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Imagine this for a moment. Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki gives an interview with a well-respected news magazine and says:

"Look, there is absolutely no way the government of Iraq can support a timetable for American military withdrawl. It's the wrong plan, period. We need American troops here until the job is done and we don't know when that is."

In other words, imagine that he stated John McCain's position almost verbatim. Tell me what the reaction would look like among the American media and voters. I will save you the trouble: shit would not hit the fan, for no fan on Earth would be powerful enough to withstand the nor'easter of shit that would result. The fan would literally be buried under an Everest-sized mountain of rhetorical feces. And Obama's campaign would rapidly become an updated version of McGovern '72. McCain would do nothing but repeat this single talking point incessantly. Your email inbox would fill to bursting with forwarded emails of al-Maliki's quote and endless derision of Obama's contrarian position. We wouldn't have a campaign so much as we'd be having Obama's wake.

Of course, Mr. al-Maliki did not say that. He said the exact opposite. In effect, he offered Obama's position as his own opinion on withdrawl:

"That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," al-Maliki was quoted as saying. "Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq would cause problems."

While one high-profile Republican strategist responded to this development succinctly ("We're fucked.") this will ultimately amount to a minor flap in the campaign. No eulogies will be sung for McCain. The man who thinks Pakistan and Iraq share a border or that Czechoslovakia is still a country or that he knows what Iraq needs more than the Iraqis do will continue to wear the Foreign Policy Expert crown. Obama will remain the guy your aunts and uncles very seriously intone about as "too inexperienced," lacking McCain's many years of experience in being white promising to cut taxes international affairs. No one will point out that McCain has repeatedly stated that when the elected government of Iraq wants us out, we'll leave.

No one will question the GOP's mind-boggling insistence that A) Iraq is so goddamn safe we can hardly believe it but B) we can't leave. They declare victory for democracy while simultaneously trying to convince people that Iraq will become Uncle Osama's Terrorism Fiesta if we leave. We've achieved victory – stable democratic government and peace – but without 150,000 troops on the ground it would quickly become the seventh circle of hell. That's a pretty curious interpretation of having achieved stability and peace.

If you can spare 90 seconds, take the Pew Center's News IQ test. Or don't and just keep reading.

As I have stated repeatedly over the years, and as you are already fully aware, Americans are stupid. We already know this. Every conceivable way of measuring what Americans know about politics, government, and current events leads to the same abysmal conclusions. It is easy to take a survey like Pew is offering and point to alarming findings such as the fact that 84% of Americans know that Oprah likes Obama and 28% know that more than 4,000 troops have died in Iraq. Oh, that liberal media!

This is not new. Every 12-18 months, usually on a slow news day, another media outlet or polling organization rolls out a new but essentially identical set of data; lots of adults don't know who represents them in the Senate, which party controls what, where the Pacific Ocean is on a map (seriously), and so on. Several landmark studies in political science (notably Philip Converse's "Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," 1964) and countless best-selling books (including Rick Shenkman's new Just How Stupid Are We?) have cashed in on telling the same story. Americans, aided by absolutely vacuous news media, are stunningly ignorant.

The data cited by these authors, both popular and academic, are doubtlessly accurate. Nonetheless the conclusions commonly drawn – we're too stupid to dress ourselves without assistance let alone wield democratic power – are controversial. Just how much, and more importantly what, does one need to know to participate in the political process? It would not be hard to support an argument that much of this has little relevance to opinion formation. Critics, in other words, assert that these tests of political/civic knowledge are essentially tests of trivia.

Does a person need to know the Senate Majority Leader – or find Louisiana on a map, or whatever – to form a negative opinion of one presidential candidate or the other? Is knowing the number of Senators relevant to understanding the motives and justifications for the war in Iraq? Objectively, no. At the same time, it is also obvious that some facts (whether or not WMD were found in Iraq, which nations were most responsible for 9/11, how many troops have died in the war) are very relevant to drawing accurate conclusions and forming intelligent opinions.

The reality about the relationship between basic civic knowledge and our electoral system centers around two dynamics. First, there is a threshold effect. It's not necessary to get 12-for-12 on the Pew quiz in order to be an informed voter and there's probably no effective difference between getting 9 or 12. There is a number, probably hovering around the mean, at which someone shows enough knowledge to form opinions that are not completely random. Going beyond that doesn't help a whole lot (although more is obviously better for other reasons) and dipping below it probably reveals comprehensive ignorance. Second, very high or very low scores are essentially measuring political interest; it's not possible to pay any attention to politics and be unaware of the Congressional majority. Conversely, it's not possible to know minute points (the names of Senate Committee Chairs and so on) without paying a lot of attention.

The conclusion I usually draw, and the sense in which I mean "stupid", is that Americans are vacant. True stupidity would be an inability to learn this stuff, and that certainly does not exist. Listen to sports talk radio for 10 minutes. You will hear callers, people who probably couldn't name their Senators for a million bucks, rattle off the batting averages of the entire starting nine of the 1986 Mets. Americans, in short, are simply chock full of information about meaningless things – Survivor, shoe shopping, celebrity romance, football, cars, and so on. Those things are all fine and good (see the sidebar for a set of baseball links I read every day). Survivor and sports are supposed to be our brain candy, our hobbies. Instead, they are the entirety of what we know. These subjects have become to the American mind what junk food has become to the American diet: what should be an occasional indulgence in the interest of pleasure and relaxation has become the whole menu.

Like an episode of Law & Order, this entry could be described as "ripped from the headlines." The current state of our nation's financial system is shaping up to be an exercise in moral hazard.

The concept is simple: people (and organizations) act differently when they believe they will be protected from the consequences of their actions. But there are rarely explicit guarantees to that effect; this amounts to an information asymmetry in which I know that you'll let me off the hook even if you think you won't.

A common example is found in the world of international aid. Rich Western Country gives Poor Dirty Country a giant check and a set of instructions: "Spend this on A, B, and C or else." Now, the kleptocrat in charge of PDC knows damn well that this is an idle threat. So he buys a gold-plated 737. RWC says "You failed to do A, B, or C. No more checks." But the checks come anyway for any number of reasons: guilt, concerns that PDC will buddy up with a country hostile to western interests, or emotional appeals about starvation and poverty and AIDS and sadness. "Benchmarks" are never met. The flow of money never stops. The money never gets spent on anything productive. Under the circumstances, how could we expect otherwise? Mr. Kleptocrat is reacting as all humans do to an environment in which the risks are manipulated in his favor.

Of course a good portion of our current financial turmoil is based on a moral hazard. For every stern-faced lecture from The Fed or Chimpy about how There Will Be No Bailout, there is always a bailout. It is difficult to convincingly threaten Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac just a few months after Uncle Fed served up a quarter-trillion dollar bailout for Bear Stearns. Remember that? Everyone on Wall Street sure does.

While the government is not above making examples out of smaller financial entities like IndyMac (a large bank, but far from an integral component of the world of finance), investment banks, underwriters, and large mortgage guarantors – Freddie and Fannie – are happy to play fast and loose with Other People's Money. Maybe they sweat a little more when they see FDIC take over a bank, but they know goddamn well that their time will never come. Congress and the President will saber-rattle, talk big, and lecture like a humorless hall monitor but they will be there with the bailout when things go to hell.

The Fed already created a situation ripe for abuse when they agreed to let mortgage lenders trade shitty, insolvent subprime paper for cold hard cash. That's a pretty sweet deal, eh? The Fed (i.e., the public) takes on worthless past-due mortgages and the lenders take on billions in cash. As usual, and as we'll shortly see again with Freddie and Fannie, the profits belong solely to the stockholders but the risk (i.e., the losses) belongs to all of us. It's socialism for Wall Street and hard-knocks capitalism for the rest of us. Fannie's executives earn $10-$13 million per year to risk someone else's money with full confidence that we will pay the tab when they fail.

And people wonder without a hint of irony why we ended up in this mess.

Oh, not everything is rosy from the investors' perspective. Bear Stearns stockholders certainly felt the pain of an 18-month free-fall from $170 to $2. Fannie and Freddie investors are walking funny these days as well. But in the long-term (which is, in my humble view, the only rational way to look at stocks) they will be just fine. If anything, they will benefit from an extended opportunity to buy cheap stock in companies that Uncle Sam will not allow to fail.

In a normal country, the government would insist on a restrictive set of regulations and caveats to go along with the bailout checks or dispense with the charade of private ownership altogether and simply nationalize Freddie, Fannie, and the other insolvent big-shots. But the financial sector doesn't believe in big government's rules, just it's cash. If the situation rights itself – as it did after the massive S&L bailout in the 1980s – you can guarantee that we'll be repeating it endlessly in the future. It's like being sent into a casino with someone else's money and two simple rules: win, and the money's yours. Lose, and the debts are on the house. Gee, what could go wrong?

(Spoiler-free, I think)

Amazingly, this movie comes painfully close to living up to its hype. It's really, really good. I would not put it in the pantheon of great films, but there is little doubt that it is far and away the best "comic" movie ever made. Not sure if there's a close second.

This review will seem a little negative only because I'm not going to waste time being redundant and pointing out what every critic on the planet has already said: it's dark, compelling, well-acted all around, and not "fun" in the summer movie sense. Everything you've heard is true. I'll mention two pleasant surprises and one big negative.

First, Christopher Nolan got slightly less terrible at filming action scenes! He replaced his technique from Batman Begins – shaking the camera around so the audience feels like they're "in the action" (i.e. nauseous) – with a mildly irritating Michael Bay-style series of rapid cuts. It's not good, but it's a dramatic improvement. They could get someone to film the action better, but then they'd be stuck with all of the idiocy that accompanies those folks. Second, Aaron Eckhart acts like someone other than Aaron Eckhart, Smug Asshole. That's refreshing.

The problem: this was very, very obviously two films. The original plan was to make the third film in the series about Eckhart (Two Face) as the main villain, but instead the writers and director chose to merge that story into the second film. It showed. A lot. The last hour of this film is a condensed version of a third film, and Nolan struggles mightily to A) connect the second act to the first and B) keep the Joker involved in the Two-Face storyline. Several storylines in the film were truncated as a result.

I suppose a second negative is that I have no idea how they're going to milk a third sequel. What could possibly follow this? One big problem with the Batman franchise (as sharply noted by commenter Scott N.) is that the villains absolutely pale in comparison to the Joker. The only other charismatic villain is Two Face and, well, they shot that wad too. Given the gravity of Heath Ledger's and Eckhart's performances, it's going to be nearly impossible for the writers and whatever actors are tasked to play a milquetoasty villain in the next film to keep pace.

OK, last complaint. Christian Bale's "When I Dress Up As Batman, I Talk Like I Am Trying Really Hard to Shit but Failing" voice gets so ridiculous that he's barely intelligible at the end of the film. Seriously, it's so over the top that, among all of the sound effects and music, I couldn't even understand a few of his lines. At this rate they are going to need to subtitle Batman in the third film. Or pump the Caped Crusader with prune juice until he craps. A lot.

1. So like most people in my age bracket I will be seeing The Dark Knight this weekend, and let me tell you something – after the amount of hype this film has received, it better be good. It better solve longstanding historical controversies. It better balance the Federal budget. It better make everyone who watches it lose 10 pounds. It better give me an above-average haircut. It better make Godfather II look like a high school play interrupted by fighting hobos.

The bar, it has been set high.

It looks good. It looks like it will be better than other movies coming out this summer. But for christ's sake, people, settle the fuck down. It's a Batman movie. I know too many people who are beside themselves with excitement and fully convinced that this will be Citizen Kane for the 21st Century. Perhaps if we keep our expectations grounded more firmly in reality we can avoid crushing disappointment.

I'm optimistic, though. If Christopher Nolan figures out how to film an action scene (which, don't forget, he can't do to save his soul in the first film) it might be a 10 out of 10. But seriously, let's all settle down.

2. I/we have been immortalized in cartoon form in NUVO, which is Indianapolis' version of the Reader or Village Voice. Contrary to the impression that this creates, our singer is not Fidel Castro.

From the fine fellows over at The Monkey Cage (a blog run by political scientists who don't swear nearly as much as I do, which may be why they all have jobs):

A casual visual inspection suggests that people in their forties are more Republican than any other age group. Unfortunately that is one of two potential interpretations, the relative merits of which cannot be determined by this data. Are people aged 40 to 50 more conservative, or are the people aged 40 to 50 right now more conservative? This is a very old debate in the social sciences, the endless squabble over life-course effects versus age-cohort effects.

We could easily construct a story that supports either argument. For example, it's logical to suggest that people between 40 and 50 are bound to be a little less liberal, having settled into a life of property taxes, car payments, and saving for college. Conversely we could argue that the individuals between 40 and 50 today are more conservative because of the 1970s. They became politically aware during a thoroughly depressing era and experienced Carter Malaise followed immediately by Morning in America.

Short of doing decades-long panel data studies (and those have plenty of critics too) it's virtually impossible from a social science perspective to distinguish between these possibilities. I'm simplifying things, for certainly many researchers have devised innovative ways to support one argument or the other. But it is fair to say, as someone with no horse in the methodological race, that it remains an open issue.

On a personal note, I have long considered the first possibility – that aging makes us Republicans – to be overwhelmingly depressing. Ginandtacos nation, this post serves as binding legal authority for one of you to smother me with a pillow if I ever take up Tax Bitching as a hobby or cheerlead pre-emptive wars in the hopes of getting some great new footage for Wings.**

**The one on the Military Channel, not the delightfully crappy 1990s sitcom. I know there are only so many times one can watch the same episodes ("Wings of the Luftwaffe") but there is a moral limit to what I am willing to support to acquire new footage.

No Arts No Letters = No More. He is now here.

I don't know why it took me so long to notice. Oh wait, I'm furiously trying to finish my dissertation.

My fellow Americans,

Now that I'm making up a little ground in the polls I think we should talk about what I am doing. Frankly you all are starting to worry me a bit. Some of you are seriously considering voting for me. Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is?

Listen. This entire campaign is just an elaborate piece of performance art. An experiment, if you will. We are seriously just fucking around with you – seeing how blatantly we can give you the finger without losing your support. I had Phil Gramm (remember when he ran for President and finished behind Lamar Alexander?!?!) go on TV and call you a bunch of whiners for complaining about the economy. Read that again – my multimillionaire surrogate mocked your economic difficulties! I also promised to stay in Iraq (you know, that war you fucking hate!) for 100 years while all but guaranteeing a new war in Iran. It's like Marcel Duchamp crawled from the grave and ran for President.

I'm publicly dropping hints that Mitt Romney will be my running mate. Mitt Fucking Romney!!! I mean, come on. I can barely even talk about it with a straight face, and you retards just keep applauding! Next I'll roast a live panda over a bonfire while my campaign staff steal medicine from pediatric cancer patients. And my supporters will send more checks! Ha ha!

Even when I act senile – trying to provoke a reaction like "Oh my God, this demented fossil can't possibly have his finger on the button" – you're unfazed! I just gave a goddamn speech about Czechoslovakia (and did it again after I got called on it!) That hasn't been a country for, what, 20 years? Your response: crown me a foreign policy "expert!" You gotta be shitting me.

It's no secret that my party has been trying to tank this one from the outset. We all know what's coming, and we're perfectly happy to blame Great Depression II on the liberals. No fracking way do I want to be the older, dumber Herbert Hoover for a new century. But at some point I started having fun with this, seeing how far I can go. I am standing before the camera with both middle fingers shoved in your face screaming "Hey! Suck my dick, losers! Sometimes I buy gas just to set it on fire!" And then you promise to vote for me. I give up. So here's my platform for the rest of the race:

If it's true that there is nothing sexier than a lapsed Catholic, then I will argue that there is nothing more entertaining than a lapsed neocon.

Francis Fukuyama has long been lauded by the right for his classic, thunderingly stupid The End of History and the Last Man. While international relations is certainly not my field, I feel comfortable mocking the shit out of rhetorical detritus like:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

I will pause while you marvel at the fact that this man became internationally famous and virtually canonized by the right for proposing that in 1992, with Earth's sun not set to burn out for another billion-odd years, Western free-market democracy became the "final form of human government." We attained perfection. Fifteen years later I am still blown away by the hubris, naivety, and self-congratulatory tone of the early post-Soviet era.

Tim Krieder (The Pain comics, with major h/t to Matthew) uses Fukuyama as a primary example of how the right lacks imagination and creativity. In the ideological glow of "their" victory over Marx, they were simply incapable of imagining an alternative or wrapping their minds around the idea that anyone could reject the promise of unfettered capitalism. How could anyone want anything else? There is nothing else.

Well, it turns out that history didn't end and the rush to embrace The Only Way was less than universal. As Samuel Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilizations, it turned out that there were still a few ideological disagreements in the world.** Duly offended by the tepid response to Democracy's Promise in the middle east and Asia, the Western world has tried spreading it through economic hegemony. Or the barrel of a gun.

Fukuyama seems to understand that he may have underestimated a few things (although he insists, as conservatives always insist, that the real problem is not the ideology but that we strayed from it). Since 2006 he has alienated his neocon devotees by suggesting that perhaps the Iraq invasion has not been a success. He has also repudiated the Neocon movement he was so instrumental in creating. Now? He's endorsing Obama. How's that for the "Where Are They Now" file?

I can't tell if he's a late bloomer or simply a craven opportunist, but I am not a man who will stand idly by and fail to enjoy a very public academic humiliation.

**Having mentioned Fukuyama and Huntington, we have now exhausted what I know about IR.