This the Current Events board, not Space/Science, and has its own standards appropriate to the subject matter: Subjective experience as current events, and the clash of political opinion. There are no objective standards that can be applied to the subject matter of this board. You and DFM both approach politics from an emotional perspective, and you both have an equal right to do so. You're in the right place for it.

The first paragraph is my answer as a moderator. The rest of this post is just my personal opinion.

I'd go even further and say that trying to apply objective criteria to human affairs has a way of producing very nasty results. You can't divorce subjective human concerns from politics, the most human of undertakings--politics is just the social interplay of a primate tribe writ large. You can't separate the human heart from human affairs...as you, Bowser, with your bleeding heart, know so well.

I think Conservatives go astray by insisting that everything must be run on a rational basis, and actions must be judged and chosen by concrete quantitative criteria. As a practical matter that usually devolves to money, the ultimately quantifiable substance, and ignores the majority of what it means to be human. When you insist that the government must be run like a business, you end up with real yet hard-to-quantify (read: unprofitable) human needs left unmet, and you get commerce in the Oval Office and the floors of Congress--vote-selling and a thriving marketplace of influence and power.

It's a bit of a Zen-like paradox: Our system of representative democracy is visibly rational and logical, yet it provides a means for intangible and sometimes irrational human concerns to be expressed and acted upon. If governance were only about cold calculation we could be governed by a machine. The fact that we've chosen to be governed by people tells you that there's more to it than sterile logic.