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

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine.

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.

Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.