The Obama campaign didn’t exist to make me feel good, and the Obama presidency won’t either. I don’t especially like his people punching the dirty [flipping] hippies under the bed, but on the other hand if they manage to convince people that Obama is a sensible centrist who wants to do sensible centrist things like build SUPERTRAINS, get out of Iraq, not torture people or invade random countries, strengthen labor protections, reduce income inequality, improve education, provide health care for people, and reduce poverty, while those DAMNED DIRTY HIPPIES just won’t shut up about their magic ponies, it’s fine by me.

For years we’ve had Democrats railing against those crazy hippies as an excuse to not do all of those things. If Obama’s people are going to rail against the hippies and use it as an excuse to do them, fine with me. If.

Obviously, the media is making far more out of this Democratic divide than exists in the real world, but critics would be well-served to wait and see how Obama actually governs before freaking out about how he’s ignoring progressives. If it turns out that he totally sucks or flails completely and doesn’t deliver any of this stuff, which I’m kind of doubting will be the case, there will be four years to criticize him, with good reason — and then you can vote his sorry butt out of office in 2012.

But the post-partisanship that Obama campaigned on requires concessions from the left as well as the right, and if Obama’s strategy does prove successful for implementing even a few of the things on Atrios’ laundry list — especially considering the disastrous path the country appeared to be on for the past 8 years — it will be hard to argue that sacrificing a liberal Democratic cabinet for the greater good wasn’t worth it.

Berkeley’s City Council will delve into national policy again next week when it votes whether to demand the United States charge Berkeley resident and former Bush adviser John Yoo with war crimes.

This, of course, will mean nothing. Not a single Justice Department official will be compelled by an affirmative council vote to pursue an indictment of Yoo. Nor will the law school have to do anything. This is a purely impotent measure.

I don’t live in Berkeley — I know all I need to know about it from Jawbreaker songs and back issues of Cometbus — but if I did, I’d probably wonder if the council shouldn’t be trying to improve my trash collection or something instead.

That said, I’m hardly in a position to complain about someone else’s futile criticism. That headline is the closest I’ll ever come to indicting John Yoo for war crimes. So one cheer for you, Berkeley City Council.

Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit.

That’s Defense Secretary Bob Gates in the new Foreign Affairs. I’ll have more on this later, but: Development-based root-cause solutions for terrorism, coupled with an effort to prudently reduce violent (“kinetic”) approaches? Put the hackeysack down and get a haircut!