“Over the past couple of days, Andrew Sullivan has linked to and published protests from various individuals who are quite angry that people ‘on the left’ are being so mean to President Obama, and several of them are so upset that they have decided they are ‘leaving the left,’ whatever that might mean. What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics.” (12/08/09)