God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

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I earlier mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer, unfortunately diminished, shopworn, and clichéd because its simplicity proved ideal for the non-denominational Christian commercial dimwitted piety market. It's become the text to carve or glue to the Praying Hands knockoff.

But it seems to me that it is the organizing principle of the moderate, centrist politician. It expresses exactly the principle of the orthodox political strategist. Here, "God" is the candidate.

Alas! the devil's in the details, such that it's hard to say whether the inspiration for the prayer was divine, or diabolical.

It's beyond question that Obama has energized a large constituency with signs and wonders of change in certain domains-- first of all, in the radical overhaul of campaigning and fundraising; in this area, there is real bottom-up participation and (I gather) an enthusiastic conviction that Obama is indeed an innovative agent of Change.

And there are certainly changes in campaign tactics; I've heard Obama fans exulting at how Obama fouls off one wingnut bean ball after the other, instead of standing there and getting plunked like previous Dem candidates. He'll wear out the pitchers, then swing for the fences! And, for a change, this one isn't to good to show flying spikes, or run full-tilt into the catcher. Go, Obama!

So the candidate and the campaign are certainly generating Changes that are felt like the Sun in "Here Comes the Sun", emanating from inside the campaign organization.

But how does this reconcile with the Unchanging mendacity, duplicity, hypocrisy, and prevarication that even a Reform Candidate by another name reserves the right to employ as needed-- when crowded by circumstances, as Twain often put it?

I muse thus because I just reviewed a laughably asinine response to a comment about Obama's strange new mock-Presidential Seal at HuffPo. I was struck by a comment in that thread from a businesslike Democratic pragmatist, who unsentimentally argued that the realpolitik is that Obama is wisely exploiting the frustrated civil-libertarians in his base in order to put his bona fides as a Staunch Defender of Homeland Security and Unremitting Foe of Terrorists beyond question.

So, whatever we may think or feel about it is "objectively" irrelevant.

The commenter felt that anyone who understood the first thing about politics would pick up the play, and not get their undergarments in such a twist. If you don't understand how the game is played, keep yer yaps shut!

It's like the Cop Show cliché where the cops beat the hell out of the undercover mole when they bust the gang, so it'll look good. It makes for a good collar, and safeguards the mole from reprisal-- a win/win outcome! What's a few bruises or a broken rib?

In this analogy, civil-libertarians are the mole. Obama is the cop who beats us up. All in a day's work; gotta take one for the team sometimes.

You may call this what you like, but it is most certainly not Change I Can Believe In.

My apologies, Hume's Ghost-- though in all fairness, the formatting of the Update is a bit unclear; I assumed that the bit in italics including the John Adams quote was you, and that Glenn added the Jefferson quote.

I'll stop payment on Glenn's check at once. ;)

Worse yet, it's not unforseeable that at the rate we're accelerating down this slippery slope into the totalitarian gulch, we may ultimately come to envy the terrorists for their freedoms!

And how f***ed up is that?

I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...