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Gail-Tzipporah seems to suggest that the best thing for Obama to do would be to outright reject the Nobel award. I've rejected two or three of them myself, but eventually my shamelessness got the best of me and I started wearing my medals to Ikea, where they give me a 20% discount for such a display.

I guess my real question is whether America's Fox-watching, God-fearing patriots are as happy to see a Christian president of our great nation receive international distinction as they were to see America fail in its Olympic bid a few days ago.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
-- G.K. Chesterton, English writer and theologian

Many who know me or who read my writing tend to see me as a moderate liberal, or a moderate, period. That's close enough to the mark, although I also have some conservative notions, especially when it comes to my distaste for politically correct, ideologically suffocating views that you'll find in some progressive circles.

A number of partisan toughs from both ends of the spectrum will occasionally rough me up on this site and other sites because of this wimpy moderation on my part. "What makes you so sure that the 'good' position always happens to be in the middle?" they typically ask. Or they suggest that, by not aligning loyally to one side, I'm avoiding making a tough moral choice.

Seeing the quote from Chesterton a few days ago made me think that I want to address these questions from the political hot-bloods. I felt even more driven to address the questions when I saw this comment from psychologist Jonathan Haidt: "I do believe that if liberals ran the whole world, it would fall apart. But if conservatives ran the whole world, it would be so restrictive and uncreative that it would be rather unpleasant, too."

Haidt was being quoted in an Utne magazine article that attempted to look past the current demonization of people "on the other side." He admitted to having liberal sensitivities and sensibilities, but he discussed his ambitious efforts to make persons on both sides of the aisle to value political variety:

"I see liberalism and conservatism as opposing principles that work well when in balance," he says, noting that authority needs to be both upheld (as conservatives insist) and challenged (as liberals maintain). "It's a basic design principle: You get better responsiveness if you have two systems pushing against each other. As individuals, we are very bad at finding the flaws in our own arguments. We all have a distorted perception of reality."

Balance--what a concept.

It's the progressive who tends to be the first to believe that blacks need to be brought up from the back of the bus. It's the conservative who tends to be the first to argue that we need to revalue personal responsibility in an overly litigious, entitlement society. The progressive seeks to fix what's broken, the conservative seeks to preserve what's best. A healthy society promotes a dynamic balance of such values and motives.

The irony is that we achieve this balance, to some degree, through the clashes of diehards and hot-bloods on both sides, neither of whom can understand why anyone would want a society that's not 103% conservative or 104% liberal. Such persons may be driven by overexcitement or ancient tribal impulses or even by "splitting" and other traits of borderline personalities, but I'm not impressed by the resulting bravado.

For a society to function well, it needs a large number of independents. These independents use moral and intellectual discernment to decide when it's better to move to the left in a given situation and when it's better to move to the right. Be clear: This isn't mere moderation, it's true independence.

This approach takes true moral courage and toughness. The rowdiest partisans of our day are unable to consider that it takes no moral courage or toughness, only foolhardiness, to always assume that the truth lies on the right or always on the left. We are seeing too many such fools nowadays: fools who believe it's cool to yell louder than the rest of the mob; fools who use the wonders of our Information Age to twist data and facts into partisan whips rather than into supple wisdom; fools who reflexively side with their mob without understanding that neither the left nor the right can be unconditionally correct.

But for those who have ears to hear, I say, Go Independent, Young Person.

I've been mostly absent from this site in recent weeks, while finishing up some outside writing projects. But I've bantered a bit with one of our regular commenters, Diane, here.

Diane wonders where she may have been "uncivil" in her own discourse, as she seeks to hold the feet of Friendly Fire writers to the proverbial fire. I believe it's usually a matter of perspective. When I criticize someone, I find my candor and bluntness to be refreshing, while others find me to be a jerk.

In that same sense, Diane probably thinks she's being bracingly candid when she responds to some FF writers and their arguments thusly:

you definitely need to take a Valium or something... calling you a "political analyst" is rather overstepping... you are practically foaming at the mouth.. Your mis-statements regarding government healthcare plans are mind-boggling... laughable... and pathetic.... racist ranting... stop being Enablers of Stupid... why don't you just stop your whining until you at least find something worthy to whine about.

If you watch TV "news", you see that it has degenerated into a Theater of Controversy, where boxing gloves are more mandatory than decency or intelligence. But we are a fame-based culture, and those who want to be on TV learn to adjust to politics-by-punching. For their trouble, they get money or at least notoriety.

But we don't get that here. We try to sound out our arguments, we think out loud, we test our ideas, and we occasionally get a response. But if we're told that our ideas are pathetic and laughable, or that we need Valium, please forgive us if we attempt to move on to the next issue without stopping to engage you.

Jonathan and Gail-Tzipporah are gracious in rebuking Jimmy Carter for indicating that racism is behind a certain amount of the feverish rage against Barack Obama. Too gracious. Behind the constant cries of "I want my country back" and demands that the president not "brainwash our children" is a subtle but real insinuation that teabaggers never imagined a black liberal could oversee this culture-war-ravaged landscape.

No, opposition to Obama need not be based on race or xenophobia. Opposition to Bush wasn't.

But it's telling that the South has consistently been at the forefront of opposition to Obama. A majority of Southerners have expressed doubt that Obama was born in this country, whereas only around 10% of Americans in other parts of the country share such doubt. Even Republicans as a group don't demonstrate such a high rate of birther views.

Carter knows this issue perhaps better than Jonathan or Gail-Tzipporah do, because he grew up in that still-divided region. I say we've given the South enough time to civilize itself: Now let it secede, so that it birthers can "have their country back." Let them be our crazy Southern neighbor rather than our brethren. Let their progressives and minorities apply easily for visas to this great, pluralistic nation if they are so inclined. But let the rest to their own sad devices.

Consider me relieved that some libertarians and conservatives are willing to call a kook a kook. If both parties dial down their kookiness, we can yet navigate this mess.

I don't pretend to be an objective journalist. I'm an opinionated commentator. Not a movement or party activist like some political commentators, but an unobjective, biased analyst nonetheless.

My biases have been pro-Obama, but I'm concerned about the arrogance that he's been exhibiting in recent months, a "l'etat, c'est moi" hubris that seems to keep him from grasping why his numbers are falling.

I saw John McCain having a very warm, civilized conversation with Conan O'Brien last night about the need for finding bipartisan approaches to healthcare and other issues. McCain also praised Ted Kennedy's ability to model an ability to reach across the table.

Frankly, that sort of conversation should be led by Obama, not by a comedian. Obama may be too full of himself to grasp that a large number of Americans can be predisposed to think of him as "not one of us," either as a foreign-born Muslim or a Marxist or a just plain elitist pointy-head Ivy Leaguer.

He promised to lead all of the US, not just the blue sections, and he needs to start leading. That includes less deference to the party's most liberal elements, who will only get the party exiled yet again if they move too far too fast.

As for his public image, he should take the time to engage publicly with those who respectfully disagree, in order to eclipse the images of the gun-toting wackos who disrespectfully disagree. Is his ego too large to live up to that campaign promise? I don't think so. Though his sense of self is grand, he still seems a pragmatist above all.

But if he keeps using televised addresses to convince the American people through solely his own charisma that the deficit won't be swollen by his programs, he'll continue to stagnate in coming months.

JFK's and RFK's ghosts always loomed over Ted Kennedy. From purely the perspective of being an icon, Teddy had the peculiar misfortune to live a full life. JFK once supposedly remarked that Lincoln's assassination is what made our civil war leader larger than life. And so it would be with him and Bobby.

As a Capitol Hill intern in 1987, I walked past Teddy in a hallway and nearly passed out from the excitement that rose up in me, who'd spent the summer reading about the Kennedys. For the next 22 years, the word "liberal" would be such a negative term, and Teddy would be so much the dictionary illustration for it, that much of his mystique wore off in my mind, especially given some of his foibles and disappointments.

Yet he accomplished much in line with liberal ideals, more than his beloved ghost brothers. It may be his final victory that the word liberal is no longer the dangerous pejorative that it's been for so many years.

I think the folks at Fox n' Friends will say that a non-partisan study of the economy and the stimulus is only non-partisan if it confirms what they want to believe.

For the record, the $1.6 trillion projected deficit terrifies me, and we'll need greater maturity out of our populace than we've currently got to make the tough choices.

The previous administration crashed the nation's Trans Am into a ditch. Obama, at considerable expense, has gotten it started again. He deserves credit for that, in the face of those who acted as though the engine was going to pop to life on its own (remember that last December we seriously believed we were entering a Second Depression).

But now the bill for the repairs is coming due, and we need more than partisan posturing. We need Dems to cut back on social services and pandering to lobbies, Republicans to cut back on wars and low-tax fantasies that don't work as advertised, and all Americans to realize that our credit addiction needs to be dealt with at the national and individual level.

The good news for Obama is that a major, longtime world leader has rebuked conservatives who've been complaining that their president is a crazy foreign socialist intent on destroying America.

The bad news is that his defender is this guy....

Let's try to think about organized hate groups and militias in "shoe on the other foot" terms.

Since 9/11, we've had passionate debates about whether moderate, non-violent Muslims here and abroad are obligated to do more to counter violence among their rabid, frothing extreme fringe.

Groups such as CAIR seem to resent being associated with extremism while not seeming to do much to efficaciously stand up to their affiliated extremists.

Another conundrum is that many moderate Muslims rationalize the anger of jihadists, saying that wackos in Gaza and Peshawar Kashmir take understandable grievances to unacceptable extremes. They suggest that if India or Israel or America adequately address the grievances, the extremist hatred and violence will go away.

That usually rings hollow and tinny to people on the outside. It sounds as though the moderates are acting like enablers in a crazed, abusive household.

Yet now the American right, who has comprised the most vocal critics of such rationalization-and-codependence approaches in the Mideast, will need to rise above their recent tendency to use just the same approach in the Obama era.