Is President Obama Perfect?

By Zamboni

No. And that's a good thing.

You see, we've never been particularly crazy about ideological purity, regardless of which direction it goes in. All you have to do is spend some time in the right-wing blogosphere to know that insisting on such purity gets a political party exactly nowhere.

Take our friends at Free Republic, for example — the red-meat base of the GOP. Man, they don't like anybody. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist — they are all RINOs because of one issue or another, and therefore the Freepers despise them all. Even Mike Huckabee isn't conservative enough for them, because he had the nerve to raise taxes once. We've seen some tepid approbation of Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford and Jim DeMint — but for the most part, only Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin pass the Free Republic litmus test.

As Democrats, we cats choose to take a lesson from these nutbags. They are our anti-role models. So whenever President Obama does something that doesn't precisely toe the liberal line, rather than lash out angrily, we suck it up. We choose to celebrate the fact that this White House gives us Cheshire cat grins at least 90 percent of the time — instead of focusing on the 10 percent on which we disagree.

That's because of the, um, previous Administration. The real relief of having President Obama is that after eight years of sheer hell, even when we don't like something, we don't not like it as much as before.

In other words, perfection is scary. Unless, of course, it's in a cat.