For Barack Obama's supporters, one of the more alarming developments in this year's primary and general election campaigns was his seeming equivocation on several proposals that were the brick and mortar of his "hope and change" blueprint.

It was his vow to reject "business as usual" on pertinent policy points that had brought him from the obscurity of the Illinois state house portico to national prominence - and, finally, the Presidency. But there were flip-flops along the way: support for the FISA extension, dropping a promise to lift the Cuba embargo.

But nothing was more disquieting than signals he was softening his promise to end the Iraq War, that his timetable was becoming fuzzy for withdrawing U.S. troops slogging through this most unpopular and baffling of conflicts.

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It's been more than a week since the election, and, still, it's hard to get back on track. All the tension, all the passion ("McCain? On SNL? On the eve of the election? What's THAT about?")... seem to have just burned off us like gobsmack on a summer sidewalk.

We're left empty... spent. As in the aftermath of a tractor pull in the dirt pit of some hayseed backwater...

But a little vapor trail of excitement has lingered to tingle and tease me: The T-shirt model in the zebra-skin bikini on the right-hand side of TPM.

Umm. Yasss...

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You can always tell when a schoolyard bully has met his match and gotten his ass kicked in an unexpected beating: For awhile there's a churlish, almost benign quietude, in which his usual victims enjoy a kind of "Prague Spring" free of unwarranted attacks, free of that ugly social condition that renders them emotional punching bags to undeservedly assuage a tough's fear of and frustrated anger at the world.

It never lasts, of course. And we have no reason to suspect a fragile thaw in frigid U.S.-Russia relations will become permanent, even though an economic downturn of seemingly bottomless dimension has punched onto the ropes the world's premier "post-historic" bruiser.

And, no, we're not talking about Russia.

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