The World Is on the Brink, but What I Really Want to Talk About Is Mini-Moo's

I'm an optimistic guy. I have always thought things would go my way. I think that way about the world, too. Yes, we're going through a period of smallish world leaders pretty much across the board and evil philosophies held by evil men, but I'm thinking that in the mid-run things will be OK if people of goodwill apply their good brains to matters of public importance and let their voices be heard.

But some stuff is definitely getting worse.

Thing is, they are things that should be getting better.

I've already written about the appalling deterioration of AOL Mail with each successive version, which has caused that trailblazing service to plummet into almost complete uselessness.

But what has come closest of all to destroying my faith in the entire Universe is . . . Mini-Moo's.

But even before I tell you how this product has sent me into a descending spiral of Weltschmerz, we must deal with its name, which, as you can see, is a singular possessive: "Mini-Moo's." It designates something that belongs to Mini-Moo -- or is it "a" Mini-Moo? This in itself does not make it a bad name for a product. (Think "McDonald's.") But it leaves us with the issue of how to comfortably refer to the singular and plural of this product. I've researched this.  Some people would form the plural "Mini-Moo'ses," some would say "Mini-Moos," and some would treat the word as an invariant, like "sheep," with the plural the same as the singular. I vote for that one. But it would be better if the manufacturer had just called the product "Mini-Moo." But between you and me, "Mini Moo's" will be treated as both singular and plural. If, heaven forbid, I have to use it as a possessive, I will form it: "Mini-Moos'." 

And there's another problem for the careful writer:  Sometimes it has a hyphen, sometimes it doesn't -- see the photos below.   And its manufacturer, Land O Lakes?  Sometimes it appears as "Land O' Lakes," with the apostrophe indicating that it's a contraction of "of," and sometimes without.  Sheesh.

Mini-Moo's are little containers of half-and-half for use in coffee and other drinks.  They are little corrugated plastic cups covered with foil that is sealed around the rim of the cup.  As noted, they are made by the good people at Land O Lakes, who put that rather fetching Native American princess on all of their products.  Don't ask me why they don't have to be refrigerated.  (I know why, just don't ask me.)  You have seen them in 7-11's and other places where you can grab a quick cup of coffee (my own workplace favors the Mini-Moo's):



Perfectly fine product.  Excellent product, in fact.   Its major competitor, the famous Coffee-mate, is OK, I guess, but it's not half-and-half -- it's "non-dairy."

Now I know most of you have used one of these products or something like it.   When the item is produced, the manufacturer leaves the adhesive off a fair portion of the foil that covers that little tab.  You tease at it,  the foil on the end of the tab lifts a little, you seize the newly-liberated foil tab and pull toward the cup.  The foil top easily peels off and you can then pour that fine concoction into your drink.   The image on a box of these items portrays -- rather more dramatically than it happens in reality -- a successful peel-back and pour:

I have been using Mini-Moo's for years.  I cannot number the consecutive successful peel-and-pours I have executed. 

Until the last several months. 

One day I was preparing my morning coffee at 7-11.  Picked up a Mini-Moo's.  As I had done thousands of times, I held the cup between the thumb and index finger of my left hand.  With the thumb on my right hand, I scraped it lightly against the tip of that little tab, which usually lifts the unattached foil away from the plastic, and, with the thumb still moving, I prepared to bring the index finger of my right hand forward to grasp the little loose foil tab to complete the peelback.

Except that this time, the foil did not separate from the plastic.  It had been glued down all the way down to the tip of the tab. 

I tried it one more time.  Nothing.  Tried to stick a fingernail in to pop that little foil tab off the plastic.  No. 

Threw that one away.  Undoubtedly an outlier.   Possibly rare.  Maybe worth some money, like a misstamped coin.  Began to be sorry I threw it away.

Picked up another one.  Stunned to discover it suffered from the same defect.

After one or two more, I was able to select one that was more conventionally glued, and was only happy that my coffee had not unacceptably cooled in the meantime.

Since then, I have encountered many many Mini-Moo's that are almost impossible to open because the peel-back foil tab is glued all the way down to the end of that little sticking-out tongue. 

One might think this was a conscious decision on the part of the Land O Lakes people.  Perhaps  .  .  .  I don't know, product security?  Except that not all Mini-Moo's suffer from this inability to actually get at the product.  If you grub around in the bowl of cuplets long enough you can find one that's sealed like they all used to be.

No, this is a factory issue.  Either Land O Lakes has some new machinery that slathers on too much fastening stickum, or the quality assurance function at LOL (!) has suffered some unfortunate turnover.

It may seem like a small thing, those little gold-foil cups of half-and-half serially resisting my efforts to get at their creamy nectar. 

But what I want to know is:  If, in this marvelous world of ours where we witness the blessings of progress day after day and year after year, does the decline in the quality of Mini-Moo's after being so good for so long represent some kind of cosmic signal that we have gone as far as we can go?  That it's all downhill from here?  

Or  .  .  .  that I'm just wrong about the fundamental nature of reality?

And that there is, in fact, no chance at all that we can repeal Obamacare?

Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today! (PART 2)

Three more hot thoughts on Politics 2010: 

This Is No Time for Bipartisanship – Let the Bickering Begin; or, Don’t Fear the Gridlock. Most of the American electorate – especially in this election -- doesn’t want the parties to get along. They don’t want the parties to compromise on bad policies. They want good policies. The voters do not agree, of course, on what those good policies are. But we now have a Republican majority in the House, and a Senate that will begin to tilt away from the Obama agenda. And the reason for that majority is because the voters want the Obama/Democratic policies stopped and reversed.

Does anyone suppose that this election was about a craving on the part of voters for bipartisan compromise? No – the majority loathed the results of Democratic hegemony from 2008-2010. They truly want to turn back the clock. They (no, no, not everyone, but the people whose numbers matter) regret their vote for Obama and are counting the days when they can turn him out (unless the Republicans nominate a peckerwood, of which they are surely capable – see later entry re Republicans' peckerwood problem). The Republicans should demand reversal of the last two years of nonsense and should not back down, even at the risk of nothing getting done.

I recall college discussions with pals over whether we would prefer almost any House or Senate candidate we could think of, Republican or Democrat, over a robot who would vote NO on every single vote. (Perhaps exceptions for veto overrides and the like.) Robot always won.

Another exception would be voting yes on certain specialized legislation, such as . . . .

*    *    *

Republicans Must Make Every Effort to Repeal The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” – Policy and Politics.   Stop laughing. Yes, that’s the real name of “Obamacare.” As though it ended up having much to do with patients, protection, affordable care, or care at all. Surely the most reviled single piece of legislation in memory across a broad spectrum of American voters. Legislators could not tell you what was in it. Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass it to find out what was was in it. The bureaucracy it promised was gigantic and staggeringly complex. And in the meantime, we were treated to the vision of government social services collapsing economies and spawning beggar classes throughout Europe who demonstrated against any attempt to turn the tide of ruin.

And, of course, the bill itself was dead on arrival save for the legislative bribery it took to pass it.

And what’s happened since?

   --  Employers are cutting back and, in some cases, dumping health care benefits, and passing on higher expenses to employees. 

   --  Analysis after nonpartisan analysis has demonstrated its almost certain nonviability.

   --  President Obama himself admits that his repeated representations that healthcare costs will decrease under his plans may have been, um, untrue.

Almost nobody believes this monstrosity can work or is even beneficial to all but a few, at gigantic expense. To believe that people will tolerate a shrinking doctor class as MDs' rewards for excellence are slashed, while undeserving patients consume vast resources -- well, there are some who do believe that.   Supporters are scarce, and they seldom emerge from what is almost always a tower of academe or cosseted media position.  With each passing week, public support for the thing reaches a new low.

Obamacare doesn’t need fixing. It needs to die, and quickly, before the prospect of the economic and healthcare horrors it will unleash keep one more employer from adding one more employee.

Republican candidates called for repeal during the campaign, and now they need to demand it. Make the case – get the facts out – and work for repeal without compromise. It is the correct policy move.

But would it be politically prudent? The idea of repeal is very popular right now, and, as noted in my previous article, a large majority of Senators up for re-election in 2012 are Democrats. It is not beyond imagining that a strong Republican leadership could round up the votes required for repeal.

Nevertheless, it might well be a lost cause, since the President could veto any attempt at repeal, and Republicans are a Senate minority.  A majority for repeal might not be the necessary majority for override.  And, as we have seen with the recent tax agreement, there are Democrats out there (in this case, socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont) who will filibuster.

Your Cool Hot Center advises Republicans: Let them filibuster. Let them vote against repeal. Let them vote to sustain the President’s veto. As long as you fight the good fight and present a factual, supportable case for repeal – not the peckerwood case, but the sound economic, moral, and policy case, perhaps while acknowledging the need for reform in certain areas – you will be rewarded in November 2012.   If you fight the good fight and lose, all it tells the electorate is that the housecleaning of 2010 was incomplete, and will energize the base for further corrections in 2012.

And, Republicans, if you don’t fight that fight, if you just nibble at the corners of Obamacare, if you try only to “reform” the beast, then you will have justified those souls who are convinced that principle counts for nothing in Washington, that anyone who goes there is inevitably compromised, must go along to get along, in derogation of the best interests of the Republic.

It’s gotta go. It or you.

*     *     *

No, I Don’t Miss George Bush.  And I don’t feel sorry for Wade Phillips.

PART 2: President Obama, What We Mean by "Intelligence," and What He Means by "Hope"

In  Part 1 of this article, appearing a few posts ago, -- Your Cool Hot Center had hoped to persuade you that our very smart President's policymaking proceeds from abstract thinking, from the application of theory, not deductions from observations of the world as it is.  Put another way, he governs by deduction -- reasoning from the general (theory and ideology) to the particular (legislation, regulation, and policy) rather than by induction (observing facts and reasoning upwards to the theory or general belief, from which policy then proceeds). 

The theories from which the President proceeds are predominantly found in the writings of the academic left.  The theories are highly idealistic and prescriptive, even utopian; they arise mostly a priori from the ways that liberals would like the world to be.  Some of them are highly sophisticated and subtle and have gained a wide following among faculty and students.  A lot of those students are now stalwarts of this administration and the Democratic Party.  The influence of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, about which I've briefly written before, is central. 

People who have the ability to think abstractly, and who do it well, are regarded as intelligent.  (I myself regard them in that way.)  In formulating his policies, President Obama has relied on academics who think this way and share the President's preference for abstraction. 

And that's the point I want to make here: "high intelligence" -- the ability to think abstractly and reason from creative a priori assumptions -- is a very valuable and, I think, a pretty rare thing.  It is a critical part, if not the beginning, of almost all scientific and cultural advance.  It can be inspired; it can be laboriously thought out.   But we only know if that smart brain work has reached the right result when reasoning from abstract assumptions is tested by experiment. Brilliant or difficult thoughts may turn out to be false when they're tested against actual observation.  

This is a great way to run science.   It's a great way to run a university where all that brainy work product can get debated and tested and exposed and tried and, with any luck, let loose only when it's ripe.

It's a damned bad way to run a country.  

Barack Obama is the first one to try it as his fundamental basis of governing.  An exception might be Franklin Roosevelt and his Keynesian spending on public employment, but Roosevelt faced crises that make those identified by today's political leaders (not just Dems) look ridiculous.  And it didn't work. (Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was not published until 1936, but his ideas were widely circulated -- including direct presentation to Roosevelt -- in years prior.) 

To President Obama, the United States is his laboratory. He's got a fistful of theories from the academics he admires and he's trying them out.   He has no particular reason to believe they'll work.  But that's what the theory says, that's what the smart guys believe should be tried to achieve social justice and world peace, so that's what he's going to do.

And if we lab rats don't like what it's doing to our health care, our bank accounts, our standing abroad, and our freedom generally -- well, we just don't understand the theory.  Too dumb.  You can feel the President's impatience, his dismissiveness, when challenged.  As though there's little point in dealing with present reality when his whole point is that he is the author of a new reality, arriving any day now.

That this smart guy is failing with these theories will, I think, somewhat change the way the public perceives "intelligence" generally.  It may still admire the brilliant men and women of the academy, business, the arts, but it will no longer think of their gift in quite the same way.  The IQ required for the creation of lovely theories and the corralling of abstract concepts into something understandable is not the kind of "intelligence" required to get a fractured, diverse, freedom-loving people all headed in the same direction, and in identifying and solving real problems.  Not the problems imagined by social theorists (and, regrettably, sometimes by agenda- and grant-driven scientists), but the ones that really exist for folks generally. 

That kind of leadership requires some empathy for one's constituents and some understanding of their real concerns, not the pretend crises ginned up by social scientists and promoted by the journalists who graduated from their liberal arts programs. 

Which is not to say that effective leaders are not smart.  They are.  But consider this list of modern-era presidents I believe most people would regard as effective, whether or not they agreed with the agenda:  .  Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson.    (So I'm excluding both Bushes, Carter, Obama, Kennedy (too short a tenure), and Nixon's on the bubble.)  You may think these guys were inspired, or you may think they were just politically crafty operators, or you may think they were lucky --  but a list of the top three virtues of any one of them would not include "unusually high intelligence."   Because we don't think of their particular gift of practical leadership in that way. 

Again, my point:  Obama changes this.  In the future we are going to be much more skeptical of the claims for intelligence of persons whose smarts appear mainly derived from book-larnin', and elevate our regard for the cerebral circuitry of men and women who have actually slugged it out, actually gotten a big batch of humans to change things, accomplish something.

*   *   *

One last thing.

When the Obama presidency is viewed as largely experimental, we gain a better understanding of what he means by "hope."  He has used that phrase a lot, most notably in the title of his (?) book, The Audacity of Hope.  Now, when he used that phrase, he was addressing a population that, by and large, did not feel itself in a "hopeless" condition.  (Oh, there were the Bush Derangement Syndrome people whose frantic loathing of the former president may have made them think they were without hope.  Those people don't count.)


So when he used that word, he could not have meant that he was offering hope where none existed.  I think he meant -- and I'm not making a joke here -- that he had in mind to try out all these pet theories of the academic left that no politician who cared about reelection would ever attempt, and hoped that the marvelous advantages that they predicted would come to pass.  (You may recall my theory that President Obama doesn't care so very much about re-election.)

We're Barack Obama's experiment.  He's "hoping" it will work.  (In fact, we'd all better "hope.")   That he's performing it on what is, for all its present problems, still the most successful and prosperous and free political system the world has ever seen -- that's the "audacity" part.

Intelligence is a wonderful thing and it is wonderful that we have a President who possesses it.   After I published Part 1 I heard from a several people who disagreed with my premise that Barack Obama is smart.   How could anybody so smart advance such dumb policies?    Well, again -- that's my point:   People we regard as intelligent have as a characteristic that they speculate  a lot -- there's a lot of what ifs  in their thinking.   Thinking that the President is dumb because his policies are having bad results or are poorly explained to the people they affect underestimates the guy and misidentifies the source of his problem. 

Barack Obama is a gifted, intelligent person steeped in the speculations of other intelligent people.   But we are now seeing the tragedy of his inexperience and, it must be said, his laziness.  His thinking is starved by his not knowing -- or, perhaps less charitably, by his willful ignoring.  (It's widely noted how prickly he gets when he's questioned about facts.)   He doesn't care.  The results of the leftist policies he has gotten the truly pathetic Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to bully through Congress will be the new facts, his experimental data.  He hopes his experiments give the results the people he admires have predicted.

Think back.  Remember your most arrogant and ideological (which is to say, theory-bound) professor.  Now imagine him or her as President.

President Obama, What We Mean by "Intelligence," and What He Means by "Hope" -- PART 1

Whew.  A pretty grand heading, that.  My usual course in these entries is to mosey through bloggish reflections and eventually say what I want to say.  I thought you might be grateful if I got to the damned point.  So: 

(1) President Obama's high intelligence is connected to his being the first President whose policies are dominated -- not just influenced, but almost completely swamped -- by concept, theory, and ideology, and scarcely at all by political observation (or, put less kindly, by facts).

(2) His presidency will subtly alter the popular view of "intelligence," if not its clinical definition.

(3) Understanding the President's intelligence helps us understand what he means by "hope."

*     *     *

I regard Barack Obama as an extremely intelligent person.  More, I regard him as the most intelligent President we have had since -- I don't know.  Long time.  

The objective evidence of this is considerable.  Although I have seen suggestions that some of his publications are not entirely his own, one does not become the President of the Harvard Law Review from his beginnings without some serious smarts.  His genuine eloquence from the podium is widely acknowledged.  It is true that personal charm -- or skillful BS -- has a lot to do with conveying the impression of intelligence.  There is also the uncertain effect of informal affirmative action.  But I'm a believer.  The guy is brainy.  He's sold me, anyway.

Barack Obama as President of Harvard Law Review (holding copy)

It's one of the reasons I wasn't all that bent when he was elected.  I heard the warnings of the Hannities and O'Reillys and their ilk, and I believed them, but I was hopeful that, like other ideologues elected to high office or appointed to the bench, he would govern more from the middle, even if somewhat left of the middle.  I thought that, like the Clintons, he would apply the political shrewdness he had shown in his political rise.   He certainly portrayed himself as willing to cast off the extreme partisanship that had characterized political discourse in recent decades.  Alas, the electorate's revulsion over Republican rule resulted in bulletproof Democratic legislative majorities, and any need he may have felt to rein in his impulses dissolved.  We should have listened to Sean and Bill and their ilk.

So I find myself asking -- how can such a smart guy be advancing such dumb policies, and saying such dumb things, and worse, things that he knows to be untrue whose untruth is easily shown and widely noted?

Ah, Steverino, you say, you believe yourself to be a smart guy and therefore you believe that any ideas that conflict with your own could only be the result of dumb thinking.  I have considered this possibility and, since it's my website, I reject it.

No, actually, I don't reject it.  I do think that the center and right and Tea Partiers, putting aside their occasionally obnoxious rhetoric and methods, are correct in their rejection of almost everything this administration has advanced. 

But my point in this post is not to prove that Barack Obama is a fraud.  He is, but the fraud is not that he has falsely conveyed an impression of intelligence.  I concede that his braininess is established.  What I want to explore is what we mean when we say that someone is "intelligent."  The President is very intelligent, but I don't want him anywhere near a position of civil authority.

Why is this?  I think it has something to do with how we understand -- what we mean by -- "intelligence."

I am fortunate in having had the opportunity to attend and teach at some of the most highly-regarded educational institutions in the United States.  I found myself frequently awed by the raw intellect of many of the men and women who taught and attended there (and simultaneously wondered what I was doing there).  Some were touched by genius.  But I recall a remark made by William F. Buckley in a debate at Harvard:  "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty." 

The measurement and meaning of intelligence is a vast topic and not one in which I have any technical background.  But there is a lay understanding of what we mean when we say someone is "highly intelligent," is there not?  And in general, don't we admire those people?  On the other hand, a lot of highly intelligent people -- not all, maybe not even most -- have some characteristics that correlate with their intelligence that are not so attractive:  dreaminess; neglect of the person; arrogance; difficulty in communicating; and -- here we go -- an preference for the abstract to the concrete.

What has all of this to do with the President?  He recently made a statement which summed up for me the reasons I have come to find the course of his Presidency so disturbing.  At a speech at the American University School of International Service a couple of weeks ago, he reportedly said:  "Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith."  Even allowing the President some rhetorical license here, it's a very revealing remark, and a silly one.  Being an American has almost everything to do with birth.  The very first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads:  "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."  

While the President knows this, he doesn't really feel its truth.  He far prefers the comfort of the abstract thought that America is not a chunk of real estate with borders, but rather a bundle of concepts that have something to do with freedom and equality and abundance and other fine things everyone should experience.  And if you value those things, if you have faith in those Americanish things, well, then you must be an American.  

It is similar to what John F. Kennedy meant when he said "Ich bin ein Berliner" -- that is, all people who love freedom are, in a sense, citizens of Berlin who had been confined by the Berlin Wall.   President Kennedy was speaking conceptually, and in his hands it was a powerful metaphor and a signal moment of the Cold War.

But President Obama wasn't just offering an attractive metaphor like Kennedy was.  He didn't just say that people who have faith in American values are Americans, a pleasant but not terribly helpful thought in the current border controversy.  He said that being born here had nothing to do with being an American.  Unlike President Kennedy's graceful formulation, President Obama's treats the metaphor as reality by expressly rejecting the fact that where you are born has anything to do with being an American. 

This is how he thinks.  Not troubled by rules, constitutions, statutes, traditions, voting.  Very impressed by academic concepts like income redistribution, enforced leveling of social status, racial preference, downplaying Islamist terror, the merits of international kowtowing, and, in general, "social justice" in all of its uncertain outcomes.  (I've commented on this unfortunate mindset here and here and here.)

Thus:  The President, like lots of intelligent people, and especially like those we regard as the very most intelligent, is more comfortable with the abstract than with the concrete, with theories than with the uncertainty of their real world application.

PART 2 of these speculations will appear in a few days.

Oh My Lord God Almighty -- It Just Dawned on Me That the BP Blowout Could Save Obama's Bacon -- or, It Takes a Spillage

I woke up one recent morning with a start, possessed of one of those intuitions that you only get when you’re still half-asleep. You know, that brief period in the semidark when you’re beginning to think clearly but all of the assumptions that encrust your daily life haven’t yet reattached themselves to your judgment and your mind works about as freely as it ever does.

And while I lay there, cursing the poodles for whining to be let out for some leakage of their own, I realized that there is at least a fair chance that the BP Blowout could save the Obama Presidency.

There are several preliminary matters to consider:

     • The accident was not his fault, any more than Katrina was Bush’s fault.

     • Like Bush’s response to Katrina, Obama’s response to the Blowout has been diffident and tepid. But rescuing people from catastrophic floods is something that governments have known how to do, and the Bush administration did not distinguish itself. Obama’s dithering does not upset us to the same degree, because governments are not expected to know how to fix blowouts, and nobody at all knows how to solve this problem.

     • The right and the left are taking shots at Obama over the Blowout because they’re mad at him about other things. With good reason, by their lights, but their criticism of him over the Blowout looks like piling on, because of (1) and (2). (But I must say, all the golfing and partying does betray a certain tone-deafness in this guy.)

OK, so preliminarily, we start out with a certain shakiness in the current unhappiness with the Obama administration over the handling of the Blowout. Add to the weakness of the charges against Obama on this score the following:

     • The Blowout has crowded off the front pages – or at least to below the fold – bipartisan and public dismay with the poor policy decisions for which President Obama and the congressional democrats are responsible. When was the last time you heard anything about the health care bill? The latest OMB, CBO, and HHS cost projections? Employers cutting group plans? They’d curl your hair if it ever uncurled after watching children running screaming from tar balls advancing on their favorite vacation beach.

     • Similarly, the public preoccupation with the Blowout disguises the Administration’s continued implementation of its extreme statist agenda through agency regulations, which has only accellerated in recent months.

     • The nomination of liberal Supreme Court Justices was one of conservatives' greatest fears during the presidential campaign, and in recent years nominations have been flash points for highly partisan debate.  But the confirmation process of mediocre ideological-cipher-but-demonstrably-rather-left-of-center Elena Kagan  has excited relatively little media interest.

     • The Republicans are displaying their customary lack of strategic vision in their reaction to the Blowout and the Administration's handling of it.  Their efforts to direct attention to the longer-lasting damage the White House is visiting on the nation through bad policy are lukewarm and diffuse.  Neither the Republicans nor the Tea Party Express have any bright ideas on what to do about the Blowout, and they (and the right in general) are perceived by the public as supportive of Big Oil and, in particular, drilling for crude offshore and in other exotic places.

     • Sooner or later – surely before Election Season 2012 rolls around – the Blowout will have been mostly solved and the cleanup will be well underway. I also suspect we will find, as we did with the Amoco Cadiz and the Exxon Valdez, that, horrendous as the damage was, the sea and shores will heal more quickly than predicted. And just as Obama generated bad feelings with his early failure to do anything about the Blowout, he will get credit for the greatly improving situation. He will have earned neither the obloquy nor the credit, but no matter – the credit will come his way during a time when he will be looking to trade on it for re-election.

So I don’t think the Blowout will be Obama’s Katrina. I think it may well be closer akin to his Operation Desert Storm, a distraction from his failures and weaknesses whose eventual less-fatal-than-imagined resolution will relieve the public to such an extent that it will credit the President simply for standing nearby.

I concede: The foregoing speculation gives President Obama credit for some political foresightedness – he can’t continue to make appalling high-profile policy blunders between White House parties and hope no one will notice.

But as I rest my head on the pillow at the end of a long day, poodles crated for the night after their final wringing-out, the Memsahib switches to the news and I see that Attorney General Holder is suing Arizona for enforcing federal immigration laws, that President Obama has sailed way past President Bush in number of golf rounds played (including almost a dozen since the Blowout), and that they let Joe Biden out to make another speech. The day falls away and slumber's approach is hastened by the sweetdream thought that President Obama’s post-Presidential memoir will be titled My Term.