I was pleased by President Obama's speech in Cairo today. Many of the things I'd praise about the speech, which had many fine moments, will be praised elsewhere, so I'll confine myself to one detail of its purpose and of the expectations about it.

I've already seen some reaction from fairly hard-line Islamist figures rejecting Obama's gestures of reconciliation and mutuality. I have also seen some reaction that is surprised by that rejection, despite how deeply unsurprising it is, and even reaction implying that Obama's outreach has failed, and that his approach was "naive," and so forth.

The leader of Hamas isn't buying what Obama's selling? Of course not. He's the leader of Hamas. No speech was going to change his mind. And Obama knows it. The speech is not meant to do that.

Yes, the speech presents itself as an invitation to a new beginning of cooperation, and on some level it is. But Obama knows that anti-Americanism won't vanish overnight and be replaced by a new pro-American attitude. That is his stated aspiration, not his genuine rhetorical goal. And anyone who expects him to magically convert all of America's bitterest enemies into allies tomorrow is being naive.

The speech is a beginning: the beginning of a debate. The goal of Obama's address was not to win over America's enemies through his personal eloquence. The goal was to put America's enemies in the Islamic world at a disadvantage in their argument with America's supporters. The leadership of Hamas might come around someday, at least in part, but only in response to political realities on the ground, because other groups are gaining traction against them. Obama wants to lend their opponents some rhetorical traction. Obama is not going to win the hearts or minds of Hamas or Hezbollah. But he might put Muslims who share America's goals in a better position to win their own political battles with Hezbollah.

This is a version of what Andrew Sullivan calls Obama's "rope-a-dope" strategy. Obama reaches out an eminently reasonable and conciliatory hand to his opponents, they slap it away, and they make themselves look petty and unreasonable in the process. He's done it to the Republicans over and over again. Now he's done it to hard-liners in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and it's their turn to look bad. Yes, some hard-liners have already denounced Obama's speech. Obama's not interested in them. He's interested in peeling away their supporters. And he doesn't need to do all of the peeling today. This is the fabled Obama long game.

Obama chose to tell some unpopular truths to his audience, and he had a lot of good reasons. It burnished his credibility, as someone who was talking to the Islamic world honestly about the difficult things. It gave listeners a solid outlines of the points that weren't negotiable (with the unstated reminder that the Muslim world will never get a more sympathetic President of the United States, and are looking at the best deal they can expect). But just as importantly, it gave anti-American Islamists a list of talking points that are probably untenable. Obama pushed back on Holocaust denial and calls for Israel's utter destruction, which are real and toxic positions that have to be engaged. But Obama set up the engagements on his terms. If America's opponents want to put all of their chips down on Holocaust denial fantasies, I suspect Obama is looking forward to accepting that bet.

Yes this is a beginning. It's the beginning of an intense argument, in the Muslim world, about Obama and his speech. That argument will be won and lost by Muslims themselves, and not by Obama or any other Westerner, and it has already begun. But Obama has chosen the grounds for the debate, and he's given his supporters the best advantage he could.

The response to Dr. George Tiller's death has made me nearly as angry, and more shocked, than even the murder itself made me. It is appalling to see any public figure, no matter how foolish and corrupt, equivocate by condemning a murder but calling the victim of that murder a "monster." It is disgusting to read Megan McArdle's double-voiced paean to vigilantism, which compares the killer's victim to a Nazi, or William Saletan's bankrupt and sophomoric exercise in moral equivalency. Everyone, or almost everyone, makes a token acknowledgment that murder is still a crime, and purports to disapprove. But with that brief obligation dispensed, people evidently feel free to vilify the dead man, the victim of the crime, in the most grotesque and slanderous way, comparing him to Josef Mengele or Pol Pot. The vile O'Reilly actually delivers his pro forma denunciation in a transparently insincere voice, signaling that while "Kansas law" allows what Tiller did, O'Reilly has nothing but contempt for that law. Then he proceeds, much more warmly, to repeat his libelous smears on Tiller. Then O'Reilly complains of unfair treatment by his critics. Someone has been murdered in a church, and O'Reilly claims that he, O'Reilly, is the victim.

I've never really believed in the decline of our civilization until now. What could be more barbarous, less humane, less civil?

Beyond the indecency of speaking this way while Tiller's widow and family are still grieving, and beyond the rank dishonesty of the smears against him, it is shocking to hear people continue the very demonization that got the man murdered in the first place. Dr.Tiller is discussed, even in his death, as a monster, as someone whose motives are incomprehensibly malevolent, as someone who should not be imagined as real or human. They mouth pious regret for his death, but do their best to erase the life he actually led from the public memory.

Worst of all, they complain about being held accountable for the inflammatory rhetoric that made the crime seem possible, and then sensible, and finally even laudable, to the deranged gunman. They compare a man to genocidal tyrants, and when he is killed they compare him to genocidal tyrants again, and they are shocked, shocked, that anyone would suggest they ought to have spoken differently.

O'Reilly presents, essentially, the Louis Farrakhan defense: He's not responsible for Malcolm X's murder, and should not be blamed for it simply because he was publicly preaching that the Malcolm should be killed. Farrakhan felt he was being unjustly persecuted, too.

O'Reilly, and the other pro-lifers who complain that they are being viewed unfairly, are wrong. They are not being unfairly blamed. They are free from criminal penalty, and from civil suit, because they did not participate in the crime itself. They are free from any censorship of their speech, even their intemperate speech, because they did not explicitly urge the murder. The freedom with which they trash and defile Tiller's memory proves how far from any real fear of censorship they are.

The essence of their position is that it is unfair for others to judge their speech. They will be permitted to say whatever they like, however dishonest or intemperate, however likely to encourage the violent fringe. But it is unfair for listeners to make a judgment about their honesty, their temper, their morals or their wisdom. For the rest of us to listen to them and decide for ourselves is, apparently, a violation of their freedom. Accusing people of murder and comparing them to Hitler is an exercise of their rights. Calling them dangerous demagogues for saying those things is a violation of their rights.

O'Reilly and Carlson and the leaders of Operation Rescue should not be punished by law, or  by censorship. But they should be blamed. They have earned an enormous amount of blame. They are free to pose as moral authorities; the rest of us are not obligated to believe it. They can say whatever horrible and morally depraved things they please. But no one has to pretend to like it.

This morning I hit upon a strategy for reading the unceasing supply of news articles in which bailout-dependent bankers grumble about the profound injustice of having to live on their salaries after bringing Western civilization to the brink of economic ruin.

I read the bankers' complaints in the voice of Elmo from Sesame Street.

Am I proud of this? No. But it's the only way I can read this nonsense without biting the furniture. And I find it matches the tone and content of the welfare-bankers complaints quite well:

"Elmo not be able to live on 75,000 dollars a year! Elmo have mortgage on summer house! Because New York dirty!"

It's childish, naturally, and stupid. I can't actually recommend that you do the same thing. But it does get me through the day.

One day I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, while another passenger stood at the window with her daughter, trying to show her the airplane we were about to board. But the little girl couldn't see it. See could see the fueling trucks on the tarmac, she could see the baggage carts and the airport staff on the ground. But she couldn't see the airplane itself.

"Where's the plane?" the little girl kept asking. "Where's the plane?"

The problem was scale. The child couldn't recognize the shape of the aircraft standing there in plain view, because she was looking for a much smaller shape. She simply didn't have any precedent, or any cognitive model, for an object of the size she was looking at, so she couldn't connect the sight of metal or paint or tire rubber into the larger outline of the plane. She didn't link the bits she was seeing into a picture of the whole because she didn't expect and couldn't imagine that such a whole might exist.

Lately I've been thinking about that little girl every day. She's a good illustration of how we process information, as human beings, and of how difficult the big and unexpected can be to process. When confronted with something too large and too strange, we can fail to apprehend it at all.

Most of our handling of the financial crisis boils down to one real question: who has seen the plane yet, and who has not? There have been furious daily stories in the news about this or that detail of the large, terrible shape overshadowing us. But it becomes increasingly clear in each day's news that most of the players, and certainly most of the journalists, haven't managed to perceive that shape, or even its shadow.

A CEO of a major bailed-out institution who can not only defend exorbitant employee compensation but get self-righteous about those employee's deserts has not seen the plane yet. CNBC pundits trying to defend their own performance and scapegoat others have not seen the plane. Congressmen who obsess about spending cuts or even spending freezes during a massive economic contraction really have not seen the plane. It's not simply denial, although there is a measure of that. It's a basic and all-too-normal failure to apprehend the largest and most important part of the landscape, precisely because it is so incredibly large.

Most people, with the normal human mix of benign and selfish intentions, are trying to keep doing the things that worked for them, and even seemed virtuous to them, before the situation changed, because they haven't yet grasped that this is a new, and very different situation. There need not always be a Goldman Sachs; entitlement spending is not the biggest fiscal challenge the nation faces at the moment; CNBC's business model is not necessarily viable any more. It takes a certain amount of time to grasp fundamental change, perhaps especially for the experts who are trained to deal with intricate details of a large and commonly-understood model. It takes longer to see the plane if you're trained at analyzing tire treads, and you're looking for a car. And once you've seen the plane, you have to begin the long, difficult process of thinking about what it means.

It's very clear from his banking plan that Tim Geithner, for all his expertise, has yet to see the plane. Barack Obama has not seen it clearly either. That's not good at all. Obama planned his campaign, and his administration, for a different set of problems. And like most of the other key players, what Obama tends to say is what Obama tended to say before the crisis. The economic plan that he recommends is the plan he stumped on in the primaries. That's not dishonesty or stupidity: it's simply a sign of not yet having taken on board the basic facts of the new environment.

Obama, to be fair, could not have been elected already seeing the plane; the plane only came into view a few months before the election, and anyone who had been predicting a crisis such as this earlier would not have been able to achieve the nomination. (You can't win a broad-based election based on priorities that the vast majority of the country does not share.) His success or failure will not be linked to his foresight, but to his adaptability. The question isn't whether Obama has a plan. Any plan he might have would be based on assumptions that aren't viable any more. The question is how quickly he realizes he needs to throw the plan away, and think of something new.

The child never did spot the airplane that day. She wasn't ready yet. But she had to ride in its belly, just the same. And so do we.

Jonathan Chait has a nice post at The New Republic about McCain's shallow, twittering mockery of various bits of budgetary pork, and about Maureen Dowd's witless applause of McCain. As Chait points out, McCain's "method" is to pick anything that can be made to sound silly. Dowd, of course, applauds this method as the height of wisdom.

In the list of "silly" projects McCain scorns is this:

Plenty of others have written about the many, many things wrong with Bobby Jindal's response to President Obama Tuesday night, especially its intellectual bankruptcy and Jindal's ghastly delivery. But at the risk of piling on, I want to talk about something else that's been bothering me about that speech, something which seems to have passed without comment: Jindal's bizarre decision to begin his response by discussing his biography.

I understand that this is the Age of the Memoir, both in politics and in the arts. We have a President who published a memoir before beginning his political career, and whose volunteers were trained to tell their own personal stories as a means of persuading voters. We have an entertainment landscape increasingly rich in nonfictional and allegedly non-fictional personal narratives. But was I the only one appalled when Jindal, speaking on national TV during a national economic crisis, began prattling about his family history and the things his father used to tell him? With the banks failing and the economy in shambles, what Jindal wanted to talk about was, well, Jindal.

I found that approach grotesque, and eerily disconnected from reality. This was a moment to speak to a worried nation about its legitimate worries, to talk about where we are and what we need to do. The occasion demanded an explicit focus on the audience, not on the speaker. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs; this is not about Jindal.

Of course, such an autobiographical preamble is expected and necessary in a campaign speech, especially when a candidate being introduced to a new group of voters. Jindal's little family stories make sense if he's running for President, but to respond to a speech about a major crisis, a month into a new President's administration, by beginning to run for President oneself is similarly grotesque and irresponsible. The televised pundits took it for granted that Jindal would do this, and to them it evidently seemed natural. They are interested in political "personalities" they can shape stories around, and on simple horse-race storylines they can cover without thinking. They're artificial public "personalities" themselves, dedicated to publicizing their personal brands; Jindal's grossly inappropriate behavior was simply the kind of thing the media talking heads do every day. And they have been interested in the run-Bobby-run storyline for some time now: it's a new storyline they want to roll out, with a new character they want to introduce, as if the American political process were merely a game show like Survivor.

After Jindal blithely ignored the economic crisis, various pundits (including bloggers I like very much) asked whether or not Jindal had harmed his presidential aspirations in 2012. This is a profoundly stupid question. In ordinary times, there is nothing wrong with such speculation. But these are not ordinary times, and there are more pressing questions: Will there still be an American auto industry in 2010? Will we have functioning banks six months from now? Will we be able to recover from the recession by 2011? Questions like these not only dwarf the significance of questions about Candidate Jindal, but they obviate them. Bobby Jindal has no political hopes separate from the fate of the nation or of its economy. The success or failure of the economic recovery will determine the political landscape in 2012. Asking whether Jindal helped or hurt his "chances," as a question distinct from the fate of the country, is as stupid as wondering how tie you wore for your presentation to the boss might affect your career prospects at Citibank. The better question is, will there continue to be a Citibank?  The question of Jindal's future is part of the question that Jindal, and the pundits, choose to ignore.

It's clear from the speech what Jindal wants. He's hoping that Obama's attempts to rescue the economy fail, so that Jindal can run on a blame-Obama platform. Thus Jindal's refusal to offer any constructive suggestion, and his urgency to go on record as opposing Obama's policies. That Jindal chose to position himself politically in case of an economic failure, in fact to pin his hopes to four more years of economic disaster, should in itself disqualify him for national office. No one who chooses to play a private game when the public stakes are this high can be trusted.

I'm persuaded by Andrew Sullivan on the Gregg withdrawal: it makes sense only as an act of partisan loyalty, which means in this case loyalty to partisans who have decided on a strategy of opposition and obstruction. The stimulus issue wasn't something that changed in the last few days; the census question is a canard.

But Gregg's stepping down is a losing move in a losing strategy. It's hard to see what Obama loses here, or what the Republicans (let alone Gregg) gain. Obama gets to appoint a Democrat and get full credit for bipartisanship anyway. The Republicans keep a Senate seat that they were going to keep for two years anyway, with no guarantees after that. And Gregg's vote won't change the stimulus package; losing 61-38 isn't different from losing 61-37. Gregg gets to be a minority Senator instead of Commerce Secretary, and if that were a better deal he would never have gone looking for a Cabinet gig.

There's been a lot of media spin about how well the Republicans are succeeding by being uncooperative, but I don't see it. Obama is getting to position himself as a cooperative bipartisan leader while the Republicans look like inflexible ingrates. (Taking a job from Obama and then quitting doesn't make Obama look bad.) And they end up cutting themselves out of the decisions. This isn't a strategy so much. It's more like a political suicide pact.

There's been enormous comment about the House Republicans' unanimous vote against the stimulus package. Most of the discussion has been about whether or not Obama's promises of "bipartisanship" will yield fruit and whether the Republicans in the House will gain anything from this strategy. But it's hardly a strategy; strategy implies a choice. The House vote is more an expression of the remaining House Republican's basic political nature.

The vote against the stimulus bill is very easy to understand: modern American "conservatism," movement conservatism, has never been a philosophy for governing. It has always been, from its very beginning, fundamentally a philosophy of opposition. Which part of "standing athwart history, shouting 'No!'" sounds like a plan to govern? That the modern Republican party actually became the governing party until recently was only an unfortunate accident, and since they chose not to alter their approach to suit their responsibilities, that accident led to horrible damage.

The partisans who had no interest in governance when they were charged with governing, who are philosophically opposed to the idea of government itself, aren't going to become more pragmatic or responsible now that they have returned to their comfortable, natural role in the opposition. In fact, they've been freed from unwelcome burden of actually compromising their principles with reality. They couldn't be happier. And their playbook is now very short, very simple, and very familiar.

The ideological conservatives not going to cooperate with President Obama's efforts of bipartisanship. They are not going to compromise their principles simply because the nation is facing a crisis, and they are not going to offer realistic solutions to America's problems; all of that is the governing party's problem. It isn't pretty. It isn't healthy. But from this point on, none of it should be a surprise.

So, Andrew Sullivan has a round-up of the instantaneous reactions, mostly complaints, from right-wing bloggers about the Inaugural Address. There are some moments of gracious or grudging acknowledgment, but there's also carping on matters so small that in fact, they do not exist. One complaint, is that Obama, who campaigned against Bush's policies, should have given more praise to Bush and his policies. Why this might be so is beyond me. Perhaps I have forgotten the fulsome praise that FDR lavished upon Hoover, or Jefferson upon Adams.

At least a couple of bloggers, to wit Jennifer Rubin and Jay Nordlinger, take issue with Obama's thank-you to to Bush, which they view as insultingly brief. Rubin calls it "unduly perfunctory." Nordlinger calls it "the barest minimum: 'I thank him for his service,' or something." The idea seems to be that Obama rudely and pointedly truncated a gesture of thanks which one would normally expect  to be fuller.

For reference, what President Obama said during his Inaugural Address was this:

"I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition."

Apparently, this is much shorter and less classy than what George W. Bush said in his inaugural address in 2001:

 "As I begin, I thank President Clinton for his service to our nation."

That's it.

So, you see how classless Obama is: to give Bush (who leaves behind an economic meltdown, a massive deficit, and two unresolved wars) only slightly more praise than Bush gave his own predecessor (who left behind peace and a bidget surplus). But of course, from such pundits' perspective, Clinton was owed no praise, because Clinton "had no class" and Bush did. Meanwhile, Bush is entitled to more deference from the mere parvenu who succeeds him. It's not about what they say at all.

I would never disagree with Eric or David about how bizarre Blagojevich's recent press conferences are. But as pathological as Blagojevich may be, he has relatively little to lose and perhaps something to gain from his shenanigans.

Consider the magnificent hole which Blagojevich has dug for himself:

1) His political career is over. It is beyond salvage.

2) At this point, he can count on the harshest legal treatment available. Every potential decision-maker involved in the case has been antagonized the full extent possible. Some are outright hostile to Blago, while others, like Patrick Fitzgerald, are merely implacable and Javert-like. In any case, Blagojevich should not expect any breaks. Quite the reverse.

3) Unlike the typical high-ranking American politician at the center of a scandal, Blagojevich is also on the brink of financial ruin. Blagojevich is a guy who tries to shake down a union for a $300,000 salary, because Blagojevich actually lives on his salary. Blagojevich doesn't have the means to retire from public life, the way a Scooter Libby or Elliot Spitzer might. He can't just head off to his country estate and live in quiet disgrace. When he loses the governor's chair, he will actually lose his primary source of income.

Factor in some extravagant upcoming legal fees, likely disbarment, and a reputation that will make him largely unemployable, and you're looking at a man who's facing financial catastrophe, whether he avoids prison or not. You can fall from grace in the public life and come back, but it's much harder in America to fall out of the middle class and come back. Blagojevich is on the verge of plunging from the upper middle class to something very like penury.

The only hope for Blagojevich's financial survival is, in fact, the media circus. It's the only business in which he might still find a profitable niche. There is ample room in American discourse for a colorful, irresponsible and self-destructive windbag: ask the folks on cable news, or talk radio. Ask some of the folks on book tour. And those people make better money than a lot of better people with better and more responsible jobs. We might be appalled by the freakshow of his press conferences, but the freakshow is Rod Blagojevich's only hope right now. He's going to be living the freakshow for the rest of his life, because it's the only place where he can make a living.

While the rest of us might focus rationally on the larger Problem #1 and Problem #2, Blagojevich is right: there's nothing to be done about those things at this point. Any efforts made to fix them are largely going to be wasted. But Problem #3 is going to be with Blago, one way or another, for the rest of his life. The press conferences make more sense when you realize that Blago isn't trying to get out of trouble. He can't get out of trouble. He's not defending himself. He's auditioning.

Back in the day, Saddam Hussein decided that he would rebuild the ancient city of Babylon. It's a nice idea, from a man who didn't have that many, and profoundly unrealistic. Realism was one of the many virtues Hussein lacked.

It never happened, of course. While I'm a huge fan of archaeology, actually reconstructing the city would have been a fantastically expensive boondoggle, in a country without the resources to spare, and Iraq had plenty of other problems to deal with.

But Hussein, whose refusal to cope with reality seems to have increased the longer he was in power, kept soldiering along with various grandiose plans. American journalists would sometimes use this as a symbol for Hussein's delusional pigheadedness: throwing money into an ancient hole in the ground. What kind of fool would do that?

Now, of course, everything is different, and Iraq no longer has any pressing difficulties or strains upon its resources. So the Rebuild Babylon initiative is back, with a new backer: us. The New York Times's Dave Itzkoff reports that the State Department has put up $700,000 for the project.

That's just for a study, mind you. This is only the preliminary stage.

When someone you admire, a civil rights leader whom you yourself call "an American hero," compares you to George Wallace and calls on you to change you

1) You can take umbrage, and try to make an issue of how terribly unfair it is to compare you to a vicious segregationist like George Wallace, and while you're on the topic try to make your political opponent into the villain for not "repudiating" the Wallace comparison.

or

2) You can stop acting like George Wallace.

McCain's response to Lewis is revealing, not simply for the dishonesty and political opportunism that McCain now reveals on a daily basis, but for what it reveals about McCain's value system. He takes offense, or purports to, at being compared to a racist. He utterly ignores the point of Lewis's comparison, which is that his rhetoric, like Wallace's, is stirring up passions that may end in civil violence or even bloodshed. The slur against his character stings McCain. The call to civic duty, and the warning of public danger, does not even register. McCain is deaf to it.

This is the essence of John McCain: a confusion of private virtue, or "character," with public virtue. It is more important to him to establish that he is not, personally, a racist, than it is to protect the common good. McCain's candidacy, and his political career, is premised on the idea that a politician's sense of individual honor will benefit the nation at large. The conduct of his campaign puts the lie to that idea.

McCain's campaign tactics haven't been terribly consonant with personal honor, either, but personal failings can always be rationalized or repented. Once a politician does public harm, the consequences are out of his control. No repentance will help the victims if McCain's reckless and inflammatory tactics bring his fellow Americans to harm. John McCain will have to look at himself in the mirror after this campaign, but I couldn't care less what he finds there. He will only have to live with himself; the rest of us will have to live with what he's wrought.

"It has been striking to me this year that the public seems far more serious about this election--far less tolerant of diversions--than some of my colleagues in the media." - Joe Klein, Swampland, 10/15/08

Meanwhile, the Times is running a surprised poll analysis that personal attacks haven't worked with the voters. Who knew, that in an election with this much at stake, voters would want to hear about actual policy.

But nonetheless, the Politico home page fronts a large picture of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who has been mentioned by no one lately, with Mike Allen's lead story about why the McCain campaign isn't running attacks on Wright.

Yes, that is correct. A lead story about why something irrelevant isn't being brought up. This is what the political media has come to: covering the sideshows that never came to town.

It's good, as far as it goes, that John McCain is attempting to contain some of the paranoid ugliness that he's been responsible for. I'm happy to live in a country where politicians' self-interest restrains them from fomenting civil unrest.

But what matters is not the kind of man John McCain is or isn't. What matters is the kind of country we live in.

McCain will be a rapidly-receding footnote to history by Thanksgiving, taking his place among the Bob Doles and James Blaines and Charles Pickerings. He still has the power to make this campaign very dangerous for a lot of innocent Americans, but on November 5th he won't be able to get the matches near the gunpowder any more.

What worries me are the people who are stocking up their own gunpowder for Guy Fawkes Day. It's bad enough that hateful, paranoid lies are being spread in an attempt to defeat Obama. What's much, much worse is that defeating Obama is no longer the hatemongers' goal

The shape of the narrative is already forming, in preparation for a McCain loss. The right-wing media is laying the groundwork to claim voter fraud, perpetrated by ACORN, as the primary cause of McCain's defeat, even if November 4 is a landslide. In fact, a landslide will make the hard-liners' cognitive dissonance greater, because they won't be able to process how badly they have lost mainstream America, and lead them toward paranoid explanations.

The plan is to deny the legitimacy of Obama's election, and to continue portraying him as a dangerous outsider. No claim is too outlandish. We will hear how Obama personally engineered the financial crisis and how he is in league with various foreign bogeymen.

This is extremely dangerous. It gives the most dangerous people on the right an excuse for violence, because Obama is not "really" President and because he's "dangerous." So violence can be rationalized as necessary, for the greater good. And it builds in an excuse for ignoring the rule of law, since government itself is "illegitimate."

That isn't about one election. That's about the kind of country we live it, about whether we keep civil peace and respect the rule of law.

Starting November 5, we need to push back, hard, on media outlets that peddle dangerous fantasies.

McCain and Palin have turned a dark corner in their election rhetoric, and as many others have said, they are creating real danger.

McCain has gone beyond the acceptable bounds of American political discourse, and he has done it at a moment of national unrest, as the economic crisis creates fear and anxiety. A historical moment like this would be dangerous enough without McCain. The risk of mob violence would be with us now even if McCain were not actively increasing it. During times of uncertainty, mobs look for scapegoats to turn on. McCain has chosen to offer the public identifiable scapegoats.

If the fire McCain that is playing with actually catches, if people are burned, there will be enormous grief and enormous rage. And if something terrible happens, few of us will be able to think clearly about those responsible. So it's time to think the worst-case scenario through now.

If McCain's campaign actually incites the violence it is so close to inciting, his political career needs to end. That day. Not simply his lost campaign, but his Senate career, his speaking engagements, his public life. He needs to resign in disgrace, and he needs to be made to see that necessity.

There cannot be violent retribution for the merchants of violence, if we want to keep our America America. And laws regulating campaign speech will go horribly wrong. But the political retribution must be swift, complete and unrelenting.

No politician who undermines public safety for personal gain has any place in our national life. Every politician should fear an outbreak of civil violence against his or her fellow Americans; who can speak of loving our country but not dread that? If mere patriotism, mere responsibility, mere human decency are not enough, politicians must fear for themselves and their careers. Every American politician should live in holy dread of inciting a mob, and every politician should know that rasing a mob and losing control of it means exile from American politics forever.

God forbid that any of my fears come to pass. I hope McCain will think better of what he is doing, and stop. I hope that we will get through the coming month in peace. But if the worst happens, McCain must leave public office, Palin must leave public office, and Steve Schmidt, their campaign strategist, must never be employed in politics or government again. And steps need to be taken, calmly and rationally, to ensure those outcomes: a new public organization, including a political action committee and a fundraising arm, aimed at removing those malefactors from office, and at deterring any future poltician from taking such depraved risks with the public safety.

Words have consequences, and John McCain has a public trust. A politician who becomes an enemy of the civil peace needs to be punished, not by more violence and not by the law, but by the patriotism of his fellow Americans.