Fault him for being wrong, if you like: you can't call John McCain inconstant. Fair weather passed Baghdad and with it left a number of onetime meliorists, many of them covering their escape with essays on how they, personally, would have performed as commander-in-chief. The Arizona senator? Not a month after William F. Buckley, Jr. admonished him, in the form of a syndicated column, to disavow, McCain avowed, and became the second most powerful man in Washington to irrevocably endorse the Iraqi campaign. He scheduled an announcement speech to earn the most headlines; he even called the military operation "necessary and just."

With the political melee several months from now and Republican presidential primaries even further away, one can still pause and consider President, or Secretary, McCain. As a senator John McCain has adopted and opposed various resolutions during hostilities, often crosswise the Bush administration. His positions taken in turn would win and then lose him certain votes, and will if his name is on ballots in 2008. But on Wednesday McCain spoke elementarily, he spoke of Iraq — which he would say was a single subject.

"The war on terror, the war for the future of the Middle East, and the struggle for the soul of Islam — of which the war in Iraq constitutes a key element — are bound together," was McCain's thesis. "We must," the senator continued, "gain the active support of modernizers across the Muslim world, who want to share in the benefits of the global system and its economic success, and who aspire to the political freedom that is, I truly believe, the natural desire of the human heart."

We know, or can be reminded, that the second clause is multiply attributed to George W. Bush, the man to whom few apparently listen or invest confidence. John McCain would then have found, in underwriting the president's message, only the president's delivery lacking.

This point only needs placement. I observed then — and maintain still now — that the president was neither fatigued nor unprepared for the first debate in the fall of 2004 with John Kerry, but instead stunned and then exasperated by, then unresponsive to, the substance of the opposition party's dispute. Why had the senator narrowed the war to Osama bin Laden when thousands of terrorists were contracting with al Qaeda independently, far from Afghanistan? How could anyone submit foreign affairs to an inimical committee of nations? President Bush decided not to reconcile the evidence of his last three years in office with nonsense, and repeated his argument until time was called.

The world is at present beheld by war opponents as a series of crude divorces. Lines of reason are interrupted by subjective hops across an intellectual archipelago. Iraq? Distinct, extraneous. How to answer why there is an anxious and especial presence of the enemy in-country? Insist that antagonists are popular, or funds of miscarriage, and homesick for "the real war" in Afghanistan. Failing the aforementioned? Avoid the Iraqi capital, ostracize its elected government and try to expedite the termination of its new alliance with Washington. The broader war, its name, its meaning? That's easy: have Congress elide it.

George Bush has served the United States as an earthy man leavened by simple adages and a diligence suppressing any desire to explain the obvious. His office was prodigious during the eighteen months after September 11th, when no one could afford to collude. Without fluent address, the president has seemed to respond to opponents with rote or outraged silence. However absurd the other side gets, and it is getting wildly this way, Bush doesn't pierce and pull down their contentions — restraint that might be mistaken for assent.

The White House was spared John Kerry's supercilious indecision when the president was re-elected. Four years of traducement are borne well by George Bush's clarity of purpose and plain manner. Did the burden need to amount to what it does, now, in its entirety? Through a lingering presidency are those terrible months to find liability in every gift, to consign the incumbent as a man who lost sight of what he alone started. George Bush leaves either way. His replacement should look to surpass him where he was unable, however scrupulously he is followed. Of the candidates — that could be the senator who, making a speech the president should have, voiced an echo, in word and sincerity: "The judgment of history should be the approval we seek."

For the many who are disconsolate after learning that Elizabeth Edwards' cancer is recrudescent, worry not — husband John assures that he shall continue to run for president.

Elizabeth Edwards' affliction is common enough; each of us can match a friend or colleague lost to cancer with a finger and thumb, even begin to count twice over. The decision reached by the couple — agreeing only to succumb to the disease involuntarily — was and is the same of two others from the clerisy, Cathy Seipp and Tony Snow, the former having recently passed on.

The difference between Edwards and others is in what she and the former senator each said in an interview at the start of the week with television host Katie Couric. Life on paper, secondhand, has an impression of sameness. Unless told more, when we hear that Mr. Smith goes to the store and Mr. Jones goes to the store, both men are assumed to act in parallel; when instead Mr. Smith could be the patron who walked a block and Mr. Jones, the larcenist arriving by bus. John and Elizabeth Edwards chose to explain, even defend the instance of a life ending on a campaign trail, and in self-confession one has either timeless éclat or an unrecoverable giveaway.

The response to Couric's seventh prompt elicited materialism: time is short, so, in John's words, "We have to live today the best way we know how." And that would be "what we're spending our lives doing," or politics. Prodded by Couric on the question of opportunism, John Edwards was at first open about the cold assessments of polling tragedy in Washington. "There's not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer," he said. But then his words were clever, and the frankness dissolved into preterition. "I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we'd make." His only prior object of "evaluation" had been himself.

Couric asked about the couple's children several times. The children are in early grade school, but then so are those of Tony Snow's, and Snow has not elected to leave his White House position. Yet in her persistence, in simply her need to persist, Couric contrasted Snow and Edwards. The youths' acquaintance with mortality — we are all going to die, Elizabeth repeated — was not, as the parents went on, about the precious time to be shared with their mother, but rather the hardening stricture on their mother's time, time which was already committed to Mother's own interests.

"I've often said," stated Elizabeth, "that the most important thing you can give your children (is) wings." And then — "they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves."

Couric had already injected her opinion on spending final days with work over family. She answered in metaphor. "They're still baby birds."

Said John, "But they've got to start learning to fly. And they're not ready to fly on their own yet, but they've got to start learning."

Evidently, the Edwardses were getting at a relevant aphorism, avian variety. The English language has a lot. Early birds get worms, debutants spread their wings, old hens grieve over empty nests, so — why, yes, the Edwards' children must take flight because their mother may soon never return. One of the very few examples in undisturbed nature, however, wherein a baby bird must learn to fly before due time is when the chick has about two critical seconds aloft, from the moment a cuckoo stepsister pushes it out of the tree to the moment it hits the ground and dies.

Neither Edwards can reasonably be thought of as willing to jettison his or her children. But while taking refuge in an idiom the pair let the onlooker see a political intercalation in the nursery, a confrontation between offspring and career, consequences thereof, and easily retracted causes for the whole of it.

Prayers to the Almighty are best made not with demands but deference to providential will. Even so, there will be at least one request for the long life of Elizabeth and the swift death of Edwards 2008.

Shinzo Abe, the umpteenth Japanese prime minister to have demanded of him the umpteenth apology for the umpteenth time, was asked at the beginning of the month, by a member of Tokyo's opposition party, if he would entertain grievance number umpteen plus one.

Back in January, an American congressman with the last name of Honda submitted a bill to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Language held the Japanese government in contempt of the duty to "formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery."

This was about "comfort women," thousands of young foreigners who served as prostitutes for imperial soldiers. Mr. Abe made a cogent statement, insofar as Japanese executives have many times expressed regret for gross wrongdoing of their country's former government and its agents three-fifths of a century before. But the prime minister also said something untrue, which was that reports of impressment were apocryphal. "It wasn't like the government and the army took these women away like kidnapping," Abe protested, and oh, there must have been a lot of hands slapping foreheads.

The flesh stockade is so intrinsic to civilization, past and present, that if there weren't sufficient evidence of militarist Japan's manifold slave labors one could make a justified assumption about the compulsory terms of garrison brothels. Tokyo's obscurantist edition of the historical record, which has continued through three generations and reaches deeply in some places, understandably frustrates. Yet the furor it causes also distracts from a matter of selectivity and unction on the part of claimants, critics and the wailing chorus led by Seoul and Beijing.

Manifest are the atrocities committed, being committed this very hour, in China by a line of totalitarian regimes established nearly sixty years ago. What was it Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing admitted to the world ten days ago? "Japan should face up to history, take the responsibility, and seriously view and properly handle the issue." The reprimand must have diverted Li Zhaoxing from his ministerial priority of informing the democratic nation of Taiwan that formal declarations of independence would be ignored, possibly refuted by force.

The free South Koreans could, if they bothered, list a great number of inhumanities suffered at the hands of authoritarian governments before the last dictatorship fell in 1987; and if they looked to the north, they could trace the horrid police state above the 38th Parallel to the second of two Allied powers bifurcating the peninsula, the Soviet Union. When shall the Kremlin apologize for Stalin's having primed and outfitted Kim Il Sung? Well, who's even inquired? It may irk, that the Japanese people can be reluctant to acknowledge their own modern history, but it shouldn't puzzle.

There is more to Japan's trials than acknowledgment — there is a matter of inheritance. Japan has been rather imaginatively personified, which is necessary for all indefinite condemnations, one such from a Korean speaking for a group that seeks redress for the plight of comfort women. How a Liberal Democratic Party boss recently minimized fact — "We need to research the issue further" — was reproachable. But the response from the Korean? "Another attempt by the Japanese government to distort the past and hide their crimes."

There it is, Japan as a living being, forswearing an oath. Did the many islands rise up and subordinate their neighbors? No? What happened to the government responsible for the terrible, Pacific empire? It was annulled and replaced by way of constitution a year later, during the supersession of the culture around it. Japan, as a nation, continued, altered. And the bereaved, or the plain angry, or the opportunistic, have only an increasing number of Japanese to consent to be in one or another way answerable for what they didn't actually do. Heredity, then, is all that incriminates; but politically it is enough. The apology from Shinzo Abe, or from one of the prime ministers following, won't be the last.

Yesterday was an office holiday, and I had scheduled for the afternoon a car wash for the PT Cruiser I have been leasing since 2003 — which was inspected this morning and returned to the dealer three hours ago. The trip should only have taken half an hour, but I returned ninety minutes later and, too, having made an unforeseen expenditure.

I paid for full service, a thorough vacuuming and scrubbing of the car's interior and an unpiloted trip through an automated car wash. Within fifteen minutes of paying I could, from a hallway inside the establishment, see my Cruiser rolling slowly forward through a soapy mist, then rotating brushes, then a series of rinsing hoses and blow-driers. One crewman drove my vehicle from the end of the conveyor outside, right up to the driveway onto the main road, where he was joined by three others with gloves and rags to finish the cleaning.

After about a minute, he motioned to me. "Sir?" I prepared my receipt — one of three — and was mid-sentence in inquiring which one to return when he said, "You have a flat tire." The interjection leaving my mouth had something to do with scatological apotheosis, as there was my right-rear tire, deflated. I have only driven on a flat tire once but, somewhat like, I suppose, childbirth, once is enough for a distinct memory. During the drive to the car wash, the car had not handled as if it were on three wheels. I told the crewman this.

Could someone fetch a pump? I asked. The crewman answered yes, and went one further without my noticing by quietly informing his manager, who in turn paged the owner. Word came back that the owner would be out in a moment, and his employees were to change the tire for me. Did I have a spare? Of course; and thank you, Lord. I have changed a flat once but again, once is quite enough — however, there isn't anything to be gained by refusing help from men who by their very work are going to be more deft than you.

The owner arrived just as the spare began to drop from the underside of the Cruiser's hatchback. No explanation necessary for the neat, burly man: We'll change it for you. The owner himself squatted and began unscrewing lug nuts. Three of them came off as he regarded the tire, frowning. He turned to the crewman fitting an industrial jack beneath the car: Let's give the pump a try before we go through all of this trouble. The fellow with the jack and the owner wedded a hose to tire and air compressor: ten seconds, nothing; twenty seconds, nothing. At thirty, the crewman slapped the tire twice and gave his boss the kind of look that compels one to do what the owner did next, which was to nod, "Let's change the tire."

As the spare was fixed on the wheel, the owner bent forward, held the flat tire between his hands and rolled it slowly, examining the tread. Could he see any ruptures? I asked. He shook his head, continued to roll and look down. "It's the valve stem," he said, finally, straightening himself. "Shouldn't cost you more than a couple bucks." He pointed immediately eastward. "Take this next door to Dean. He'll get you all fixed up."

The spare was on, the tools pulled away. I removed my glove and thanked the owner. He smiled slightly and deferred to the crewman who had, as he said, completed "most of the work." I duly thanked the other, and made the quick left into an old gas station and garage to seek out Dean.

Dean works at Joe's, and if I am not mistaken, owns Joe's. Did Joe leave? Is Joe a Betty Crocker or Remington Steele? I didn't ask, but stuck to script: Next door, car wash, flat, valve stem. Dean was genial — disarming, uncharacteristically so for those of us who believe we know, through one or two mechanics, all mechanics. He took the keys and, steering the Cruiser into his shop, began working.

The administrative assistant, in her forties, kindly and pretty, made several efforts at small talk before finally engaging me biographically. I don't care to be a bore, and strictly answer questions when chatted up by strangers; but she succeeded in nurturing a conversation that lasted twenty, twenty-five minutes, or however long it took Dean to finish. Dean walked into the office. The assistant and Dean were caught in an odd conflict of interest — Dean's confidence in his performance led him to simply tell me that my car was done, then the assistant asked me to clarify a statement I had made about writing a second before Dean came in, and then I decided to stick to business first and asked Dean what he had done to mend the tires.

Then I answered the question. Dean overheard. Policy and politics, really? I qualified that by remarking that politics is inevitably polemic, though there ought be some intellectual etiquette. No yellow journalism, then, chuckled Dean. Well — I was fair to Nancy Pelosi with my little facetious parody last week, wasn't I? — OK, not too much. From there the conversation was between me and Dean, as in fact this mechanic spent a lot of time thinking about the country, and matters of national importance, and the way in which a mechanic might properly inform himself.

What to do with the news networks? Dean asked, grinning. He didn't want to hear about the erstwhile Playboy model, now an erstwhile lady, more than once — certainly not "every five minutes." Stay away from cable during the day, I replied. Ah but, he said, even at night, it can be a lot of useless broadcasting. Right — that is why, I announced, I find my news on the internet. Can it be trusted? The potential for disinformation is greater, I observed, but if one knows its sources, primary sources, then Yes. It used to be, Dean said — accurately — that the internet was overwhelmed with nonsense. I agreed, but online communities have come to ensure honesty, or at least disclosure of one's sympathies.

Ten minutes passed as Dean and I talked. Term limits, federal spending, congressional earmarks — on that last one, I said, the telecommunication networks had scored largely, at least compared to what they could manage before. A group of internet doyens, bloggers, under the name Porkbusters, made something of civil agitation by exhorting House and Senate majorities to restrain their conditioned tendencies to shunt one district's money to another district with not as much, like, say, the ones that elected each of them. I have said, and hold, that Porkbusters can't change Washington like term limits will, but the effort was an accomplishment like none before.

Dean, from what and how he spoke, would be center-right; and maybe the rest of his staff, and maybe those at the car wash, too. There was among them no evident animosity for the country, or the government, and if so the only distrust of the state a naturally American one — accepting that from politics some sentiments, and sediments, are inextricable. Where are they learning what they know or think they know? What about the capital, or the war?

Given some news coverage today, a little the day before and probably tomorrow, is a group like Porkbusters — called the Victory Caucus. The Caucus is devised to "Deliver the perspectives and news on the war effort which the mainstream media neglects to help the American public understand the nature of our conflict and its true progress," and "Provide tools and infrastructure to help citizens who are committed to victory organize into a recognized and influential caucus." It is run mostly by those on the right, but I could tell you that without looking, having deduced on my own that the only rational conversations — for or against the war — are being held on the right.

The Caucus is an attempt to popularly puncture, or tap, or otherwise influence a circuit between corrupt journalism and a political establishment that has come to believe that all knowledge is drawn from said journalism, all reality a projection thereof. Polls here and there still contend that the American spirit isn't pacifist or defeatist but vexed about the fronts; however, vexed because the public is interested in winning wars. How about a channel between the soldiers and allies facing the enemy — and the man, or the mechanic, who would act in one way were he to know other than what he has, through an honorable benefit of the doubt, resigned himself to accept?

When I said "Porkbusters," Dean laughed out loud because he liked the name. From what he told me, I will presume he liked the big idea, too. The tire service and the insight were well worth twenty-one fifty.

The junior senator from Illinois will run for President of the United States. Before and after Barack Obama declared, intimations were made in news and opinion columns that character's content would be less germane to a candidacy than that of melanin. Elevating skin color to the "primary determinant of human traits and capacities" is ex vi termini racism, and the ease, or even imperative, with which it has been done, even by the senator himself, baffles.

Two years ago, Paula Zahn told Obama that she was "fascinated" by his choice of "black" as a qualification of nationality. Obama replied that he was proud of his heritage. His favorite anecdote, though, was rather about the reduction of the person on a city sidewalk. "[T]he cab driver doesn't go by and say, 'Hey, there's a mixed-race guy.' They [sic] say, 'There's a black guy.'"

How to parse this? Is he a member of a congenital ordination, or a victim, or a martyr? Obama continued and told Zahn that he has learned Negro spirituals and goes to church. Did he need to be black to do this? Barack Obama, some of the people who write or talk about him, and some taxi drivers define Barack Obama firstly, or mostly, as black. Others believe appearance and imputations thereof to be the least significant matters about the senator, and I am one of them.

Of larger importance is Obama's practiced and often belletristic rhetoric. Elaborate use of the English language is not a feature of modern statesmanship, so this attracts attention. I noticed this ability to elegantly say nothing, or something false, during Obama's address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "And John Kerry believes," he orated, on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, "that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never be the first option." The only two options left are diplomatic exaction, which President Bush endeavored to do for several months; and capitulation, which Obama suggests should have happened four years ago, and espouses now.

But the correctio phrase promises a fourth way, and whatever that might be is footnoted, so Obama can go on to the figuration. When he maintained that "We have real enemies in the world," and that "these enemies must be found," the tacit subject was al Qaeda, yet the statement can be read, comically, as a circumlocution of foreign affairs. "The people I meet," their stories set in anaphoric pathos from the same speech, "don't expect government to solve all their problems." Except — what? "[W]ith just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life."

While the ideas to which Obama subscribes aren't pronounced, they are more relevant to a voter's decision. One commentator placed the senator relatively, "in the Democratic center" — which would be, absolutely, far left — and a survey of his presidential platform shows no signal difference from that of John Kerry, or Al Gore; or John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton. For those who see action abroad as American trespass, somehow necessary but ever to be conducted with self-reproach; who like socialized medicine and athletic, even vindictive, regulation of commerce; strange and perfunctory invocations of God; any one of these current or one-time senators will do.

Enthusiasts, of course, will be tempted to select the man who looks and talks propitiously, and then Barack Obama is again valued for minor qualities. When the senator said, at his campaign proclamation, "In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope," what was the listener told, substantively, other than this man's fondness for antithesis?

Andrew Ferguson wrote for the Weekly Standard a review of Obama's authorship, comprising two books: a memoir written before politics and a political manifest written after. The second book Ferguson called "infinitely weaker," unction supplanting the guilelessness of the first one. While it is hard to accept inferiority beyond measure without a book going to print not proofread, or missing pages or words altogether, Ferguson's imprecision on that point was balanced by the reasonable regret that "we have lost a writer and gained another politician. It's not a fair trade."

Obama's declaration for executive office came on Saturday. On Sunday, he rebutted criticism from Australia's prime minister, John Howard. Obama was "wrong," Howard said, to call for retreat, as it would "encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq." It is known that the enemy delighted in the Democratic win and in its own words anticipates, from the new majority, a hurried entreaty.

"I think it's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced," said Obama, then in the next sentence disparaged Canberra's military commitment and challenged Howard to undertake what the senator would have the United States renounce. This the day after the senator spoke, using paradox, of salad days in Springfield, when he "learned to disagree without being disagreeable." Color, clever distinction, statecraft? Most obvious about Barack Obama is that he has been made — or has made himself, for exertion in American politics — insufferably prosaic, and no uncommon politician.

We used to have diversions, before science brought us the temporary divestment from reality. The favored term for maintaining a suspension of disbelief in an electronic projection is immersion, though the word denotes plunging in so as to be covered; or becoming engrossed. Last March, video game developer Bethesda Softworks released the fourth title of its Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion, a refinement of techniques in fooling the eye and ear and mind — and confounding one's sense of time — with interactions on a TV or computer screen.

I write hereon assuming that the reader either has some understanding of fantasy themes popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien and others; and their application in modern Western literature, drama and games; as well as video games themselves; or else, if some reasoning of what follows isn't tacit, that unfamiliar meanings or concepts can be sought and clarified elsewhere.

Oblivion is at its simplest a normal fantasy role-playing game. A single player creates an identity, a character, whose actions he will control in an anthological mise-en-scene: part Arthurian legend, part European folk tale, part Greek mythology. Characters can be one of three traditional archetypes (warrior, rogue, magician) and one of several races (four breeds of man, three strains of elf, the loutish orc, or an upright and civilized lizard- or cat-man).

Gameplay follows the adventurer's lot. As hinterlands are traversed, haunted or savage ruins and other subterranea entered and conquered, treasures captured, fellow imperial subjects aided or bested; the strength and abilities, and fame and fortune of a character are increased and enlarged. Quests emerge from the environment — conversations, serendipity — and are either vignettes, with one or two accomplishments required for completion, or are segmented and develop into storylines, one of the latter central to Oblivion's plot. There are scores of challenges found across a large and varied countryside.

Until August of last year, that is all I knew of the game or its predecessors: big, open-ended, and fun. Does Bethesda realize how commonplace Oblivion's features appear to the unacquainted because the magnitude of them is, without having been experienced, incredible?

One can see pastoral photographs from the game, but that doesn't impart the encounter of sixteen square miles of navigable, fecund wilderness — mountains, forests, rivers. Nor is the dynamic simulation of natural light, be it morning or noonday or evening or night, appreciable without being able to, say, crane the neck of one's character and lose the crest of a hill in the sun's glare. Matter and objects are rendered so to be convincing on a fine, inch-for-inch scale. Exploring one of Oblivion's ancient temples, fortresses, caverns and mines takes between fifteen and forty-five minutes; and there are over 200 total sites.

Some of the enormity is by implication, though grand in itself. So while Oblivion's capital city is populated by only ten score inhabitants, each citizen has a name, a face, an occupation and a reasonably distinct temperament. Anthropometry must fascinate somebody at Bethesda — players can manipulate their character's facial dimensions before starting out, results weighted by race, dimorphism and one's aesthetic judgment. I spent nearly an hour sculpting the face of my own character, an alabaster, high-cheekboned little enchantress. And that was the primary stage of customization.

Oblivion was promoted and welcomed as a game in which one was lost for hours, each next step of an adventure reported as having a strong dilatory effect on one's sense of closure. I resisted this by playing regularly, for just a few hours at a time. Six months later, if only once or twice a week, I make time for a short session. Most quests have been fulfilled, but there are several dozen forbidden places still undisturbed.

An excellent game, of course, isn't a perfect game. Functionally, Oblivion is very stable. The bugs which persist are not numerous, and they are minor; and some of them are comedic. As a game approaches a tangible and complex constructed reality, however — never reaching verisimilitude, surely not this year — shortcomings and oversights seem more noticeable than in a game borne of less ambition. Oblivion does this and this and this, yes; but what about this? One remedy is administered through the version available on the personal computer. Altering or inserting code, with Bethesda's encouragement, players make available modifications, or "mods," which often add game content, but may also adjust the calculus of Oblivion to match a preference or reflect an opinion.

Myself, I am limited to the original game and whatever Bethesda reserves for owners of the Xbox 360 console. Which is not to say I haven't thought about how Oblivion isn't as strong as it might be; I have, but shall do no more than write about it.

The milieu of Oblivion is complicated; too much so, maybe. It is a melange that, without studying the series' history, is probably from accumulation; multifarious in design but really anachronistic. Now, studies of medieval urbanity, architecture, economics and agriculture will always be buttressed by speculation, on one hand. And on the other, Oblivion isn't a period piece, so modern elements serving the convenience of players aren't unwarranted.

But then you plod down one of the several cities' streets — it's lined with houses closest to an Elizabethan style, behind curbs of what looks like Portland cement — while enclosed in chain mail armor, iron longsword slung from the hip, passing storefronts that retail food, goods and arms of the broader Middle Ages. Miscellany of arcana, magic and alchemy and artifacts, are vended; and vendors talk nearly as they would today.

What about an open market? Barter? What lord of sound mind would allow a blacksmith to work and sell materiel privately? A thaumaturge might offer his knowledge for a price, but then, wouldn't he, as at least prescribed by fairy tale, do it through tutelage, and out of sight — rather than, as in one example from Oblivion, unravel a catalog of sorceries inside a place called Edgar's Discount Spells, like a kind of esoterica a la carte?

Out of practicability and perhaps a bit of deference, Bethesda laid out underground structures a little bit like tabletop Dungeons and Dragons: passageways, rooms filled with monsters. Most of the time this doesn't seem too illogical, and in a few special instances the designers imaginatively set one kind of beast (say, goblins) against another (the angry dead whose presence the troop of goblins fatally overlooked). Wood nymphs, minotaurs, ogres and scorpion-men wandering around a crumbling great hall, not at all consanguine and yet minding the others' presence, inaptly make for a costume party.

The artificial intelligence governing the behavior of allies works to confirm Oblivion as a solitary endeavor. In the course of some quests, men of action join a character. In battle, each one sprints for the nearest enemy. Outnumbered, they are quickly cut down; in numbers, a cohort encircles a target, preventing players from engaging an enemy themselves without risking harm to their brothers. Athwart what seems natural — a swordsman would run and try to kill his opponent as quickly as possible — is what is enjoyable, and the theater suggests that the most interesting melee is one where combatants are paired off, and duels begin and end in turn.

How many weapons, pieces of armor, jewels, adornments, and curios are in Oblivion? Hundreds. After a sufficient number of hours, however, the game's classification is rather easily exposed in terms of rows and columns. A gold ring is a gold ring — is a gold ring, and what remains in monetary value is lost in variation. Is a random, a fractal, generator of the physicality of a thing impossible? Bethesda could take that same gold ring and show the player engravings, inlaid stones, other marks; that vary slightly or considerably from a second gold ring. Two rings, or two swords, or two of whatever might be worth the same coinage; one, through nuance and attendant sentimentality, priceless to a player. And curiosity about what another unique object looked like would inspire adventuring that sameness couldn't.

Inspiration, while playing Oblivion, is yet in ample supply. We have some one hundred-odd visitations for the snitching of antiquities left to go, my enchantress and me.

"We handled 9/11," wrote Andrew Cuomo two years ago, "like it was a debate over a highway bill instead of a matter of people's lives." Cuomo was referring to the Democratic Party, but his reprimand snugly fits several rightist commentators. The Iraqi campaign is nearing the end of its fourth year and for several months has been wreathed in dysphemisms, the fatalistic kind.

In question would be whether this front in the war is devoid of what should be or what some of us would prefer to see. Soldiers generally believe the latter, and many thousands choose to declare it by reenlisting so that they may return to Iraq. A lot of intellectuals are convinced of the former and have reverted to what Mr. Cuomo thought disgraceful. Where broadly expressed preferences for tactics and strategy would be relevant, some editorials instead tender "policy" about "security" to "end" the "violence." As if the deaths, most of them from Iraq's civilian population, were casualties of the remote; or that rhythmic murders by the enemy could be, with just the right public initiative, enjoined.

Very little of what the enemy can muster, against Iraq's future, is irreversible — as often as the word is repeated and by whomever, when polity, construction and defensive prescriptions continue, one can't say things are "deteriorating" unless to do it a priori. What seems to be motivating this, on the right, is a dissociate carelessness, a product of boredom with the war.

If it is not distracted thought, then National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg should be in some trouble. Seven weeks after obliquely terming Iraq "a mistake," at the same time calling for a plebiscite on the acceptance of allied troops, Goldberg, today, retracted the democratic offer and asked for a prepotent Iraqi to decide for all 25 million — including the Kurds? — by usurping state control and emulating the recently deceased Chilean tyrant, Augusto Pinochet.

Just three days ago, National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. reviewed Pinochet and his life, decided Chile and the West were fortunate to have been rid of the man after seventeen years and ended with an apothegmatic warning: "Power begets the abuse of it." But because Pinochet might not have been as murderous as other dictators, and because Pinochet (an authoritarian, not a totalitarian) left Chilean culture and markets mostly alone, and because Pinochet surrendered the government two years after the country was finally enfranchised; Goldberg has, if not exactly ennobled Pinochet, selected the example of his rule for salutary intercession in Iraq.

Goldberg propounds this through a series of errors, beginning with a choice between placing Fidel Castro or Augusto Pinochet in Baghdad — a strange one that no one actually needs to make. The government of Nouri al-Maliki, embattled, is still together and despite the enemy's tenacity there are no rivals behind which Iraqis have gone. The "bad options" Goldberg says that Washington has are the ones he gives us. And then, Pinochet himself, a lurid Cold War remainder whose rule could only arguably have led directly to present-day Chile. Rather, Goldberg wants correlation to prove causation: "Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society," he asserts, crediting Pinochet with "democratic institutions and infrastructure" and "free-market reforms."

First, Chileans were already navigating constitutional government before Pinochet took it from them. Second, Pinochet plus Chile equals enterprise is not universal — the Czechs and Estonians didn't learn about economic liberty from Moscow. Third, if non-totalitarian authoritarian Pinochet made it all happen? On Pinochet Christopher Hitchens has opined, reasonably, that "free-marketeers presumably do not believe that you need torture and murder and dictatorship to implement their policies." Or Americans with any interest in the vindication of their government's foreign efforts.

The "Kirkpatrick doctrine," that of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, is part of Goldberg's justification. But Kirkpatrick advocated forbearance of authoritarian regimes opposed to the totalitarian Soviets, not dictatorial coups fifteen years later, not the political infanticide of Goldberg's design. In her own words, Kirkpatrick said "I think that it's very important for us to continue to assure Eastern Europeans and citizens of the former Soviet Union, that whatever the current difficulties, we are convinced that they have made the good choice, the right choice, for the long run."

After the removal of a Stalinist despot, and granting to popular confirmation a constitution and government, actions led by a president who ran for reelection on the probity of his administration, it upends reason to believe that the United States would not enervate the libertarian causes it has always impelled, or the national will therefor. It is disturbing enough to hear of the extent of Iran and Syria's manipulation, the murder of Iraqis by enemies of the state who wear the state's uniforms. But to openly effect an oppressive government?

Practically: who would be picked to play Pinochet; how many and which kinds of dissidents could he harass, imprison, execute; how much of the nation's resources would be his through escheat; what would be his time limit to reinstate what he undid; or would there be one?

On the right, some parochialists are resigned to leaving the Third World to the several brands of fascists — but one has to strain to recall the last time somebody wanted to forfeit an entire country, and positively. If polemics have not left us all dulled, there will be an exclamation, to Jonah Goldberg, of: What did you just say? Goldberg's article is out of character, insouciance over the betrayal of millions, but that is not an excuse.

National Review's editors and publishers, to avoid an impression of lazy inconstancy that could nag, might return to the departure of Ann Coulter five years ago. Coulter was admonished for writing, on September 13, 2001, in an obstreperous tribute to the slain Barbara Olson, that the United States "should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Goldberg, in fact, wrote about the unsuccessful conciliation and Coulter's contract halt.

Coulter, Goldberg explained, didn't fail as a person, but as a writer. What so repulsed was her implication of literally forcing a populace to obey, in Goldberg's words in 2001, "at gunpoint." Unless the Iraqi Pinochet employs dominative psychokinesis, he will have to follow Goldberg's plan with the force of arms, too. So, turn to Goldberg. If the demand for a Pinochet impersonation was a joke, it wasn't funny. If, as the saying goes, Goldberg was "just thinking out loud," he should think hereupon to himself, principally on where he went wrong.

If Coulter was too much, in the rawness of September 2001, either National Review deals with Goldberg or it tolerates what is understood in conscionable terms only as pro-fascistic. Does meaning still matter to the right? Goldberg should apologize and recant or National Review should send Goldberg the same way as Coulter — out.

If someone whispered to Harold Ford, Jr. — before a consummation in failure to be elected the junior United States Senator from Tennessee this November — that divine intervention was a resort, the congressman might have assumed that an endorsement had already been secured. "We got something else at work," announced Ford at a rally, one week after imparting his campaign manager's confidence in party doxology: "He said Republicans fear the Lord; he said Democrats fear and love the Lord." The King of Kings bid Brother Ford follow a path out of public servitude, and so it was.

About the same time, Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, had published a commentary piece on politics and religion, and religion and religion. Writing that "Democrats have been trying to show that they, too, have God in their hearts" since an electoral defeat two years before, Mac Donald related the open confessions of Harold Ford, Hillary Clinton and something on Capitol Hill called the Democratic Faith Working Group.

What does a candidate's witness mean, she asks: "That he is a good person?" No disagreement between the religious and irreligious on that; both are wary of pretenders. Offer a general remark about "evangelism" to someone under 70 years of age and there is a fifty-fifty chance you will have to clarify — the seminarian calling, or the telecast hustle? This, in the first few paragraphs, was timely and more contemporary than the rest of the article which, as the opinion of Mac Donald and declared "secular conservatives," still stands.

So Mac Donald takes a sharp turn. Pretense isn't what bothers her. The mere interjection of religion she calls a "conversation-stopper." Her doubt that "a sincere belief in God prevented behavior we now view as morally repugnant" leads an injunction on theological influences entering policy, discourse, and something-other-than-God forbid, one's own mind. The stuff goes past skepticism to plain contempt, flush and terebinthinate.

Discrediting religion needs a captious eye for failings — however central human flaws might be to Christianity, which takes the brunt — and Mac Donald has got one. On repugnance, we are informed that "There were few more religious Americans than antebellum slaveholders and their political representatives; their claim to a divine mandate for slavery was based in unimpeachable Scriptural authority." A false one, as bondsmen were a regulation of the Mosaic laws against which the apostle Paul remonstrated in his letters to the Galatians.

If the misapplication of a tool invalidated its utility, we would have no use for fire, knives, hammers, automobiles, piano strings — let alone religion. Mac Donald is conflating piety, devotion, with pietism, affectation; or else doesn't mind the difference. Were the popular culture of urban blacks not meretricious and patricidal, "the sad state of the inner city" might illustrate the irrelevance of religious obedience. Mennonites, Amish and Quakers don't have the same problems; Quakers' ancestors having used the same book as the slavers to oppose the lien on men's lives.

But one might suppose Scriptural inspiration would be dismissed by Mac Donald as incidental. "It is a proven track record that makes conservative principles superior to liberalism, not the religious inclinations of their proponents." Secular rightism, taken beyond a personal stance, is a narrative of coincidences. Imagine memorizing Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Alto Horn in Eb and Piano, playing the piece without need of music for several years; and upon reaching a sufficient level of confidence, denying Hindemith's authorship or the authenticity of a score, instead maintaining that given enough musical insight a student could construct every note, rhythm and phrase for each of four movements all by himself. After all, if Hindemith's music were so compelling wouldn't anyone come to a similar conclusion?

Mac Donald thinks George Bush's avowal that "God wants everybody to be free" is "disquieting" because of a disjuncture from "worldly evidence." The president had at least two reasons for saying what he did. First, the formulation is neither novel nor strange, inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 as "certain unalienable rights," endowed by the Creator, of which "liberty" is one. Rejected by some in dialectics, free will has endured in Western thought, often proposed as self-evident and inviolate as it is providential — Mac Donald has other statements to impugn before turning to Bush's. Second, the president is not the only one judging his actions according to guiding principles. Mac Donald may not, but many millions do listen to clergy. Adjutants of the late Pope John Paul II decried the liberation of 25 million in Iraq as "a crime against humanity," the pope himself "a defeat" therefor. Mr. Bush has an interest in exegetical defense.

A-ha! Unresolvable contention! Mac Donald, who has elsewhere called the Bible "open-ended," adduces the defeatist platform of unsuccessful Senate challenger Ned Lamont. "If opposing candidates declare themselves supplicants of the divine will," she asks, "how will a voter decide who is most likely to receive divine guidance?" As they would anything else, yes? Mac Donald is welcome to submit subjects in the humanities settled beyond dispute. In the meantime, she can contemplate Pope Benedict's speech on faith and reason.

"The scientific ethos," the pontiff said in September, "is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity," by which "theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."

Values, for Mac Donald, "are best grounded in reason and evidence, not revelation." But logical deduction is to moral philosophy what a thresher is to harvesting — a dumb machine reliant on input. If we are governed by a universal system, which is it? Islamist fascists specialize in promulgating every facet of living; or there is, for one, the Bible.

Go strictly on evidence? Empiricism leads to dutiful nescience, where human dignity becomes just one of several competing suggestions for what in the world to do with people. Barge into a discussion on a college campus, or most anywhere in Europe, or within the United Nations Human Rights Council, and you may interrupt an exercise in rationally concluding that man has no natural rights to enterprise, speech, property or life itself.

A little farther on, Mac Donald assures that "the Golden Rule and innate human empathy provide ample guidance for moral behavior." The command to do unto others as one would have done to him is correctly attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and his preaching; incorrectly when used to imply that Jesus taught nothing else. Alone, the Golden Rule instructs a relativistic pact of mutual non-intervention through which Party A, so long as he remains unmolested by Party B, shouldn't reproach the persecution of Party C by Party B; or else is not empowered to stop certain activities of Party B that will lead to B inflicting pain on C.

Only "innate empathy" can intervene, and as sure as there are those few totally without it, we have no such comfort. Ayn Rand understood that "There is no such thing as the right to enslave," but in 1957 Whittaker Chambers, reviewing Atlas Shrugged, wondered if Rand didn't know why: "Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. ...If Man's heroism (some will prefer to say: human dignity) no longer derives from God...then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity."

From postulate to party to policy to perfect world, we can pick and choose among the materialistic detestations that the last century alone had to offer. Chambers captured the irony in the arch-individualist's oeuvre overturning her thesis. God, even the idea of a divine sovereign, is a great consolation: unlimited power wielded without fault or extremity — while man takes ahold of just a little and makes himself into a cynosure, first tumescent and then implosive, always baneful. Absent something grander, there is only the self, and that vehemence is in Mac Donald, chafed because "America's rules of religious etiquette demand that we acquiesce silently in a believer's claim of revelation." How dare they. Even the Constitution is a skeptical writ, insofar as the Founders "left God out of the Constitution," when in fact the document carefully indemnified religion against proscription or marginalization, or weird theophobia, like that of Heather Mac Donald.

And: Congress went thataway. Election results aren't devastating for the Republican Party but they are unassailable: half a dozen Senate and over two dozen House seats taken by the erstwhile minority, no opposition incumbents exacted in kind, a similar picture in the capitals of most of the fifty states. In Washington, control of the legislature changes as it usually has — cleanly.

For some on the right and in the party, this is just the opportunity for reformation, to efface certain sections of the Republican palimpsest.

However, just what of party canon needs to be scratched out and what overlaid will be subject to the same differences that, it is easy to argue, impaired the defense of a majority this November. At present Republicans stand for Republicanism, tautology intended, but Republicans ended up there gradually rather than egregiously. The 1994 revolution's eponym fell in 1998; and the last serious mention of the federal budget deficit was five years ago, the day before the start of a world war, after which Republicans on Capitol Hill were complaisant over soft-statist propositions of a theretofore presumptive commander-in-chief.

Widely telecast, Republicans plan to take the party back to — somewhere not here. In the Senate, calls for moving left. In the House, a return to tabula rasa, and several extant congressmen have announced candidacy for minority leader, whip, conference chairman. Public statements generally regret drift, complacency, banality; and resolve to, in the words of Representative John Boehner, reconstruct what in 1994 "translated," for Congress, "the coalition that put Ronald Reagan in office." The 2006 loss occurred when the "coalition came apart."

Boehner and others want to put the coalition back together, and it won't be as simple as another unifying platform. The axiom of power and corruption stands, but pressure to moderate came over the last decade from a leftist party, media and clerisy, all of which spent the last five years, particularly, striking in places where the rightist majority was vulnerable. Before the midterm we heard that Republicans deserved to lose, and now hear that they are better off.

Are they? Advantages of minority status are tiny at best. There isn't much to do except refit and try again. In 2008, the party is likely to encounter an environment less hospitable to small-government ideals, and fortified to keep them out. If Democrats find it hard to legislate, the consequences of that difficulty will be easier to bear by the efforts of a sympathetic press corps. On the major networks and in the major newspapers, Washington proceedings will still be narrated as Republican misfeasance and failure, only now with the corollary that Congress a) is not responsible, and b) had its good deeds stopped up.

Some positions will be painful to adopt and maintain. Take an issue as signal this year as pork-barrel spending. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, one of the principal members of Porkbusters, a group petitioning Congress to stop measuring the legislator's worth to his constituency by the earmarked dollar, observed in October — a month after Washington's passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act — that "It's insiders versus outsiders, not Democrats versus Republicans, and however the elections go things aren't likely to change much because of party shifts."

As written here a year ago, unlimited incumbency lends itself to ingratiation. That is a rule, and only a little interpretation is needed to assume that it will be followed by the Democrats — Senator Chuck Schumer last week, heralding "majority for a generation," warned his party, "Our joy today will vanish if we can't produce for the American people." Schumer could have chosen a lot of words, like "speak," work," "perform" or "reform," but no, he said "produce." Unless Republicans politic against diverting federal monies thither, even to their own states and districts, a discretionary register will be used less for civil scrutiny than for public munificence.

That is a domestic conundrum. On foreign affairs, revivalists ought look to whether intervention and nation-building — held here to be essential for national security, however expensive — are as pungently consistent with other principles as reformers and critics alike might demand. Less entitlements here, plenary entitlement abroad? It can be done. Can it be argued?

Republicans have some time. There are ten days to go before Thanksgiving, and Democratic leaders are still posing to smile in photographs with President Bush. Nevertheless, big policy debates are coming up.

It was the recollection of journalist and historian William Shirer that Adolf Hitler maintained "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." Footnoted in any appreciation of Richard Wagner is the composer's suspicion of modernity and his inveterate anti-Semitism, faults shared by the German dictator. But rather Wagner, Shirer believed, provided with his "towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths" endemic grandeur that the Third Reich could and would restore — as dictated by Hitler's expository Mein Kampf.

The Nazi manifesto could be called a product of intellectual convenience. Shirer was more descriptive. In a chapter of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich titled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich," Shirer wrote how Hitler's beliefs were dictated from Lansberg prison "in all their appalling crudeness," derived from "a weird mixture of irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenth century." Establishing the reality of Germany after the Great War — only shallowly democratic and pluralist — Shirer contended Hitler's activation was typical among the Germanic but for "the means of applying" these things, and that the fulminant Reich embodied a primeval which "always fascinated the German mind."

It wasn't that Teutonic myth and Shirer's "odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced" intellectuals, when combined, led one to conquest. Hitler did appeal through common culture. The rudiment of his Weltanschauung, however, was simplistically dominative — the sum of concepts from Georg Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, H.S. Chamberlain and others in Hitler's "littered mind," by any reckoning, a totalist empire.

Mary Habeck, professor at John Hopkins University, has written a book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. "What were the reasons," Habeck asks of the nineteen September 11th hijackers, "that they gave for the attack?" Reaching back eight hundred years, Habeck traces forward in time the lineage of exegetes who interpreted Islam rigidly and with increasing resistance to a popularly mollified struggle — jihad. In the Koran, we learn, Mohammed would define observance as both aggrandizement and sublimation, the former "understood by present-day Muslims to refer to...a time that has come and gone." Over the last century, several radical intellectuals struck at Western moderation. Habeck names three who contributed directly to today's Islamist fascism, and follows them closely: Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Mawdudi.

All three men were certifiably out to lunch. As with Hitler's national socialism, to read Islamism is to wade through delirium. Habeck, like Shirer, is to be thanked for completing a transposition of conspiracist lunacy. Her book stands out on two points. First, it refutes any irredentist claims for this kind of terrorism by simply turning to the many mentions of a global caliphate. Second, it reveals the work of the three as only plausibly originalist or regressive. Al-Banna, Qutb and Mawdudi took extraordinary liberties with Islam itself, constructing sinuous arguments to arrive at very narrow, totalitarian conclusions — an "Islamic state," but one misnamed. Not only did the three authors sidestep history and geography, but lifted much from the world they contrived to destroy.

Al-Banna, for instance, "did not ignore modern European concepts like nationalism, patriotism, constitutionalism and socialism is his search for an answer. ...In a passage strangely reminiscent of communist and fascist discourse of the same time, he wrote that 'after having sown injustice, servitude and tyranny, [the West] is bewildered, and writhes in its contradictions.'" Mawdudi "envisioned the Islamic state that would be run by a small group of Koranically educated and pious clergy, somewhat like the Politburo of the Soviet state." Habeck repeatedly notes such a reliance: al-Banna "did not accept foreign ideas" but was eager to use them once they had been "transformed to conform with the Koran," while Mawdudi picked "foreign ideas and gave them an Islamic meaning and context, finding ways to justify his prescriptions from the sacred texts." These scholars and their modern equivalents have played so roughly with categories of jihad, the meaning of disbelief and its consequences, the compass of Islamic territory and even the relevance of Mohammed himself that "fundamentalist Islam" comes across to the reader as not resembling the religion much at all.

Of interest near the end of Habeck's book is the lack of effort among radicals to clarify an "Islamic state." One contemporary group tried, sketching a constitution "that envisions a totalitarian dictatorship without a legislature or formal judiciary that could check the unchallenged power of the ruler. Private behavior — and even secret thoughts — would be regulated by the state." Is it reductionism, at all, to find a parallel in a maxim of history's most flamboyant dictator, "absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority"? Hitler — or any tyrant that was — hadn't come up with anything basically unique.

Professor Habeck draws prudent conclusions, more conservative than those here. In the last chapter of Knowing the Enemy, she writes that Islamism's "innovations" are deviant canon and the use of violence as good works. However alloyed, Islamism still qualifies, for Habeck, as a religious calling. Should it? Or is it common culture used as a transmitter? What, in this judgment, is exclusive to Islam but for the historical context and means of expression? If none of it is, the differences between, say, Islamist fascists and Chinese Communists are simply degrees of malignance; therein a potential for American strategic opposition, even military engagement, against dozens of countries for many years. It wouldn't be popular but under the circumstances more sensible than implicating Islam and supporting, as suggested by some, the placation of secular autocracy — as easily and fruitlessly as one might have had the Weimar Reichstag ban Tristan und Isolde.