like sands through the hour glass...

Everyone knows we're in the middle of a big drama; that real life has been turned into some kind of soap opera with Obama, Hillary, and Jeremiah Wright as the stars.

And everyone's trying to figure out the plot.

Here's what we know so far:

It's no accident that Jeremiah Wright was given a few really big pulpits recently from which to remove all doubt from anyone's mind that he's a raving freak.

Having portrayed himself as such (although Peggy Noonan suggests he might be charming in person), he has given Obama the role of distancing himself from this "spiritual mentor" of almost his entire adult life. The result is clear: Obama is made of Teflon; but whether Wright did this intentionally or simply as a consequence of being a ranting buffoon is still up in the air.

Hillary and Obama agree that Wright should 'dissed. All of a sudden, instead of being a divider, Obama's starting to look like a hero for doing the hard thing, and standing up against such a dear, but pitiful friend. Oh, Obama, you're so brave!

Of course nobody with any sense believes this is anything more than a real, live soap opera, which is a pity, because real life is serious and few things are more important to responsible citizenship than our political processes. They are too grave to be turned into really bad drama. But here were are, just the same, in the midst of it.

The unknowns will become clearer, of course. But the knowns are pretty disturbing by themselves.

On the other hand, Occam's Razor suggests that..."it is what it is": Wright is some kind of self-aggrandizing self-promoter with a big chip on his shoulder so blinded by his own violent rhetoric that he thinks he's mainstream; Obama is a nincompoop; Hillary is...well, Imus calls her "Satan," but that's giving her far too much credit.

In any event, I am not sure which is more ridiculous: the story line as drama, or the story line as reality.

so many questions...

Look at Obama putting his embarassed face in his hands when asked about the deluded bleatings of Jeremiah "God D***m America" Wright. Can you just hear, "Oh, I'm so embarassed! Look at him! He's gone over the edge!"

Is the Obama campaign so clever and so ruthless that it might just be grateful to the "reverend" Wright for going as public as a human can and airing by interview for worldwide dissemination his warped conspiracy theories? Grateful, for example, that Obama can mumble and look like he's saying, "Oh, look at that poor wretch," while in the mind of the public he moves further and further away from his "spiritual mentor" until...

...when he says, "see, I never bought into that," the public will nod its collective head dumbly in agreement, and the Obama campaign will have pulled off another narrow but brilliant escape from reality?

Can they be that clever? Can they be that ruthless? Did the Obama campaign just stand by with its hands in its pockets while Reverend Wright publicly hung himself? (I was going to say "lynched himself" but there's no point in invoking racist imagery here).

Next question, did the Obama campaign encourage him to do so? Did it enable him to do so?

moral capital, part one

Today's Wall Street Journal ran an interesting Op-Ed piece about the Fed and its loose-money tonic. Personally, it isn't often that I feel sufficiently qualified to disagree with a Fed chairman but I will confess to an occasional doubt about Mr. Bernanke, and the Journal piece made a good case.

Alongside the editorial was this graphic showing the price of oil in Euros and in Dollars. It is very telling, because it illustrates clearly the effect of the falling Dollar on the price of oil. To wit: the commentary reads, "And it means that had the dollar merely retained the same purchasing power as the euro, today's price of oil would be below $70 a barrel." I think it's worth a little emphasis.

The editorial hashes again the debate about using "core inflation" as a measure of inflation for monetary policy purposes, and argues against it. Indeed, even a schlep like me has been known to point to a Dow or Gold or Crude ticker, back on the floor, and say, "there's your inflation!" when engaged in a discussion with traders about how high gold was going to go this time. Now, I can point to this graphic. That's handy because I'm not on the floor anymore.

But the title of this thread is going to take us down a path that will likely be a unexpected to some. We began with a discussion about easy money. Look what it does! In addition to a short litany of its attendent evils ("Inflation is the thief of the thrifty middle class"), the editorial cites one obvious consequence: "The housing bubble was a societal mania brought on by the Fed's subsidy for credit, and no one wanted it to end."

That last bit got me thinking. Easy money makes the weak weaker. And what's more, there's a moral parallel: easy morals make manias, too.

the materials posted here were freebies on the WSJ Online site.

dream on

Memo to Barack Hussein Obama: Sir, we have all heard quite enough about your views on the "color of your skin."

And we can read between the lines to get some insight into the content of your character.