When good people make bad choices

[Alcibiades]

I now support Obama, and have since a couple of weeks after John Edwards dropped out of the race. Clinton was right on healthcare, but wrong on the war. Handing the legal authority to invade Iraq made no sense given what most of us realized at about the chimp at the time. My candidate, Edwards, misunderestimated him. Clinton misunderestimated him. Obama didn't. He knew him for what he was: a drunken fratboy who wears his fake Christianity like a breastplate of righteousness while actually pandering to special interests and pursuing an ill-conceived war for political gain. That was good judgment on his part.

As the Clinton campaign has worn on with their poll-driven divisiveness and ever more tenuous arguments about how Senator Clinton will make a better candidate against John McCain, we are confronted with the contradictory evidence of her poor decision making, beginning with the selection of expensive advisors who don't know about proportionality, advisors who told her that running like a Republican was a smart idea, a good way to win a Democratic primary. Presumably, they thought that by going right in the primary they would be in a better position in the fall, but they miscalculated in that it would have been better to run as a liberal to appeal to primary voters and then make a right turn (if needed, which I don't think it is) in the fall. They just made some bad choices from the beginning of the campaign, choices that have gotten worse as time goes on.

And yet, I feel that Clinton must get it. She needs to reconnect with who she was in 1968. There's an idea in our culture that adversity makes you stronger, but that's not always the case. Plato, in the Republic, writes that some kinds of adversity can actually demean you, which is why he argued that people who do manual labor should have no part in governing, as he felt that the slavelike conditions of those days for free workers (let alone the slaves who were probably at least as numerous) left their character in a degraded condition. Obviously, I want no part of that bit of the argument, but I do think there's a kernel of truth: did the politics of personal destruction the Clintons underwent do something to them, to her? It would be bad enough to have these sort of problems in one's marriage, but to have it play out in the national press, and to become an issue of great political importance, to have to take the position that it does not really matter if your husband screws around on you--did that change her? I sometime wonder what the young Hillary Clinton would have made of some of these choices they have made in the campaign. I think she needs to take some time to reconnect with her better self.

[PATRICK]

1. Plato down from the clouds

Now that you mention this guy, it is good to take a look of his admirable decision to try out his ideas in real life. Taking the political leadership he tried out his model of good fascist government, modeled on Sparta. The good citizens made life very difficult for him and his improvements. The great man stomped back to his ivory tower.

All good people make bad decisions either as exceptions or the rule of their pride and idea base and emotions they don't often credit enough in themselves to see those of others. That is why sharing, compassion, humility and strength based on these in reality(real reality, not forced changes) within a democracy make for the best government if not a flawless one. Once a majority is on the move with this force and not fear, a lie, or a hero on a sand pedestal the overall result with overall be for the best.
Then the only thing overall that is dangerous is relaxation and underestimating anti-democratic forces and putting the status quo on a pedestal that cannot be sustained.

As for what people in error know- they know it all on compartmentalized levels and emotional warehouses. They feel the truth before they acknowledge it, and shift the feelings to what they want to acknowledge. The strength of anger is spurred by the denial of self knowledge that they consider an invasion by a reality they become willing to claim is a lie. They turn reality and necessary knowledge, inescapable feelings around upon themselves in a choice for actual madness. A lifelong sociopath like Bush has easy personal sailing through reality no matter the damage and failure in his wake until reality bites personally hard. A good person troubled by alienation from their chosen, somewhat selfless, path and good adversaries can by degrees get on that exact same course until they have more in common with evil adversaries who are less challenging to their mind and will.

People know instinctively, added powerlessly to the swamp of lies and misinformation, how bad Bush is and how bad things are. When you meet this headon sometimes there is not a single question about what to do about that knowledge except to shrug, hunker down and watch out and just get meek or mad. No matter how extreme the crisis. No matter how free we supposedly are. Our parameters for accepting and dealing with knowledge and our emotions usually narrow.

[Alcibiades]

2. Sorry, but no

You're factually wrong on a number of points, but I'm not going to get terribly worked up about that. I don't know who it is you're arguing, but it's not me. Someone who actually worshiped Plato would never use Alcibiades as a handle, for reasons that would be obvious to you if you actually knew what you were talking about.

You should also know that simply citing Plato in no way implies any hostility to enlightenment rationality or modernity in general, particularly when you do so in the qualified way that I did.