“Brevity is the soul of wit,” says one of my favorite books on writing. And, as a writer, I admire this concise missive from one of our letter writers:

“Read your liberal column this morning and almost threw up,” wrote Grover Ouellette of Lewiston.

I do hope Mr. Ouellette speaks figuratively and for effect, but you never know.

But I also realize that this perpetual sense of anger, passion and underdoggedness is a remarkable achievement of the conservative movement in America. Until the last election, liberals had a hard time working themselves into a comparable lather.

Think of conservative attack dogs Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Always passionate. Always angry. Always attacking that mythic liberal monolith. Day after day, year after year.

While I disagree with both men, they don’t make me ill or even angry. Nor have I ever argued that they should be fired for expressing their opinions or should move to another country, both responses I’ve received to writing this column for the Sun Journal.

As comedian Jon Stewart has pointed out: Republicans control both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court – and they are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore.

It’s one thing to be a sore loser. But a sore winner?

Conservatives need to get comfortable with being the big, dominant, governing party. The election is over and they won. They have all the trappings of power: their own TV network (Fox), movie studio (Disney), newspapers (The Washington Times), magazines (the Weekly Standard), media dynasty (Clear Channel), talk-radio icons and mass-media preachers (James Dobson). They have largely squeezed Democratic lobbyists out of Washington, and they have installed their own lobbyists in top jobs in federal agencies. They wine, dine and duck hunt with the titans of industry and Supreme Court justices.

They even have God on their side!

You’d think they could tolerate one silly liberal editor writing one column a week in the Opinion section of one blue-state newspaper.

But part of the conservative philosophy is to scream bloody murder anytime someone expresses a similarly passionate liberal viewpoint.

The very word liberal has been so thoroughly disparaged by Republicans that many people seem to think it’s illegal, immoral and probably perverse.

The constant assault has given liberals an inferiority complex. When asked if he would define himself as a liberal, even presidential candidate John Kerry stammered as if he’d been accused of beating his wife.

He should have pointed out that liberals and Democrats have always appealed to our better angels. They pulled millions of elderly Americans out of poverty with Social Security, they integrated the U.S. armed services, supported the civil rights struggle (predictably alienating the South), signed the GI Bill (which some conservatives argued was too expensive and would encourage “sloth” among vets), championed clean air and clean water legislation, instituted the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, advocated seat belts and air bags in cars, initiated food safety and sanitation laws, started fuel-economy standards for vehicles, established an agency to regulate and test new drugs and introduced Head Start.

And, by the way, a Democratic president in a wheelchair was fully up to the task of winning World War II.

Are there liberal initiatives to regret? Of course. Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, Carter’s handling of interest rates and the economy, and Bill Clinton’s inability to keep his fly zipped.

But the voters have spoken. Now Republicans need to get used to being the party of nation-building overseas, big government at home, big government borrowing, big corporations and big investors.

How else can anyone explain George W. Bush’s sudden penchant for dispensing democracy from the barrel of a gun, the growth of government and government spending in his first term, and a deficit that has exploded far, far beyond the cost of the war in Iraq.

The revolution started by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan has reached its conclusion. The “stolen election” of four years ago is now history, and conservatives are fully in charge of everything. If there were a shred of doubt before, there is no longer: Conservatives are the establishment.

With success, however, a ruling party has to accept two downsides: opposition and blame.

That’s the nature of democracy. People argue with you and, when you control the government, they praise you for the things that go right and blame you for the things that do not.

As George W. Bush says, although he always seems testy and insincere while saying it, “Democracy is a beautiful thing.”

Rhoades is executive editor of the Sun Journal. Readers should know that his opinions – like those of all columnists on these pages – are not intended to reflect those of the newspaper’s owners, employees or carriers. E-mail him at [email protected].