenomenon has been overblown, how will the history books record the moralistic, alarmist rantings of the intelligentsia? How do history books today record the rantings of this same class of people who were just as sure a generation ago that global cooling was the world-threatening menace?

 Will the anti-abortionists later be seen as having occupied the moral high ground on the life issue, or will the pro-abortionists be remembered as noble champions of women's freedom and dignity? Continued...