I've learned that I should be pleased that I'm not a Rhodes scholar, but I also have to take issue with this claim by Pilger:

Liberal hysteria that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is more extreme than Obama is no more than a familiar promotion of "lesser evilism" and changes nothing.  Ironically, the election of Romney to the White House is likely to reawaken mass dissent in the US, whose demise is Obama's singular achievement.

I'm of an age where pretty much everything seems to have occurred relatively recently (9/11, the fall of the Berlin wall, George Formby, the French revolution, etc.), but I'm reasonably confident that a little stir called Occupy happened during Obama's presidency, and was a generally splendid affair whose ripples are - as ripples are wont to do - spreading outwards at this very moment.

Despite the fact that I think calling Obama a spineless weasel is an unforgivable calumny upon weasel invertebrates of every stripe, the suggestion that "worse evilism" would awaken the masses to finally recognise the brilliance of our natural vanguard intellectual leaders is utterly monstrous. To support my position, I'll go for a trite cite: the extraordinary social/political progress in the second half of the 20th century which took place in the affluent post-war west, where a generation looked at their inheritance of shallow materialism courtesy of institutionalised injustice and said, to quote Abbie Hoffman, "Yuck!" Compare this to the results of the mass dissent in Russia and Germany in the first half of the 20th century awakened by the dubious blessings of the Tsar and the Treaty of Versailles.

Lest you think I am being flippant, I am second to nobody in awareness of the terrible harm that prog rock (arguably a consequense of the counter-culture) has done to our civilisation, but I prefer it to the KGB or the SS. It's much easier to do good if you're contending with a lesser evil.