I Require Validation, and get it

When I said this, first back in September after McSame & Moose-a-lini started slinging mud at Obama and then again in the wake of the embarrassing Rick Warren debacle, I felt I was distilling down a certain zeitgeist that had been taking hold across Left Blogistan for some time:

Why am I and my fellow progressives, liberals & Democrats expected to take the high road every single time? Why is the onus on us to make nice and maintain civility while the other side gets to wreck and rob the place with impunity, spewing hate and flinging poo like a monkey? Why are we supposed to just sit there and take it? It is almost as though they know these people are over-grown children and, like children, we grown-ups are required to be patient and tolerant while they go through some adult version of the terrible twos, except sustained and culture-wide.

Then, just today I read this at Group News Blog, again regarding the "wisdom" of Mr. Warren's selection (bold-face mine):

Warren panders not just to queer-hating but woman-hating, class exploitation, child abuse, apocalyptic nihilism, and white supremacy. Within a few years, he will be brought down by some seamy scandal (probably related to gay sex) and his brief validation on an international stage will be revealed for the sick joke it is.

In the meantime, however, he and his ilk operate from the developmental level of five-year-olds and talking about "tolerance" has no real meaning to them. If your five-year-old throws a screaming fit because she wants more cookies, you can sit her down and have a long talk with her about nutritional balance, but if you then give her one more cookie for participating, she will take away from that the lesson "if I throw a fit, I can get more cookies". Somebody has to be the grown-up with these people. They are not a majority, they are not even that powerful, it's all a house of cards. I want a President who will move in the other direction, away from giving them more room in our public discourse.

And then I read this at Crooks and Liars, not about Rick Warren but about the notion of bi-partisanship with the GOP in general, of which Warren is only a mis-represented and misunderstood facet (again, boldface mine):

I find it hilarious that after all of the petty partisanship of the last eight years that somehow it's incumbent upon the Democrats to be the grown-ups in Washington and reach across the aisle. Where was all the talk in the media circles of bipartisanship for the last eight years? Is it that the media knows that Republicans aren't mature enough to do so? And where, in all their history, have the Republicans shown themselves to be able to do anything for the good of the country instead of their party...?

Can we stop pretending these WATB's are serious people? On purpose and by design, they have no understanding of the demands of public policy or the laws of physics or basic facts of history or science or any complex theory of any kind. I know we are supposedly a representative democracy, but they demand a level of public validation that is far out of proportion to their percentage of the population and that validation, quite frankly, is Manichean in its desired totality. Anything short of fascist adulation and ring-kissing of their leaders bundled with unquestioned submission of any hint of any and all dissenting views is characterized as an attack on their personhood, a chip-on-the-shoulder, persecution-complexed worldview that is corrosive to healthy discourse in civil society. They should be marginalized for the good of the country, but Obama seems to buy into their self-serving hype as fully as the Washington Villagers.

I guess I can't let this Rick Warren thing go. Sue me.