I know nothing stays the same
But if you're willing to play the game
Its coming around again
- Carly Simon

"There is nothing in life
more disenchanting than attainment"
- Charles Dickens

Fox and friends have begun their inevitable withdrawal from a McCain candidacy that they were never particularly thrilled with in the first place. So, their arrival at an untenable position vis a vis the fumbling curmudgeon is not as sad an occasion for them as it might seem.

Hannity and Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin and Beck and Dobbs and O'Reilly and the rest of the rabble from the virulent right may oppose Obama. Ideologically speaking, it’s virtually obligatory. But, naysaying (like bartending and undertaking,) is a recession-proof industry and, professionally speaking, an Obama presidency augers happy days for the BloviNation.

As any critic will tell you, it is actually rather difficult to be simultaneously supportive and entertaining. It's boring and predictable. (There are, after all, only so many ways to say wonderful, and fawning is so un-ferocious.) It is, however, not only easy—but thrillingly delightful, to find fault, mock, excoriate, impugn, belittle, etc.

All you need is a thesaurus, an attitude and a willing audience.

As Bill Mahar says, "Politics is show business for ugly people." In this vein, the next few years is starting to look like the rebirth of vaudeville.

For now, the other shoe seems to be dropping. For better or worse, McCain's bid for the White House has gone off the rails, and there doesn't seem to be enough time or talent to fix it.

The good news (comparatively speaking) is that Obama will now likely win. He’s young and smart and utterly unbeholden to the power structure of the last half-century. Indeed, the age of Nixon is finally drawing to a close. For those who wanted change—it’sa comin’.

The bad news is that we are heirs to a paroxystic débâcle—real, wrath-of-God type stuff.

Taking the long view of American history, this appears almost almost preordained. It seems that, about every seventy years or so, the shit hits the fan in America like a baggage handler getting pureed through a jet engine.

The 1780s saw a Revolutionary aftermath. The 1860's saw a Civil War and the first presidential assassination. The 1930s saw Great Depression and the winds of a coming World War. Cyclically speaking, the wheel is coming around again—and Barack Hussein Obama is about to hit an historical jackpot.

For the last eight years, everything has gone exactly wrong, and the resultant troubles are not yet fully ripe. By January, our next president will be as a homeowner who just signed off on a house with bad plumbing, a leaky roof, and a crumbling foundation, in a neighborhood populated by meddlesome, angry neighbors and monitored by sadistic and unrelenting building inspectors.

The WingNutocracy has never trucked in truth. So, even though blame for the majority of our difficulties can rightly be laid at the feet of the outgoing administration, the task of reclamation left for the next administration will be bedeviled by derision and obstruction. Count on it. All this "Country First" hooey means nothing where ratings are involved.

In any event, the navigation of the coming shitstorm shall fall to Obama. With any luck, George W. Bush has been a reincarnated admixture of George III, James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover. This would make Obama a Washington-cum-Lincoln-cum-FDR.

It may be audacious, but we can always hope.