Okay, Ebbie, perhaps you are an exception? ;-) I'd be interested to see what happened if my hypothetical scenario occurred. I think there'd be a frenzy of infuriated reactions that would make Doug's snarky comments about Colin Powell look mild in comparison. That doesn't mean those reactions would come from every Obama supporter here...just from a lot of them.

It's just normal, average human nature for people to be that way when they get caught up in partisan politics...and that's one reason why I don't like partisan politics, as a rule. It causes people's reserves of goodwill to dry up and vanish. It is the author of continual conflict and division in a population.

Ancient societies attempted to concentrate power in a single monarch or family line precisely to avoid the dangers of those sort of fractious divisions, which could easily slide into civil war at any time (when various nobles and powerful houses were jockeying for power against one another). The trouble with monarchs, of course, was that if the specific monarch turned out to be a fool or a jackass or an incompetent ruler...well, you were just stuck with him regardless till he died. ;-)

No system is perfect, I guess.