I like San Francisco, I really do. I like the big buildings in the financial district, I love a lot of the great, small restaurants, I like the big parks in the middle of the city. And I have some really good friends who live there. But I really can understand why people hate SF, even a lot of liberals. The problem with San Francisco isn’t that it’s super-liberal (well, IMO, and yours might vary). Politically, San Jose isn’t all that different from SF, and nobody hates it. It’s that it’s a city whose people jump all over each other trying to be more progressive than each other, even to the extent of adopting “progressive” stances that aren’t actually progressive, but are more just contrarian/controversial/really, really stupid, and then calling them progressive. Conservatives get to use examples of this to paint liberals with a broad brush, which is genuinely unfair because SF is on its own axis completely. And their self-righteousness about it all really is pretty nauseating. This is what makes it different from, say, Los Angeles, which exhibits far less of this particular tendency, though I like visiting it much less for a lot of different reasons.

Anyway, if you want a pretty typical example of all this, just read this (quite entertaining) live blog over at the great local site SFist. It’s mindblowing in a way. The subject here is whether or not wifebeater/convicted criminal Ross Mirkirami ought to be able to keep his job as Sheriff of San Francisco. Almost all the city’s leadership, from the Mayor on down, wanted him gone prior to this meeting. Public sentiment seemed to favor his removal. And yet…he stayed, most likely due to an overwhelming show of support for a guy who hasn’t even been in the post for quite some time (he was suspended after he was slapped with ethics charges). Turns out, standing up for a convicted criminal and wifebeater is progressive because some other City officials did bad things, and also Bill Clinton was impeached! And the outpouring of support apparently flipped enough City Supervisors to let the guy resume his duties. This is weak debating–for one thing, comparing criminal or ethics cases apples to apples blurs the issue, because the details of every situation are going to be unique, different prosecutors will handle cases differently, etc. And saying that someone else got away with something is no argument to let the current person off the hook. In an era where moral relativism has become almost entirely the province of the right, we have here a truly left-wing example of the genus, and for utterly misguided reasons. The liveblog is hilarious in a very, very dark way, comparable to the last 30 minutes of Fargo I suppose.

I don’t know if it’s ever going to be a part of the public conversation, but this is just sad. I can’t imagine another “blue” city (or frankly too many “red” cities) that would have had this happen. But it’s really a different world on the other side of the Bay, and they really ought to be ashamed of this.