We appear to be living through Weimar of the late 1920's again, though perhaps with smaller problems and lesser men, both good and evil.

As was the case in Germany after the first world war, the good guys are facing problems of such magnitude, and are so stymied by their opponents, that NOTHING of substance gets done. The critiques of their critics are demonstrable.

Hopes fade.

The good guys look worse and worse, and weaker and weaker, and because they are, become less and less effective.

Those to their left accuse them of ignoring the working men and women who brought them to power, and suffered the worst of the consequences of war, disease, and economic collapse.

The right accuses them of lack of patriotism and disrespect for the values that made the country great.

Big business, honor bound to protect the interests of capital, have no choice. In the absence of an electable centrist, they support simple-minded ideologues of the right, whom they truly believe they can control.

They inevitably can not, and reap the whirlwind (or in the case of the Weimar democrats, a second world war and the Holocaust).

We hear left liberals talking about voting Republican . . . "because Obama can't get anything done." If asked if they would prefer to empower the Perry's, Bachmann's, Cain's and Romney's of the world to do what THEY want to do, there is silence, or worse, a Ron-Paul-like lecture on the long-term cleansing benefits of pain and suffering.

On the right we find little, if any, historical perspective (not to mention any respect for modern physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, or economics.) Out of such environments emerge not just philosophers of hate, but clever opportunists and practitioners.

Choose your own object of detestation: people and groups of people, governments in particular and government in general, science, skepticism, intellectuals, liberals, environmentalists, questioners. -- easy targets for those with simple solutions to complex problems.

The dreadful irony, of course, is that out of such conditions emerge governments of government-haters, run by men and women more than willing to use the very governments they hate, with great effect, to impose their "values."