For anyone interested in the liberal psyche -- in figuring out what makes the leftist mind "tick" -- Alan Dershowitz is an interesting case study. Here's a guy who teaches law at Harvard. One would presume, therefore, that he is deeply committed to the scrupulous consideration of facts, the rigorous use of logic and rational thought, and the exclusion -- insofar as it's possible -- of emotion when arriving at conclusions. And one would further presume that he teaches these intellectual virtues to his students. Well, I have no idea what he teaches to his students, but it is plain that last November, he violated every one of these precepts when arriving at his choice for president. Instead, he fell in love with a candidate, let that emotion color his thinking, threw the facts, rationality, and objectivity to the wind, and voted for Obama. Indeed, he did more than that; he became a cheerleader for Obama, missing no opportunity to tout him in love-stricken terms. What strange behavior for a professor of law -- at Harvard of all places!

What this demonstrates, I suppose, is that love conquers all. A school-boy crush is sometimes enough to make a teenager stop eating, so why shouldn't a political crush make a law professor stop following the precepts of legal thinking? But there's more to it than that. Over the years, in book after book and public appearance after public appearance, Dershowitz has declared himself a lover of the State of Israel and all it stands for. Apparently, last November, his love for Barack OBama overcame his love for Israel. When the time came to choose between two loves, he made it plain where his real love lies. When push came to shove, he spurned Israel for liberalism. Dershowitz would no doubt deny this, but the truth is that he is too intelligent a man not to know that in voting for Obama he was voting against Israel. After all, many, many readers of American Thinker -- easily Dershowitz's equals in intelligence -- knew that. How could Obama not have known?

The case of Alan Dershowitz does much to answer the question so often raised in the comments printed on this website: How could so many Jews have voted against the State of Israel? The answer: their devotion to "progressive" ideas and "progressive" candidates is much deeper than their devotion to Israel and the Jewish people. If these knuckleheads had had a decent Jewish education, they'd have known that the ideals of the State of Israel are much more in accord with the ideals of our own country than are the ideals of Barack Obama. But the sad story of Jewish education will have to await another post.