It's Not Right or Left, It's Thinking vs. Unthinking

My favorite liberal sub-blogger, Rob at Rob's Blog, has a couple of good posts up over the last 24 hours. The first is his rethinking of his original reaction to the story of the tragedy of the shooting of the Italian officer at the BIAP TCP that dominated the news this weekend. While Rob is unabashedly liberal, he demonstrates that when a logical person receives new information, they're able to incorporate that into their worldview, and sometimes admit that their original thoughts may have been mistaken. I applaud Rob for this, and hope he doesn't take too much crap from the other side of the blogosphere (although he puts his reasons down so clearly that I think it'd be hard for anyone to disagree with him).
Rob's second post is a good one for anyone who feels the political dialogue has been poisoned by paritisanship within the U.S. He recognizes that people on the other side of the political fence may not simply be brainwashed idiots, but may have good reasons for believing as they do. While I spend a lot of time crawling around the darker, moonbattier recesses of the liberal group mind on the blogosphere, I do in fact recognize that the large majority of Kerry voters are in fact people who love their country as much as I do, and simply believe that there are different ways of solving our problems. As you may guess from reading some of my posts, I'm just as uncomfortable with some of the idiocies coming from the right as I am with those of the left (although, to be honest, the left are normally more humorous.) [Note: this last link is, in fact, a satire site.]