One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time.

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism.

It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.