That was precious. I think you would agree that Americans are more concerned with after tax income than the amount of tax that goes to government, no? Isn't that what conservatives are always arguing? That it doesn't matter how much rich people are getting, we should concentrate on how well people are doing by comparison to what they were doing?

So, no, tax cuts are not an end in and of themselves, although your saying so does speak volumes about how far down the ideological rabbit hole supply siders have fallen. As for the 'concern for the country', well, you will have to account for brownie's heck of a job, going to war with the army we have even if that means they get killed because we didn't equip them properly or leaving them to rot in derelict hospitals when they get back maimed and with brain damage all while contractors that still pay the vice president literally 'lose' billions of dollars in tax payers money. Real concern there, and that's not even counting the concern for the country's character inherent in co-opting all federal government functions to serve narrow partisan interests. That gives us something very much in common with stalwart nations like Zimbabwe fyi. I could go on. I won't.

I wait with baited breath for your serious introspection over how your judgment could have gone so wrong.

PS It was you who intimated that the country had 'erred' by overlooking Clinton's 'character issues', not I. Not that when those same character issues were found in the Republican nominee post-Clinton there wasn't plenty of overlooking coming from your side, but that's another issue.

And I don't mean the potential election any of the Presidential candidates, even though I support Obama. What's exceptional is the feeling that we are at the end of the line. Contrary to popular opinion, we have not even begun to realize the economic hardships we have accrued in the last 25 years of historic excesses (to say nothing of the confluence of those excesses with a demographic time bomb). And this, together with the feeling that commercialist cynicism has reached its saturation point- that it cannot get any more commercial or any more cynical, and that we are already feeling the impulse to purge- may lead to a great revulsion by the American people. In the months and years ahead, things will change more quickly and dramatically then we have seen in generations. As I see it, the Presidential candidate that becomes the President amidst this will be its manifestation, not its catalyst.

Meanwhile, Bill Kristol and Sean Hannity amongst other testaments to the egregious cultural excesses of our country in this time will in the not-so-distant-future take their places amongst other ignominious characters in the dustbin of history. Future anthropologists will indeed have a field day, regaling their students with the outrageous and fictitious-sounding if true stories of old.

This, as I see it, is inevitable.

This is very much of a piece: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120873309012529689.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

"Elitism" is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has "a dash of Harvard disease," proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here's a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton's own sins, when these are our standards? Didn't he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

The sweat of laid off workers is a nice touch.

Before I go I can't resist a quick descent into the circular firing squad that is the Democratic primary to mention that I find it remarkable that Obama's trivial association with Ayers has become more of an issue than Hillary's tenure on the Board of Walmart ever was. For all the complaints about the unfair treatment Hillary has received by the press, it never extended its personality/caricature based unfair coverage, which abounded, to this MAJOR issue, at least for a Democratic primary. This, even as Walmart was at its union busting, health-care denying, employee abusing, supplier outsourcing pinnacle when she was on its board (it was also in full swing of its against-women discriminating, though she gets something of a pass there for at least trying, if ineffectually, to do something about it). It's just one more example of how frivolity is paramount to the point where it literally consumes all other things of substance. The ABC debate is increasingly feeling like a cap-stone on all this...