hopefully I will see the world at 52 with different eyes

It is no crime to be overly idealistic and/or ignorant when young. In my early 20s, I would abide no criticism of Israel, and there are many other examples of education and reading causing me to change my mind. Along with the maturity that life experience brings.

You [pieceofcake] don't speak for anyone but yourself. You certainly don't speak for everyone under 30 or whatever you think the magic age is. It's quite unnatural for youth and reverence for political figures to go hand in hand. The cult-like worship for authority which is your only perspective is quite characteristic of the older people you scorn.

Thank you. Not everyone under 30 is a political naïf, but I do know that Mona at 52 is much more realistic than Mona at 22 -- and she has changed her mind about some important issues. Many (not all) kids think they can make the world anew, and totally ignore the lessons learned not merely by their living elders, but also the dead in history as well.

It has ever been thus. Pieceofcake ten yrs from now will likely look at the world and politics with a bit more understanding.

But whatever else is true, what Ignatius and others are celebrating as "remarkable" -- that a national Democratic politician is alienating "the Left" and embracing the center-right in the name of transcending ideological and partisan conflicts -

I've never thought of myself as "on the left," save for the civil libertarian issues that the left has generally been much better about. (Whatever my occasional disagreements with the ACLU, thank the gods for them!)

And, there has always been a strain of suspicion of warmongering among we, well, I guess we are "left-libertarians." Many of the first Reasonoids were ardently opposed to the Vietnam War.

Jeebus, you'd think Broder and all were commending Obama for sending signals that he wasn't adhering to Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. Apparently, being on the "far left" now means opposing a surveillance state, militarism and war-mongering; "centrist" means being open to these things. (Nevermind that it was Republican Ike who first raised the hue and cry about the military-industrial complex.)

In order to fit both columns on the screen, side-by-side as they would be on a printed page makes it so that one column or the other is off the screen.

Even without that annoyance, as you originally said, so many pdf docs are in columns that require going up and down screen. That has long driven me batshit.

I hit 40 plus and couple, and couldn't make out the newspaper print. Took me for a loop. That was a whiiile back. ;o)

Yup. At 41 my eye doctor said I did not yet need bifocals, but that they were only a few years away. She was so right.

Mona and the senior crowd

I resemble that remark. ;)

(52 is not THAT senior, but bad eyesight runs in da fambly.)

Well, I do anyway. I can't read little ittsy bitsy letters anymore.

Same here, my friend. Now, I know this works with Firefox and have no idea whether it does with Adobe, but when reading blogs I hit Ctrl w/ the + sign until it eventually gets large enough for me to read. (Ctrl w/ the - sign, by the same token, reduces print size.)

Indeed, as one commenter corrected me, it was not a Beatles song, but rather the first of Paul McCartney's, under his then-new group Wings in 1972. Ah, for me, '72 may as well be '69 -- I am old enough to be confused about dates that far back.

But I do recall my virtual cousin Patrick Collins and I singing it together when we were all but wee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_Ireland_Back_to_the_Irish

I'm sorry for snapping at you. . .

Apology accepted. You, as an Irish national, are likely unfamiliar with how weird and vehement my Irish-American family -- going back generations -- was in romanticizing the IRA and Sein Fein. We were an ocean apart, but still tied to The Cause.

It pretty much ended w/ my generation (I'm 52), but is what I was raised with. And still, today, I would recuse myself from deciding any issue of acrimony between green and orange Irish. My amygdala is trained to always favor the green.

??

What did I write that so provoked you? Your comment left me confused, but you seem to believe I've said something very wrong?

Or am I missing irony?

For the record...."Give Ireland Back to The Irish" was not a Beatles collaboration.

It was a Paul McCartney solo tune.

True, that. But John and Yoko protested on behalf of the green Irish cause. Anyway, that was so long ago I only remember the song at all because it suited my emotional attachment to a country and cause that I did not sufficiently examine before I (briefly) gave $$ to "my tribe" without fully understanding the grotesque violence I was thereby supporting.

As soon as I did, I felt quite guilty. (But I've never lost my emotional attachment to the cause of Catholic Ireland. And as Glenn says, one must be especially careful when the tribal lizard brain is dictating to one's reasoning faculties.)

That video/song do bring back memories. It was my anthem for a good bit when a young lass. And I cried in solidarity w/ Bobby Sands et al. when they died by going on hunger strikes.

But the situation had caused bloodshed for centuries, and it was long past time for both sides to realize everyone was there to stay, and so they had to work it out. Maturing as an adult I came to accept that. Ditto for the I/P bloody stalemate.

Doesn't mean I was not still outraged at every reported atrocity committed by Her Majesty's troops, but there just were no clean hands in the entire mess. The options were: 1. Continued death and carnage for all, or 2. Come to some negotiated peace.