With John McCain's eleventh-hour statements that Barack Obama is a socialist, this piece seems more pertinent than ever.

Whereas Obama admits to sharing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with his pals in grade school, third-party socialist candidate Brian Moore declares his grown-up interest in redistributing our nation's wealth. Not content with raising taxes of people who earn more than a quarter of a million bucks a year, Moore seeks to reduce the managerial-worker salary ratio from as much as 800 to 1 in huge corporations to 10 to 1. If, as our Declaration of Independence says, "All men are created equal," most Americans end up earning an infinitesimal fraction of what, say, Warren Buffet makes -- and this bothers Moore as an egalitarian.

A true socialist in the Eugene Debs tradition, Moore wants to abolish such institutions as the petroleum industry, as well as get rid of the CIA, NSA and the Homeland Security Department. He'd like to re-educate workers to take up new positions in health care, along with mass transportation and other industries "more beneficial to the community at large."

Listening to Moore may not persuade you to become a socialist, but this interview, ably hosted by Dave Brooksher, will at least clear the airwaves of political name-calling. Barack Obama is no more a socialist than John McCain is Attila the Hun. Just because a candidate decides to buck the establishment and alter the status quo, he (or she) doesn't deserve to be tagged with a term of opprobrium.

I wish I could say that sticks and stones will break our bones but names will never hurt us. The fact is, name-calling can be deeply hurtful, as politicians and kindergarten babies have long been aware.