for why Obama does these things - he's a Republican who had to be a Democrat because that's the neighborhood lived in and the connections that he had. I also think Obama is a sociopath and sociopaths will destroy everything - they always do.

The abstraction of the abstraction of the abstraction is getting more and more absurd. I'm completely fascinated watching the human mind do all that it does to justify it's beliefs.
An amazing spectacle from which to learn.

Thanks for the link. And at the end, vastleft links back to a GREAT post on corrente in 2007. (I hadn't yet discovered corrente.)

Question - do you still have to request to have commenting access? This blog is a one of my favorites and I wonder why there aren't more comments.

I had to read nearly the whole thing, to be brought up short by "Bush's extreme partisanship, his utter disregard of the Democratic members of his government, turned Americans against each other and polarized the electorate. For Obama, that was Bush's greatest crime -- because to the President, we are a nation of consensus before we are a nation of laws or dreams or anything else."

Yeah, right. That was why Obama's strategy for the primaries was dividing the constituents of the Democratic Party.

Hey, I was there. And these guys are supposed to be smarter than me?

They are still crippled by their presumption of good faith on Obama's part, and on the part of those who schemed and stole for him, and on the part of those who bought him.

If only the czar knew!

Jacob Freeze sums up the illogic:

This is Rawls' famous maximin principle, and it's front and center in every reasonable discussion of John Rawls. Any and all social inequalities are only allowable if they serve "the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society." (Political Liberalism, p.6)

Most progressive criticism of Obama concentrates exactly on the absence of this principle in Obama's despicable pandering to the Republican Party, but somehow the obtuse Mr. Young has entirely ignored the (amply documented) Kantian foundation of John Rawls' moral and political philosophy, and constructed an absurd equivalence between a great liberal thinker and the completely unprincipled con-man Barack Obama.

will be California, from most accounts (and I'm no local expert in CA, so I could be off).

That should provide us with a litmus test for greatness soon enough. Basically, if we see this bipartisan shit with Ahnald, that's going to tell us exactly how much Obama's "visionary minimalism" is worth.

We get all of the backlash and none of the benefits.

As I mentioned in a previous Book review. I think liberalism is dead because it has been overrun with "progressives" who appear, to me, to be more interested in winning a battle than having their philosophical ideals triumph. Case in point, it is fundamentally undemocratic and non-liberal to accept a primary that Obama won, but the tactics served the role of helping to "win" the primary. Further, the questions of principle raised by the primary (caucus absurdity and discrepency with primaries from within the same state, the RBC ruling, etc.) were glossed over during the general election because we had had had to beat McCain. Guess what? We still haven't had Dems address the problems. Nor are any A-listers bringing it up because it is a sore spot. But failing to address the issues raised prevent a true liberal solution from ever happening.

The fundamental misreading of Rawls by this person is appalling. I'm glad that there were at least some versed liberals who were able to counter this perversion of Rawls. That the original post seemed to paint Rawls as Humean rather than deontological is surprising.