One vast, towering reason for Barack Obama's victory over John McCain in 2008 was the widespread expectation that an articulate and half-black chief executive would help the country overcome at long last its racial anxieties.

I really wouldn't care myself but for the appearance of a book about the university's apparent subservience to athletics and the dough that athletics brings in.

A number of maxims surround the practice of war.

Not that Texas -- very much a part of our fallen, post-Edenic world -- is without its modern challenges, including deficiencies in the public schools and the persistence of poverty amid plenty: the same challenges, come to think of it, facing Congressman Hastings' Florida. To say nothing -- in variant degree -- of progressive paradises such as California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, where enlightened opinion would shut down quickly enough any crazy, Texas-like adventures in the spread of freedom.

Back in the '90s I bantered once or twice with Karl Rove. It had to do with the Bush boys, George and Jeb.

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtu

" I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

A grand misconception is embedding itself in the public brain: To wit, the Supreme Court soon will clue us in to the true meaning of marriage.

"The West," as we pleasantly call the tatty, post-Cold War remnants of Western civilization, got off its numb if still-hifalutin bottom Sunday and took to the streets of Paris in defense of -- well, its life, its future, the future of everything in life that matters.

Politicians do politics because they can't help it.

Bethlehem. Ah. Yes. There we were as a matter of fact, and not many weeks ago, either. Also at Nazareth. Also -- of course -- at Jerusalem, where everybody goes who goes to the Holy Land, with a sense of immense events and occasions to be taken in, the more so as Christmas draws near.

Among the journalistic takeaways from the late Congress' death frenzies is the equivocal plight of the two parties -- the grown-up deal makers in both cases squeezed by hardcore, do-it-our-way extremists.

The human tempests presently sweeping the country -- rape allegations at the University of Virginia and in the U.S. military, racial protests and rioting over police conduct, growing and growling bitterness during the sweetest of seasons -- have as much to do with moral decay as with circumstances.

"Race," you said? A "national conversation" about race and the variant understandings and byplays that result from our differences?

Thanks-mas -- as our new winter holiday deserves to become known, with pumpkins and red-and-green lights merging in anticipatory celebration -- only partly occludes the opportunities for national and personal gratitude widespread in Novembers past.

For two more years, two very long and, I'm afraid, discombobulating years, the United States is to be served by a president with the emotional maturity of -- shall we guess? A 12-year-old determined to be noticed by everyone in the room? Maybe.

"The polls" have it that Americans in 2014 expect virtually nothing from the 2014 style in Washington politicians. Amid the horrors we trip over every morning when evacuating our beds, this revelation may count as very, very, very good news.

The really troubling point that Joel Kotkin makes in the New York Daily News is that New York can't figure out how to do the economic equality thing we hear so much about in this and every political season.

"(Wendy) Davis is running (for governor) against Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is heavily favored to win in a state that remains strongly Republican."

Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies -- oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead.