Of all the misnomers of our political vocabulary, "progressive" is the most abusive and the most abused. "Progressive" is the accepted term for the political left today, just as it was 50 years ago, when it was used as a self-description by Communists and fellow-travelers who sought its protective cover even as they supported the most oppressive regimes in human history. In the later years of the Cold War, it was the term of choice for liberals as well, who thought that the Soviet system was "converging" with Reagan's America, just before the Communist fall.

One of the more interesting characteristics of progressives is the way they seem to learn nothing from their experience, confounding the very idea of progress as a process of escaping from the myths of the past and acquiring knowledge. Today, self-styled "progressives" can be found supporting economic redistribution and state-sponsored racial discrimination, or memorializing the death anniversaries of totalitarian legends like Che Guevara, just as though the history of the last 50 years had never taken place. And progressives can still be counted on to lend their support to the discredited domestic legends of '60s "revolutions," most notably the Black Panther vanguard.

In Oakland, recently, something calling itself the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation launched a "Legacy Tour" of "historic" Black Panther sites as a step toward making the Panther stronghold into a local monument like Lexington and Valley Forge. On a glistening October day, three busloads of former Panthers and Panther supporters, along with Oakland city officials, began the tour with visits to the former Oakland homes of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Panther "Field Marshal" David Hilliard. Hilliard, who was their guide for the day, once spent a year in jail for threatening to kill President Nixon in front of 100,000 anti-war protesters in Golden Gate Park. The executive director of the Foundation, he describes himself as a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Other sites included various Panther headquarters; the street corner where Newton shot an Oakland police officer in an incident that launched the "Free Huey" movement and made the Panthers a national cause; the shootout scene where a Panther named Bobby Hutton was killed after a Party hit squad attacked San Francisco police in an attempt to "avenge" the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; and the sidewalk where Newton met his long-deserved end at the hands of a crack cocaine dealer he had burned.

Not included in the Legacy Tour were the sites where Newton killed an 18-year-old black prostitute, raped a black mother of three and shotgunned the doorman of an after-hours club that had refused to cooperate in a Panther shakedown. Also missing were stops at the sites where Party members were "mud-holed," whipped with cat o' nine tails or beaten with chains by Newton's goon squad for infractions of Party discipline. (One editor of the Party paper, by her own account, was bull-whipped for missing an editorial deadline.) Missing also was a visit to the house where Panthers tortured former Ramparts employee Betty Van Patter before smashing her head with a pipe and throwing her body into the San Francisco Bay.

Tour guide Hilliard instead stressed the Panthers' "idealism" and explained that "the point to be made is that when you fall below history, as happened with women and slaves, you're really nothing. So the point we're trying to make here is to not be written out of history but to be a part of history." The enthusiastic audience for these pieties included the sitting mayor of Oakland, members of the Oakland City Council, the Oakland Board of Education (the same that adopted "Ebonics" as an "official language") and former California Gov. Jerry Brown, now running for mayor of Oakland.

A straight-faced account of the "Tour of Panther Sites" appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle complete with accompanying tour map. It began: "The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was about politics, as its name implies, not about destruction." None of the missing pieces of Panther history were alluded to in the Chronicle account, nor in similar credulous reports on National Public Radio and in the New York Times.

This was more than a case of collective amnesia. After all, America is not a "progressive" police state like the Soviet Union once was, where you can simply erase the historical record. It's not as if the sordid history of the Panthers, a homicidal street gang albeit with political pretensions is not widely known. But as Michael Kelly recently observed in the New Republic, the journalistic ranks are filled with veterans of the counterculture who consider themselves progressive and supported the revolutions of that time. They have taken it upon themselves to protect the Panther myth and, more importantly, the progressive cause the myth supports. The result is a national media (right up to and including the once august New York Times) that acts to "institutionalize the myth of the Panthers" and of the "progressive" '60s.

This mentality was on full display in the national coverage of Black Panther Geronimo Pratt's release from prison, on a technicality, last July. Although Pratt had been convicted of an unusually cold-blooded murder, not a single reporter interviewed prosecutors on the case, let alone Pratt's chief accuser, a former Black Panther named Julius Butler, in an effort to gain a reasonably balanced view. Nor did a single reporter bother to look at the court records in the case, which prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Pratt did murder elementary school teacher Caroline Olsen on a Santa Monica tennis court 29 years ago. Instead, the press repeated Johnnie Cochran's fantasies about an FBI-LAPD conspiracy to frame Pratt, despite the fact that the evidence originally presented at trial shows that there could not have been such a conspiracy. While ignoring Pratt's prosecutors, the press amplified the claims of his fans, who viewed him as an "American Nelson Mandela" and a new progressive hero. After his release, journalists followed him deferentially on his own tour of college campuses and dutifully reported the book and film deals he was negotiating, which will undoubtedly further lionize his criminal life.

And so history repeats itself as Hegel once said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Today's progressives are like the Bourbons, of whom it was once said, "They learn nothing and forget nothing."