As many of you no doubt are aware, John McCain released his official equivocation about the Russo-Georgian war the other day. In it, he demands of us to stand firm with our allies in Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and everywhere else that could conceivably get us into war with Russia. He calls upon us to respect our deepest values and ...

Eh, let's just go point-by-point, shall we? At least until he runs out of them.

I was given A Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich by the Calvert homeschool program, when I was living on a boat. It was part of their conservative ideological agenda, something I’m sure my parents had no idea about when they enrolled my brother and I. Calvert dressed up their slanted history in resolutions toward honesty and speaking up for Western values, but of course their curriculum on American history was done all in glossy white acrylic. I liked Solzhenitsyn’s writing, though; I liked the subject matter and was impressed with the author's sardonic, unsentimental voice. I read and reread the vivid descripitions of bread, cigarettes and the cold, and the elegant pan-out sequence that ends the novella. One of my favorite such sequences.

Hey guys, remember the Year 2001? All Your Base was a new and funny joke, and music critics thought the Strokes were going to save rock n' roll. Remember when some Islamic terrorist sent out a bunch of anthrax letters to two Democratic Congressmen (who were holding up the PATRIOT Act) and a handful of newsrooms? Remember how that story was pretty much buried, what with the D.C. sniper, the War in Afghanistan and then the War in Iraq? Well, we've finally got the exciting conclusion, and it's a total fucking anticlimax:

National Review have been in a frenzy throwing Barack Obama's name at any comparison to a past failed Democratic contender that will stick. I've seen him namedropped next to George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, even Adlai Stevenson.  There's a standard right-wing narrative about the "wimpy Democrat" who attracts buzz for being a lily-white exemplar of liberal pieties during the primary, and then bombs during the election because at the end of the day, a healthy country full of vitality and national elan will always choose a cowboy over an Indian. And yet, despite having more experience telling this particular story than Mel Gibson has establishing paper-thin pretexts for cinematic revenge, the right seems to be having difficulty in this particular case making it stick to Obama.

Since the invention of radio and TV, Americans have lived in a more fluid cultural environment than has ever existed before. For many of us, televised fictions made up the majority of our childhood observations of life. We grew up with a major source of cultural induction separate from our parents, our educators and our leaders – we may be the first humans to have received cultural education from media alone. A naïve observer might conclude that given this, contemporary Americans should be the most skeptical, intellectual society of people around. So what gives?

It's easy to get bored of political writing. It usually takes the form of airbrushed policy hackwork that you could as easily read on a FAQ or on Wikipedia, or someplace else where you don't have to endure subscription nags or the pretext of topicality. Happily, "Obama, Shaman" by Michael Knox Beran is just the opposite: a piece of unintentional art whose hypotheses reveal so much about the psyche of the author that the subject itself practically vanishes. This isn't about Obama the man. It's about Obama the idea, and why the author is terrified of the Left. Beran conveys the conservative nightmare with surprising, perhaps unintentional expressiveness.

Today, Congressional Democrats stood up defiantly to the President’s bogus spying program. Shouting down cries for mercy by Republicans counting on Comcast for re-election money, Democrats boldly asserted the rule of law and set the matter straight once and for all on the legality of George W. Bush’s illegality. We should be proud of our party. They have ensured that the President can’t just go over the electorate and confer with corporate America to do things expressly forbidden by the law.

Those of us who’ve been confused by John McCain’s wildly contradictory pronouncements on a number of issues can breathe relief that there finally exists a rational explanation for it all: it’s all as John Edwards said. There are two Americas, growing increasingly apart from one another –
and McCain has divided himself in half so he can be President of both.

Note the skillful job he’s done:

- One John McCain opposes overturning Roe v. Wade. The other McCain can’t wait.

- One of them rebuked Jerry Falwell for insinuating that we earned 9/11 by watching Queer As Folk; the other one, obviously, stands firm with Mr. Falwell in opposing the steady erosion of the family.

When people talk about wild flukes of history, they usually mean things like Napoleon, a miniature Frenchman whom the Romantics loved before he was cool and denounced after he crossed over, or the Black Death, which killed lots of people and made life easier for everybody else.

But these weren’t flukes per se, because they weren’t improbable. Stunty despots are one of history's recurring motifs; it shouldn’t surprise us if some of them are good at it. Even lethal epidemic diseases have had stronger innings since the twelfth century. We shouldn’t allow yersinia pestis to use a bombastic name like "Black Death" for itself; go back to Mongolia, you underachieving disease.

No, critics’ lists of favorite flukes of history routinely ignore perhaps the biggest, closest and most catastrophic to all of us. Perhaps it’s so big and so close that it’s difficult to notice, but that’s only because we’ve grown up in the shadow of its enormous girth. I’m speaking of the American postwar economy.

Barack Obama has been noted for the fanatical devotion of many of his followers. For example, on this site, he is often referred to in vaguely messianic terms – "Obama is coming, are you ready to receive his message of institutional change?" His critics have hammered on his lack of experience, as well as the vast advantage in terms of political tenure enjoyed by his competitors. Hillary Clinton is, of course, a venerable Washington insider with a long record of making announcements. John McCain has likely reversed his position on more issues than Obama has even voted on.

Not a week goes by that some ideologue doesn't write a piece about how and exactly why our education system is failing. Who can blame them? Education, unlike (for example) farm subsidies, is an issue with which nearly all of us have a personal connection. It's an emotional issue - and there's nothing an ideologue loves more than finding a hook, some way to hitch his car to the locomotive of public sentiment.

Max Weber once defined states as "human communities that successfully claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." The keyword here is "legitimate." If a scruffy man in a trucker hat were to pistol-whip you and demand your money for "a good cause," you might be justifiably suspicious about his motives, whereas the state does effectively the same thing (with lot of programs that either offer the taxpayer no obvious benefit, or obviously benefit some people while completely ignoring others), we regard the experience as one of the few certainties in life - and have been doing so since the Bronze Age. To a certain extent, we even sympathise and identify with the process. When we read about someone who's going to jail for some particularly clever piece of tax evasion, many of us are pleased that a cheater got pwned.