Actually, she would have executed Cally, turned to Tyrol, and said, “Your son is next unless you talk.”
I guess I’m sort of splitting the difference here, in terms of the question of whether Adama would have stayed Adama or if he’d have drifted Cainward without any external influence. The bottom line is, just because the Admiral is the closest thing we have to a hero on the show doesn’t make him, y’know, an actual hero. None of the characters is particularly admirable – though, Gods love 'em, they’re all understandable and to some degree relatable, yes, even Baltar. And because of the variance in viewer perspective, different people will feel differently about one character versus another. A good friend of mine, for example, wants Laura Roslin to be her mentor. Totally looks up to her. Thinks she can do no wrong. Blind to her faults. The whole works. And, hey, that’s fine for her. Another friend has nothing but love for Starbuck, self-destructive streak and all.
Me, I’m soft on Lee, because I have more than a bit of the annoyingly stubborn idealist in me. A guarded relationship with authority, rigorously consistent attention to principle, and sticking to my moral guns lo even to the point of contrariness, are qualities that have gotten me close to fired from a couple of jobs in the past. Yes, I’ll readily concede this makes me somewhat predictable, occasionally prickly, and hard to get close to. And it’s been a limitation in my career, because I’m a crappy politician and a crappier liar. But it’s who I am, for better and for worse, and not only can I identify with Lee’s struggles to stay true to his principles, I really identify when he winds himself so tight he snaps and gives in to spite or petulance. It may not be pretty, but damn if it isn’t true.
Of course, just for the record, this close identification doesn’t mean I always enjoy watching the character. Sometimes it’s actually uncomfortable. In general, the character I most enjoy watching and thinking about is Tigh, partly because the character is a hundred and eighty degrees away from me, and partly because the actor’s performance is so frakking spectacular. Either way, I have some distance, and I can just appreciate what’s happening without being hooked into it. The character I personally ache for, though, is Lee.
And not to flog a dead daggit but that’s why the show’s so great. I mean, this is, what, the third thread in a row where the debate about the show’s storyline has taken a back seat to a debate about the characters. The first episode, we’re all getting re-engaged with the plot; there’s tons of narrative to establish and lots of storylines to set up, so that’s what we talked about. Now, though, we’re getting into the meat of the season, and it’s the conflicts between the characters that’s the driving engine of the show. (As opposed to typical TV SF, where external conflicts like exploding stars and meteor diseases provide the conflict.) Naturally, we feel varying degrees of loyalty to different characters, so we find ourselves arguing about motivation, backstory, emotion, justification of choices… subjects where nobody is ever really right except for and within themselves. I expect to catch a little heat for my loyalty to Lee, because, yeah, he’s a bit of a prig, and he drives a lot of people crazy. But I’m not going to apologize for it, any more than I would take the inverse position and castigate someone for finding Starbuck the most compelling character.
Everybody on the show is terribly flawed, just like every one of us is terribly flawed. The intensity of their circumstances serves to inflate those flaws and throw them into sharp relief against their positive, even heroic qualities. We see things we recognize, and we keep coming back because in the backs of our minds we wonder how we ourselves would deal with such a situation. That’s what draws me, and all the friends in my viewing circle.
Some people like the pretty spaceships and asplosions, not to mention the occasionally nekkid Boomer, so the show tosses in a few of those moments as well. 
But as far as I’m concerned, that stuff is just icing.
Anyway: all of this is sort of a long-winded appeal for continued civility in the discussion. There’s some heat in the debate, as people argue for or against their favored characters, and that’s fine, because emotional loyalty is a powerful thing. Just keep in mind variant loyalties will be an inevitable result of the show’s construction. As was discussed above, in the confrontation between Lee and Roslin, both of them are, objectively speaking, simultaneously right and wrong. How can anyone choose a side? And yet, we do, and then we seek reasons why. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that somebody who chooses a different side is somehow wrong; the show rarely gives us the luxury of clear good-and-evil boundaries. (And when it does, as in “The Woman King,” it almost invariably falls on its ass, and everyone hates it.) As I pointed out in a previous thread, if this were Star Trek, nobody would be taking the Cardassians’ side against the Federation; that may be fun but it’s programmatic cowboys-and-indians stuff. Approaching BSG with that mindset is just asking for trouble.
Aaaaaand this turned out to be way longer than I expected it to be. Time for bed, and I’ll look at this in the morning to see if my rambling makes anything like sense.