“The Un-Uncola” (from Stop Me Before I Vote Again)
Posted by Richard S. on March 8, 2008
I love this passage from one of my favorite blogs of coverage on the primaries, Stop Me Beofore I Vote Again. About The Un-Uncola:
I’ve had a few conversations with Obama supporters. These folks are not, admittedly, the perfervid young True Believers depicted in will.i.am’s You-Tube videos - more like grizzled old liberals still hoping, hoping, for a break in the weather, a break that hasn’t come since the ’40s and certainly doesn’t appear to be imminent.
What these folks always end up saying is something like this: Well, he’s better than Hillary, isn’t he?
Of course they’re right. It would be hard to be worse. But note that we now have a recursion of lesser-evillism. We vote for the Democrats because they’re “not as bad” as the Republicans - and among Democrats, we support Obama because he’s “not as bad” as Hillary. The Democrats are the un-Republicans, and Barak is the un-Hillary - a double-Un!
There’s a nightmarish Achilles-and-the-tortoise quality to this reasoning - the sort of vertiginous slide down through orders of magnitude that you get in fever dreams. How small could these distinctions get before quantum effects would begin to be felt?
