This is where the son is like the father: each has plunged in a losing streak and self-destructed before God and everybody. What we are actually witnessing is a genetically-coded second act in which the doomed Bush the Younger fails to make it through the second term, something the father fortuitously avoided. There need be no crazed assassin perched among the gargoyles, no bogeyman suicide bomber, and not even a successful impeachment movement. This man is likely to either walk away or be carried away from his office due to a quite literal meltdown somewhere in the midst of the next two years. He has run out of steam and it's been entertaining and instructive and its purpose has been served, but it is not fitting for people to watch what most certainly was about to be visited on the father served backhand on the son. As much as I dislike the man (and it is hard to imagine words that could get that level of disgust across to the gentle reader) I don't think it is going to be pretty to anyone when he folds up like an old empty wineskin.

This is a prayer, then: that the American public is spared the most disturbing parts of the coming unraveling of an American President, because its coming is as certain as the rainy season here in Southern California; and while I am quietly thankful that it will have ended and closed this bizarre chapter in our history, the image of our President staggering away from the wreckage of his wax-winged, rudderless apparatus buggers the imagination and even as it frees up the exhausted American psyche it will also cause a collective urge to look away in nauseated dismay. The necessary and inevitable changing of the guard will be remembered much as the septic, slow dying of William McKinley: a stomach-churning soul cleansing for which we have all, in one way or another, asked or wished. Watching it may not be as fun as it seemed in theory.

God grant us the sanity and sense to never again elect to office a man not capable of at the very least playing off the enormous pressures of the job nor resisting the temptation to see himself as some sort of savior of a family name not worth the sparse supply of brain cells it would have taken.

"'Even assuming [Noer] was relying on good data, all it is is information from the past, which is that women's expectations rose while husbands' behaviors did not change,' said Hirshman."

Everything is information from the past. All prison revolts take place inside prisons. Noticing that Noer might be an idiot does nothing to advance the state of society. Our former "revolutionaries" sit back and make sanguine observations about information from the past, based on their own past experiences. Fabulous.