The politics of it all

I love this paragraph in today's Peter Baker article for the NYTimes Magazine:

The policy criticism of Obama can be confusing and deeply contradictory — he is a liberal zealot, in the view of the right; a weak accommodationist, in the view of the left. He is an anticapitalist socialist who is too cozy with Wall Street, a weak-on-defense apologist for America who adopted Bush’s unrelenting antiterror tactics at the expense of civil liberties.

The whole piece is a worthy read, even if much ink has been spilled on the subject already. And I don't think I have anything new to say on the matter. On the whole, the politics has become deeply depressing  - there is very little intellectual curiosity once you step outside the blogosphere, and feels too much like we've entered a time when zealotry that only belongs to religions rules politics once again. Or is my memory too short and we've simply never left that time?