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[byronius]

96. When Abbie Hoffman supported McGovern, he was vilified by his own.

McGovern would have been an awesome president, in hindsight. But because he wasn't perfect, he became the enemy.

I remember a party I was at full of young Green Party members right before the 2000 election, who were all absolutely horrified that I wore a pro-Gore t-shirt. Gore and Bush were exactly the same thing, they insisted. I was harshly mocked for not knowing this Absolute Truth. Al Gore, evil and darkheated as they come. Why, he might as well have been a Republican. No difference at all.

I wonder how they all feel about it now. Different, I'll bet.

When these conflicts arise, and the Left splinters (I read that book), and the imperfect becomes the enemy of the good, and the 'feet are held to the fire' until there is no more walking but there is a Walker, I am always reminded of the enlightened Weimar Republic newspaper editor who reserved all of his elegiac vitriol for the fledgling forces of democracy, neglecting to focus on the schemes of the hard-right parties to seize power because they were so obviously defeatable.

He and his family were some of the first to be carted off to the death camps. And the lesson I take from that is not that one should be 'blindly loyal' to ineffective bumblers -- but that absolutist scorn and uncivil hyperbole from otherwise good-hearted and wise people are often the small butterfly-wing-flaps that build to hurricanes that sweep millions to their deaths. Nature loves irony. Our perceptions are limited and often purely subjective and unrelated to deeper truths. Calling for the torches and pitchforks because we 'know' a moderate political figure is a 'bad man' is standard Foolish Primate.

My own opinion is that we don't deserve someone like Barack Obama. On balance, we're a generally doltish, short-sighted, crude nation, and we just got lucky. We're going to miss him terribly when he's gone.