Charles Krauthammer is probably my favorite columnist.  I have long thought him to be the most cogent writer critiquing President Obama.  He was scathing, but respectful which is something many who dislike the President seem to refuse to be.

However, his latest column is truly great because it makes a compelling case for why we must engage in politics.  He does this in a round about way that touches on the search for sentient life beyond our own planet.  This may seem a strange segue into a conversation about the need for politics, but it is, in fact one of the best.

Here are several relevant sections,

"...Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption."

He concludes by waxing lyrically on how politics, for all its grunginess and stupidity, at the core, is the necessary precondition for surviving and channeling our intelligence, if we can, in a way so as to avoid true catastrophe.

"We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right."

So haunting and so potentially prophetic.  This is why anyone who engages with politics, and does so for the right reasons, is worthy of respect.