Geffen's Yacht: What's a Liberal?

Reading Bill Bradley’s piece on the Bittergate scandal last night, I was struck by the amazing size of David Geffen’s yacht and this morning we injected a photo into the story. At 454 feet it is slightly less than half the length of the Queen Mary (1019′) – for one person! [What’s Geffen’s carbon footprint?-ed. Twice all the elephants in Africa squared?] We are of course here at a level that makes hypocrisy a weak term. Sure, Geffen and Huffington (with her umpteen thousand square foot home ameliorated by a Prius) are hypocritical in the sense that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” but there is something more complicated afoot. The word liberal no longer exists. It has been hijacked and placed in the deep freeze… or … to paraphrase Preston Sturges (who was talking of chivalry at the time)… “Liberalism is not only dead. It’s decomposed.”