Wow, Mead is usually a lot more guarded in tone than in this screed. He often seems nostalgic for the heydey of the good ol' blue model, I think he admires the directness of balancing prosperity by redistribution. Maybe here he's expressing his frustration with the people he feels brought that model down.

Do you think he gets that the independent variable is the relative degree of freedom and coercion in a society, not the quality of the people who implement the system? Get that wrong and the quality of the leadership will drop like a rock, along with everything else.

Spot on, Sophist. Citizens have to be personally invested.

Ditto. Only I don't understand the argument for so many terms in the House any better than jarhead. Representatives turn over faster than Senators by design, that being the point of the 2 year term. Maximum 2 terms (ok, 3 if you must, but that's indulgence to ease the pill) for each.

All right already, you're tearing my heart out. I admit it! I'm the one who shot Bambi's mom. There, you satisfied?

Rasputin

Which noble lie?

I can think of no reason why Robert Reich's treason should ever be forgot. (Bill & Hillary's too.)

Personal character is a necessary but not a sufficient qualification to govern. George W. Bush displayed personal character equal to Romney's, yet he turned the progressive ratchet several clicks to the left. Romney would likely have done the same.

Mitt Romney's politics have always been a continuation of his father's, who was deeply opposed to Barry Goldwater. Mitt has never shown any evidence of a departure from his pink-diaper stance, apart from a few clumsy platitudes thrown to the despised "base" during the presidential campaign.

Brent, that's wishful thinking. Mitt Romney is no Ted Cruz. What do you expect he could say that would actually help?

We lost the election because we ran a boring progressive against an exciting one. The people aren't stupid, and both right and left recognized that Mitt Romney is more of the same thing that got us in this fix. (The left likes it, of course.) We'll continue to lose until we play to our strengths instead of our weakness. More Cruz, please - less Romney.

Look, when your choice is between a bag of poison and a bag of festering poison, you walk away. No viable alternative? Then we'll have to make one.

... pinch-souled mediocrities who daily refute the million-monkey theory: there’s not a single CNN comment thread that would generate the poetry of Shakespeare, no matter how long it ran.

Inspired. I'm adding that to my snark bank, thank you James. 

However, I note that as monkeys are pretty much random typists they must be considered Shakespeare-neutral. Those who write for and comment at CNN exhibit hostility to eternal truth and practice an active avoidance of elegance; the million-monkey theory remains viable.

Is it certain that Christie would appoint a Republican?

Of course he wants to ban rifles - the left wants to ban handguns too, but rifles have to come first. Rifles are much more useful as tools of resistance. Can you imagine the minutemen of 1775 without them?

Outstanding. I had just read Mollie's post and I was totally down. Now I'm off to fix dinner with a grin on my face. Way to hang in there, Amy.

The trough is broken and the pigs are running scared. Today being an optimistic day (I'm a pessimist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), I'll bet in 3 years we'll recognize the Romney fiasco, NR's pathetic flailing, and all the other recent Rovian nonsense as the implosion of the GOP establishment. Good riddance.

I think the professor makes the same mistake as do most people without religion, even many religious people with an unexamined conception of divinity. God is not a big person in the sky who tells us what to do. (That's our parents, not God.) God is another order of being entirely.

But to answer the point here it's enough to consider the definition of the terms. (Amazing how often that's the case.) Sin is an act which separates us from the divine. How then can God sin?

Try "a PM with enormous confidence in her military and her nation."

Fred, vulgarities are rarely accurate or descriptive; most fail even as metaphor. Testing the boundaries, are we? Confirming the analysis of libertarian as adolescent, we are.

Shaw was more than a garden-variety socialist, he was an ardent defender of Stalin. Vile filth. Defending that monster implies one is intellectually infantile and morally a pure sociopath. George Bernard Shaw was the scum of the Earth.

We may take his "witticism" as evidence the opposite is true: The trivial differences between American and the Queen's English are the best indicator of the fundamental unity of England and America. It's only the near identity of our languages that permits us to draw meaning and amusement from little variances in vocabulary and grammar.

Not exactly on topic, but I thought I'd mention I found Leebaert to be rather whiny. He shoves his thesis ("We could have done it better") down the reader's throat with a disturbing lack of finesse, balance, and perspective.

He's certainly right, in large measure. But in his lack of sympathy for the historical players he's the archetype of an armchair quarterback. I'm more inclined to the view of Paul Nitze: on the whole, we made a good job of it.

Back on topic, the Cold War got us here (to the extent that any one thing got us here) because it was a primarily ideological fight on many fronts and we had to pick our battles. Our putative allies worked against us more often than with us. We ceded the battle completely on the grounds of the non-technical academy and in the popular culture; the "intellectual" and entertainment segments of our society sided wholly with the enemy.

Now we're a spent force. We beat the main enemy, but not before the cancer metastasized. We're out of moral energy and time, dying of our wounds.