I believe John McCain when he says that he will put America before all other considerations...and Republicans hate him for that. That says a lot about Republican partisanship and especially about their values. You've said before that compromise is the betrayal of principles, and this is the fundamental place at which we disagree: I place the American principle of democracy above narrow ideological concerns, and believe that compromise is an obligation of a citizen in a democracy.

No, I think you believe McCain would mostly do the things you would like him to do.

"Putting America before all other considerations" is meaningless noise. What can reasonably be defined as "America" except a set of basic ideals and principles? What "considerations" are we talking about that could override that?

"American principle of democracy" is also meaningless noise (you'd make a good political speechwriter). To be fair, I think you're using the term as a "feelgood," not in its strict sense--God help us if we ever get to the point where majority rule becomes the absolute.

Our nation was founded on a specific set of ideas about the nature of humanity and government, and the government was organized in our Constitution to serve those ideas.

Democracy, as I have pointed out before, is an effect, not a primary, and all by itself it is not the main foundation of a free society. It's a shame that the word gets used as a catch-all for the Western ideals of government (even by myself.) This has tended to dilute the actual principles behind it. If democracy were all there was to a nation, Iraq would have snapped easily into a free society after the first vote.

I have never said that compromise is the betrayal of principles.

I have said that a compromise that does betray one's principles is a bad thing. You can compromise on what pizza to get, or how much to spend on a bill in Congress. You can compromise on many things where basic principles aren't at stake. You can't compromise on things like whether blacks should vote. Somebody wins. Somebody loses.

Only extremists have a low batting average, and that's by design. Our system is designed to favor moderation, not extremism.

Again, I find that people seem to think this way only when the "moderate" positions are their positions. That was one of my points.

You're fighting against America itself, Tom. You're rejecting the most basic principles upon which this country was founded, and that's just plain wrong.

I'm sorry, but going back to the real basic principles of our nation, I find that compromise doesn't seem to be on the list of the major virtues. It wasn't "give me liberty if we can work out some deal." To be sure, some of our history began with compromises on things that should not have been compromised, like slavery. It can be argued that the whole thing would have been dead in the water without such sacrifices, but it certainly came back to bite us later.