No matter how long you watch politically opinionated people, no matter how cynical you become about their ability to believe anything they want to believe, you always find that you were not nearly cynical enough.
Partisans have their good points.
They are, at least, engaged in issues larger than themselves. More people should be. But the people who are engaged in public debate this season are giving a bad name to engagement. They are simply insufferable. Columnist Michael Kelly has written in these pages that what's really awful about Al Gore is the piety, the pretense that he just wants what is right.