Re: half-a-loafing. Paine probably would have been the last of them to settle for half a loaf. (Either him or Sam Adams). We know him for "Common Sense" and (occasionally) "The Rights of Man", but to a lot of those of the time, even those who were on the same side, he was the scary guy, sort of a combination between Edward Abbey and G. Gordon Liddy.
The half-a-loafers were Hamilton, Jay, to a lesser extent J Adams, then a couple generations later, Lincoln, and, finally, a century after that, Nixon.
To my mind, of the group, the strongest historical case for your "security" argument would be Nixon.If there was a time it was necessary for a lesser-of-two-evils approach, it was the Cold War.
But IMO we have nothing like the threat that the Soviet Union posed today. It's not even close, all the NBC worries notwithstanding. Since the Wall fell and the USSR crumbled has been our best opportunity ever to get past "lesser of two evils", to choose something other than Realpolitick OR social democracy. Instead, we've contented ourselves, for over 30 years now, with the lesser of two evils approach.
And where has it got us? We're so damn ignorant as a nation that we not only elect Obama once, we elect him twice, despite his having not a single real idea of his own, despite his spouting the same crap that 1945-2005 showed to be the hubris of the yammering over-educated residents of ivory towers.
We're so damn ignorant as a nation that the best we can can come up with as "Presidents" for nearly a quarter of a century is Clinton I, Bush II, and Obama? The best we can come up with to be one step away from the presidency are Gore, Cheney, and Biden?
The best "lesser of two evils" we could come up with in 2012 was Mitt Romney?
John McCain was a bona fide hero, I'll grant that. He is someone with more integrity in his little pinkie than our current Prez has in his entire body. And perhaps he could, like Washington and Eisenhower before him, have transferred from the battlefield to the Oval Office and been what the nation needed. Maybe. As the Palin selection made clear, he sure wasn't afraid of potential negative reaction when he did something other than the usual Washington cynicism.
On the other hand, Americans showed themselves not at all ready for someone willing to truly go outside the box. Instead, they chose a Facebooking babbler of nonsense with "oratorical skills" and marketing cynicism. And despite a first term that featured "new ideas" like spending 80K of taxpayer money for a car worth 3000, a petulant child who pandered cynically to the lowest-common denominator while taking a bigger tithe than the most shameless televangelist, the American people did what? They re-elected him.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)