The real "pragmatists" in American politics turned out to be Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich and the rest of the left wing of the Democratic Party who opposed the neocons' crazy economic and military ideology, and their ethical opposition was also infinitely more practical than the neocons simple-minded reduction of everything to a few bad ideas, or the center-right Democrats' collaboration with torture and genocide in Iraq, and deregulation in the United States.

Mr. Greenwald's targets are using "ideology" in perfect accord with the most salient instance in its historical evolution, which was Napoleon calling Condorcet, Constant, and Madame de Staël "ideologues" to indicate an uncritical application of a few ideas to every political question.

But it's the neocons who fit this classical definition of "ideologues" better than any other political clique in the history of American politics, and Paul Bremer's immediate destruction of Iraq's statist economy could serve as the paradigm of an ideological disaster.

"Government must not interfere with the free market!" Uncritical application of this tiny idea threw 60% of Iraq out of work, and so what? "Government must not interfere with the free market!" This was ideology elevated to the level of insanity.

The New York Times and the rest of the media establishment are still trying to convince us that the blind and incompetent ideologues of the Republican Party and the Democrats who collaborated with them are pragmatists, while Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, and anybody else who warned us about the catastrophic consequences of deregulating banks and invading Iraq were just a bunch of fog-brained ideologues.

This is bulls*t!

The problem with the Democratic Party today isn't "ideology," it's moral cowardice, and playing games with a political lexicon won't solve it.