A while back, I came up with the concept of the "mental singularity," where a person wraps their own personal reality so tightly around themselves, that they collapse into a mental black hole of sorts, where they spew their viewpoints out, but no information can enter (a real black hole operates exactly in reverse, which is the flaw in the analogy.)

This column in the New York Times is from a writer who apparently sees and remembers things a lot differently than the rest of the planet. Some juicy excerpts:

For all the talk about the tainted legitimacy of Bush's Supreme Court-inflected victory in the 2000 election, the Democrats have never sought to discredit Bush's presidency.

...Why are the Democrats so much more willing than the Republicans to make political sacrifices in the name of procedural fairness or of good government? Maybe Democrats are just nicer, but a more philosophical view is that liberals are committed to, are in fact bedeviled by, ideals about process that do not much preoccupy conservatives, at least contemporary ones. Liberals put their faith in such content-neutral principles as free speech, due process, participatory democracy. Is that too lofty? Then maybe we should say that today's liberals, unlike today's conservatives, don't believe in any particular set of ends ardently enough to blind themselves to the means they are using to achieve them.

Again, note the absolute conviction that liberals are inherently better than, smarter than, and above all, morally superior to, conservatives.

Anyone who can cram the terms "Democratic Party" and "ideals about process" in the same phrase is not only an example of a mental black hole, he probably drags cars towards him when he walks down the sidewalk.

This became patent during the endgame of the 2000 election, when Al Gore refused to sanction a range of promising legal approaches and Joe Lieberman felt called upon to concede the fairness of a critical Republican claim about the validity of absentee military ballots. Several months later, I asked Lieberman how in the world he could have handed that weapon to his opponents, and he said, ''In spite of the fact that on the other side they were being partisan, there was no reason for me not to say what I saw.'' It's impossible to think of any instance in which the Bush-Cheney ticket acted comparably.

Not to bring up the 2000 election again, but this does not quite square with the full-bore, veins-in-the-teeth legal attack on the vote outcome that was undertaken at Gore's personal command. Squadrons of Democratic lawyers descended on the state like the invasion of Normandy...and according to a pre-arranged plan. If there is a legal route that Gore refused to take for moral reasons, I'd love to hear what it was.

...Clinton, the one Democrat willing to sacrifice practically anything (possibly including his principles) in the name of victory, brought the party briefly out of the woods by running against Republican extremism.

Just Clinton? He's the only one? And I love that word "possibly."

There are Democrats who would like the party to get down off its moral pedestal and start fighting dirty, or at least dirtier.

Moral pedestal? START fighting dirty?

The rest of the article is equally amazing.