Here’s why: a good portion of the interview is devoted to the Oscar speech he gave in 2003 — after he won Best Documentary for Bowling For Columbine — and its aftermath. He used his 45 seconds onstage to condemn Bush and the just-started Iraq War, and got an angry chorus of boos for his trouble — before he was completely drowned out by swelling emergency Oscar music and ushered offstage.

I remember all that. What I’d forgotten was how thoroughly he was ostracized by everyone afterwards — and not just the usual suspects, but people who should have known better, from Keith Olbmermann to Al Franken to the New Yorker. He was absolutely right, of course, and in retrospect everything he said seems not just uncontroversial but blindingly obvious — at the time, though, five days into the war, what he did in front of billions of people watching all over the world amounts to an immense act of bravery.

And he suffered the consequences: death threats, assaults, crazies plotting to blow up his house. He had to hire bodyguards to protect himself from people who were (literally) coming at him with knives and pipes and scalding cups of coffee. But what’s so remarkable about the interview is his account of how scared he was throughout — his apprehension about giving the speech; the trembling walk off the stage; the hour he spent that night flipping through channels, watching newscaster after newscaster pronounce his career over; his concern for his family; his quiet admission that, if he had to do it all over again, he very probably wouldn’t have. What emerges is a portrait of a human being with the same fears and doubts and weaknesses as the rest of us, doing courageous, principled things.

I don’t want to descend too far into hagiography. Moore has his faults, like everyone else. But he’s devoted a good deal of his life to pointing out the injustices all around us, and trying to make people’s lives better — always in the face of fierce condemnation, and worse. He’s not fearless, though: fearless is easy. He’s brave.

I consider settlements a very major problem. I do think, though, that the more important problem is the refusal of Palestinians to accept the legitimacy of any Jewish state. In a 2009 poll, 71% of Palestinians said it was “essential” to have a state that encompasses all of present Israel and the West Bank. Only 17% of Israelis said it was essential to have a Jewish state controlling all that territory.

In other words: “Wait, we’re continuously building settlements on Palestinian territory, imprisoning the residents of Gaza in what little land they have left, cutting off their access to the rest of the world, and throttling their supply of basic goods and services … and they still don’t like us?”

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

The art of seeking peace in a world choked with violence, hatred and apathy has to be premised on something like this: a pure, naked hope that both rises above and obviates the hard truths of the world — that exists free of the taint of the real. This is what religion, in its purest form, gives us: a transcendent hope that survives every kind of setback, because it’s based not on the here and now but on the cherished future: on what’s possible.

But, having said all that — the rubber has to meet the road somewhere. Ideals are worthless if they don’t eventually lead to something concrete. And this is where Obama’s speech falls grievously short.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world … to say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

The sting of all this is softened somewhat by what follows, but the points he’s making here are at least as important as all his subsequent peans to peace and hope: because they lay out a justification for war based not on necessity, but on morality:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I’m certainly not quibbling with the notion that violence is inevitable, and ubiquitous. But all the violence in the world does not in any way justify an ideology that deems war — the absolute apex of violence — moral. War is, by its nature, a crime. The United States and its allies have killed thousands upon thousands of civilians — in Dresden, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in Laos, in Fallujah, in Afghanistan — in pursuit of its wars. The question of whether these murders were justified in the grand scheme of things is a subject for a different debate. But even if we manage to rationalize the killings, we really can’t call them moral. There’s a difference between calling something moral and calling it necessary.

This isn’t semantic hair-splitting. Words matter, because the ideas behind them matter. If you raise a child to believe that slaughtering thousands of blameless Japanese civilians was a moral good — because, the argument goes, it prevented the death of thousands more by cutting the war short — then you plant the seed of the notion that killing someone can be a moral act. If, on the other hand, you tell your child that children just like him were murdered in cold blood, and that this murder was an immoral act, offset and justified by a desire to prevent death elsewhere — then, yes, you’ve introduced that poor kid to the excruciating world of moral compromise. But you have not taught him that killing all those people was morally justified. Only that it was an immoral act, justified by temporal, human, ratiocinations.

There is only one moral imperative that matters here: killing people is wrong, no matter who does it, or why.

The same goes for the notion of moral wars. Once you lay out a framework for justifying wars based on morality, it’s incredibly easy to slot other wars into that framework — because in stretching out and distending the definition of “moral” to meet your present needs, you’ve laid the groundwork for further redefinitions. All recent wars have been justified as moral imperatives, from the first Gulf war, to the second, to present-day Afghanistan.

I think this is one of Hitler’s unacknowledged sins: giving people who want to believe in moral war something to hang their hat on. It’s basically impossible to argue that our entry into World War II was wrong: it came in response to an actual honest-to-god military attack on our country, it delivered a large swathe of Europe from Nazi domination, and it halted a systematic — and, yes, evil — campaign to extinguish the jews. But, ever since then, Hitler has been used as a justification, by proxy, for all manner of wars. The first and second Bush administrations told us that Saddam Hussein was like Hitler. The neocons bolster their case for bombing Iran by manufacturing an Ahmadinejad/Hitler analogy. And, most depressing of all, Obama compares Al Qaeda to Hitler in his Nobel speech, in order to justify a war in a country in which Al Qaeda no longer resides:

A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

I admire Obama’s honesty in tackling this stuff head-on, in a speech that was supposed to be about peace: it’s to his credit that he chose not to ignore the elephant in the room. But I wish he hadn’t decided to justify his escalation by constructing a framework around it. If he feels that this war is necessary, he should simply say that it’s necessary, in this case, and then tell us why. In positing a whole category of “moral” wars, he justifies not only this war, but all the ones that are to follow.

And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership.

I’m not sure what question she was answering there, actually, or whether this really qualifies as an answer — or a sentence, for that matter. But it’s marvelous. It made me wonder what it would look like if she interviewed for a job as a software developer.

Interviewer: Can you describe the pros and cons of the Spring framework?

Palin: Yes, of course. Now, some people would say that the “Spring framework” is not a framework at all but perhaps rather an attempt by software bureaucrats to tell hardworking American programmers how they should write their software for example. And you know me I’m just a backwoods Alaska girl and honestly I don’t spend much time listening to the “experts” and the “elites” because sometimes you just have to go with your gut.

Interviewer: [pauses] So you don’t like it?

Palin: It’s not a question of liking or to not liking, Charlie, it’s a question of standing up for what’s right. Can I call you Charlie?

Interviewer: My name’s Phil.

Palin: Great! Imagine, Charlie, that you were getting ready to sit down in your own home or perhaps in your own yard in your own neighborhood wearing your own pajamas and you wanted to make code with your computer. The kind of thing that average moms and dads who love their kids and America do every day. Right?

Interviewer: I’m not sure.

Palin: Now imagine that you’re typing away at your codes and then suddenly some government bureaucrat swoops in and says stop Charlie! Stop, darn it! Because you’re not perhaps typing it the way that the “hive mind” wants you to type it. You’re typing it in a way that’s individual to yourself and that just doesn’t sit well with the socialists and the communists and the media elites. How would that make you feel?

Interviewer: I’m in the yard? In my pajamas?

Palin: In your own pajamas that you bought with the labors of your hard earning. And now this guy who never probably even shot anything with his own hands perhaps wants you to write it his way. The “spring” way, whatever the heck that is. [laughs]

Interviewer: So you’ve never used it before?

Palin: Chad, whenever I hear the work “framework”, you know what I see? I see a crowd of hardworking American men and women slaving away their whole lives stuck like dead butterflies on a communist scaffolding working for the State. I see welfare mothers with fifteen babies snorting coke that they bought with our money, Chad. I see the whole nation bent under the burden of socialized healthcare while Mexicans pour over the border and take jobs away from good American workers. And for what?

Interviewer: I’m not sure.

Palin: For the Spring framework, Chuck. When I had my son, Spork, me and my husband Todd looked each other in the eyes and we said to each other: “Never again. Never will we let the tyranny of French monarchy scar the shores of this great land.” Our men and women are overseas fighting for our freedom against the forces of Hitler or perhaps some Hitler-like entities while in our own country ACORN workers are free to go into our schools and hand out pamphlets about how to do abortions and Nancy Pelosi wants to nationalize Christianity and illegal immigration and what are we going to do about it? I’ll tell you what, Chris. We need to stand up and be the Americans that our founding forefathers and foremothers and little founding forebabies wanted us to be. By turning our back on the Sling framework, Chuck! But standing up for what we believe in and for what’s good and right and then for example traditional values which.

Interviewer: [pauses] It’s the Spring framework.

Palin: Exactly. Now, you can do whatever you want. You can use the Sling framework or the Euro framework or the Lenin framework or whatever you want! This is America. But if you do then the will of the people will rise up and crush you like a bug and that’s what makes America great.

Interviewer: Well, Ms Palin. It’s been very nice talking to you.

Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, spent $14.9 million lobbying in the six months, 23 percent more than the $12.1 million laid out by companies that make solar panels or wind turbines to generate electricity, London-based New Energy Finance said today in a note to clients.

Enough money, I’m sure, to bury every letter every congressman has ever received on this issue. The system is broken.

You have discussed this possibility only in the context of the current detainees at Guantanamo Bay, yet we must be aware of the precedent that such a system would establish. While the handling of these detainees by the Bush Administration was particularly egregious, from a legal as well as human rights perspective, these are unlikely to be the last suspected terrorists captured by the United States. Once a system of indefinite detention without trial is established, the temptation to use it in the future would be powerful. And, while your administration may resist such a temptation, future administrations may not.

Exactly, and obviously. It beggars belief that this has to be pointed out. Given the choice between an illegal program of incarcerating people without trial forever, and a legal program of incarcerating people without trial forever, I’d pick the former, in a heartbeat. But are those really our only choices? Sanctioned or unsanctioned outrages against basic human decency?

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for documents that carefully, surgically, and systematically gut the moral corpus of an entire society, then you’re not only in the right place, you’ve hit the motherload. You’ll find this:

Several of the techniques used by the CIA may involve a degree of physical pain, as we have previously noted, including facial and abdominal slaps, walling, stress positions and water dousing. Nevertheless, none of these techniques would cause anything approaching severe physical pain …

And this:

To violate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering. Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. … We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.

And, this:

As we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering”… The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering”. Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

Now, it seems to me self-evident that, once you’re in the business of carefully parsing the word “pain”, once you’re cheerfully debating the atomicity of the phrase “pain and suffering”, then you’ve entered a dark and scary place. And if, furthermore, you happen to be sitting in the justice department while you’re doing this, and your mad ravings not only have the force of law, but will in fact be put into practice as soon as your leather-winged emissaries can beat a path to whichever fetid torture chamber your opinions were expressly written to justify, then the whole country is in a dark and scary place.

To be clear: what’s frightening about this whole thing is not that these people legalized torture — it’s that they changed the definition of torture so that they wouldn’t have to bother. You don’t need congressional approval to eviscerate words, or to stuff their hollow carcasses with your own twisted, self-serving perversions. What you need, apparently, is faceless lawyers in dark subterranean cubicles scratching out poorly-argued legal opinions on preordained decisions. What you need, most crucially, is moral vacuities with their hands on the level of power, people willing to subvert goodness and decency in the name of — what? Security? Paranoia? Power? Probably all those things, and a lot more. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that one of the core assumptions of our democracy — that you can codify morality in law, and place those laws in the stewardship of human beings — is now null and void. If you control the language that underlies those laws, and are willing to subvert that language, all bets are off.

So who owns morality? The obvious answer here is religion — but religion is, if anything, a worse steward than the law, precisely because morality is kind of the point of religion, and because it has so routinely failed us. I’ve seen arguments that the Old Testament contains some of the earliest moral arguments in human history, and I suppose that’s true. Commandments five through ten are still good, solid advice: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat on your wife, honor your parents, don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. However — the prime real estate in that list of to-don’ts, its first four items, are devoted to the proposition that God will absolutely kick your ass if you worship other gods, or make statues, or say His name in any context other than base supplication, or work when He doesn’t want you to work. The Ten Commandments are half moral treatise, half naked power grab.

Which is, in microcosm, the problem with all religions. They start with the premise that you are here to please your creator, and all the other stuff — all the good works — are ancillary considerations. It’s a key tenet of Christian theology that being a good person will not get you into heaven: only believing in Jesus Christ — which is to say, getting down on your knees and subjugating yourself to His will — will do that. You can spend your life feeding orphans and pulling children out of burning buildings and donating organs to strangers, but if you happen to believe in Buddha you’re going straight to hell. And you know what they think of orphan-feeders down there.

Say it another way: the problem with religion, organized religion, is that it’s just another power structure, a pyramid of oppression with some god at its apex. Except it’s not really god up there, it’s whichever obese corrupt sanctimonious cleric has declared himself the voice of god.

I don’t think, for example, that anyone outside the Bush Administration would argue that the Catholic church’s sordid history of holy excruciations were shining example of Christian morality — were anything but the opposite of moral. We don’t have anything Inquisitional in the current state of Christianity in this country, of course, but examples of Inquisitional thinking, small and large, abound: whether it’s televangelists blaming gay people for hurricanes, or political parties using outdated religious mores to browbeat the devout into submission, or befuddled born-again presidents signing off on torture.

Having said all that: I find myself, against all odds, going to church on a pretty regular basis, and listening, every week, to a couple of hours of demoralizing cant about my flyspeck irrelevance in the face of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us 2000 years ago. I’ve been doing to this for several years now, and I must say I find it all no more convincing now than I did when I started.

But — if I grit my teeth, and ignore the fables and the dogma, I find it extremely pleasant to be surrounded, every Sunday, by a group of people who genuinely care about each other, and spend large portions of their lives doing stuff for other people with no expectation of getting anything back for it: they go on missions trips, and work at soup kitchens, they do community cleanup for no other reason that they think it’s right. And the pastors, for all their afactual pronouncements on the nature of life, the universe, and everything, are devoted, caring people, who preach without pretense or sanctimony. They’re honest-to-God role models, and I like and admire them immensely.

I don’t want to romanticize this. Churches, in the abstract, aren’t morality mills, by any means: a Pew study found that 54% of churchgoers think that torture is a right and proper way to treat your enemies. Some of that comes from the unfortunate linkage of fundamentalism with the current malign strain of Republicanism, some of it from the evil genocidal stuff in the first couple of chapters of the Bible. And you certainly find lots of this kind of selflessness outside of churches and mosques and synagogues. But I’m starting to believe that, if you could strip away all the oppressive cruft and focus exclusively on the core message of the more enlightened religions — peace, love, empathy, etc — we wouldn’t need any laws, civil or religious, to legislate right behavior.

Because somewhere between our innate savagery and the outer, societal savagery with which we’re daily besieged, there’s a diaphanous skein of moral fabric that whispers the truth. More often that not, it’s drowned out by the clangor of our own worst instincts, or by the vile prattlings of the snake-oil salesmen whose primary charter is to subvert our built-in knowledge of right and wrong. It’s there, though. I didn’t used to believe it was. But, these days, I do.

There’s a book by CS Lewis, called Mere Christianity, that starts out with one of the loveliest expressions of this core idea I’ve ever seen:

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used be called the law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong the “Law of Nature”, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with the great difference that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature, or to disobey it …

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Lewis goes on to ascribe this Moral Law to Heaven, of course, but I’m willing to bet that plain old run-of-the-mill human beings started it all. I don’t know why our species would choose to invent something as toxic to its natural savagery as morality, but there’s probably a good reason for it — evolution has little patience for the unnecessary or the vestigial.

I realize that this is all just a bunch of handwaving: another kind of faith. But, again, I’d choose terrestrial handwaving over supernatural handwaving any day of the week. The problem with attributing our morality to an Infallible Omnipotent is pretty obvious: it doesn’t work. Something as creakily defective as our moral sensibilities clearly aren’t the work of an Intelligent Designer: they feel like the work of a Bumbling, Inept, Compromised, Conflicted, Occasionally Good-Hearted Designer. Which is to say: us.

But wherever morality comes from, the fact remains: even the best moral instruction isn’t actually teaching us anything. It’s unlocking things we already know.

So where does that leave us? In a not-very-good-place, I think. Morality is, first and foremost, a very personal thing, and second — if you’re very lucky — an intimately shared experience, one person to another, community to community. A kid helping a blind man across the street. A mosque sponsoring a poor child in a country thousands of miles away. An engineer giving up a six figure salary to teach in a low-income district. Morality is a lovely and fragile thing, a butterfly flitting through the landscape of the apocalypse, and when you see it in its purest form, it’s beautiful, and devastating.

But as soon as you try to scale up to the institutional level, it disappears: evanescing off the hide of the Beast like mist. It’s not that corporations, governments, and religions aren’t moral entities: it’s that they cannot be moral entities¹. Morality is a personal affair, and large institutions are apersonal: they’re controlled mobs, basically, both more and less than the sum of their parts. Sure, these giant entities sometimes make gestures toward the moral: but the gestures are always hollow, hedged, and easily compromised.

Which makes things difficult. Every aspect of our lives is controlled, in one way or another, by these institutions, and there’s little hope that they’ll ever govern according to moral principles. It feels like the only thing we can do is what we have been doing: muddle through, keeping an eye on the leviathans, and relying on people who are willing to slingshot their moral sensibilities at the bad guys until they stagger, and fall. Then gird ourselves for the next onslaught.

Maybe there’s another way. Maybe one day we’ll evolve a species of morality that’s better able to withstand the annihilating pressure of the institutional collective; maybe we’ll find a way to govern from the base of the pyramid, and filter our innate sense of right and wrong up to its apex. I’m not optimistic. But as long as this thing is inside of us, I’m hopeful.

That’s kind of obvious, I suppose, but it’s remarkable how hard it is to do — for me, anyway, and I suspect for others as well. The only way you can possibly explain the eight-year purgatorium of the Bush presidency is as a triumph of personality over substance. This seems counterintuitive, given the vacuous what-me-worry personality we’re talking about here, but it’s inescapably true that, in 2000, a certain segment of the population saw in that amiable nullity a vessel for their own beliefs. I think that was Bush’s secret. Before he morphed into a monstrous purveyor of torture and low-grade fascism, he seemed to be, above all else, a slightly dimwitted outline of a man, a color-by-numbers figure who you could make your own. It’s not so much that politicians of this stripe flip-flop, or deceive, or morph to suit whatever constituency they’re trying to hoodwink today¹. They don’t have to. We do it for them.

Barrack Obama is a different phenomenon. Clearly a much smarter, more capable, more thoughtful man, he achieved his brand of mass appeal not by emptying himself of content but by filling himself with it. If you’d spent the last eight years suffering under the reign of zombie right wing ideology, then he represented, explicitly, everything you were longing for: some form of universal healthcare; a rejection of the pervasive culture of secrecy; an end to torture; an exit from Iraq; a recognition of, and an appreciation for, the rights of labor. You didn’t have to invent things for Obama to stand for: he came prepackaged with then, a Messiah of Particulars, with the ability to both convince and inspire.

But, really, all of this is just the beginning. I’d like to say that, in the last election, I just took a steely-eyed look at the agendas of both candidates, calibrated them against the evidence of their past deeds, cross-referenced everything with the matrix of my own convictions, and came to a purely empirical decision. But that would be bullshit. Not complete bullshit, because I clearly do line up better with Obama than McCain, ideologically, and if both candidates were reduced to a couple of anonymous policy papers, I’d certainly pick his. But, if I’m being honest, a lot of what I responded to was the man himself. I liked him, and, more importantly, I trusted him.

And really, there’s nothing wrong with that. The sad thing about being human is that it’s more or less impossible to get inside someone else’s head. You can take a long hard look at your candidates’ policy positions, temperament, eloquence, intellectual rigor, etc. But ultimately, what it comes down to — what it must come down to — is trust. Trust has to be earned, of course, and it should be based on deeds as much as it’s based on words. But, ultimately, it’s a leap of faith: Do I believe this guy will do the right thing? ²

So, yes, by all means, trust. Follow that trust to the ballot box, and let it guide your hand, and walk out of there with a clear conscience. But, as soon as the election is over, and your candidate is (joyfully, miraculously) in office, it’s time to put trust aside. Because he’s a very different animal now — he’s a president, and presidents can’t be trusted.

Which isn’t a very radical statement, especially in this country, whose government is founded on — and organized around — the principle that human beings are fallible and untrustworthy. We have three branches of government, and a constitutionally-protected free press, that are supposed to be keeping a close eye on each other. Lately, they’ve been doing a very poor job of that, but the point remains: the founders were clear-eyed about our limitations, and they enshrined their misgivings in an essentially confrontational system of government riddled with checks and balances.

Obama did himself — and the country — proud the other day, by releasing a bunch of memos, written by Bush administration lawyer/ghouls, that detail in legalistically gruesome detail the kinds of suffering we, as a country, have felt comfortable inflicting on our prisoners for the past decade or so. These memos represent a shameful blot on our history, one that needs to be acknowledged and atoned for. Obama started that process last week.

But he also seemed to stop it, by saying that no one in the CIA should be prosecuted for torturing people. Because the past is the past, we have to look to the future, blah blah blah. I’ve always found this particular line of reasoning (whether it’s applied to the millionaires who ruined our economy or the sadists who ruined our soul) profoundly ridiculous, and fundamentally incoherent, and I don’t know why Obama keeps using it. No doubt there are a lot of issues to consider here, and he had to take all of them into account in plotting the best way forward. Or this may be part of some giant Obama-esque master plan — built out of equal parts ambition, moderation, patience, and intelligence — that will eventually get us where we need to be. But, in the absence of better information, it’s dangerous to see this as anything other than a betrayal.

I like Barack Obama. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a public figure more. And, again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless, that is, I allow my appreciation of the man to distract me from my scrutiny of the president.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn’t a new kind of politics. It’s the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there’s a reasonable argument that it’s actively pernicious – that if you can’t shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn’t shrink it at all. There’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s radically different than the one we have now; there’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we’re getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They’ve done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they’ve shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right – but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right.

That’s exactly right. These aren’t serious people. They’re playing a game whose rules, and goals, have nothing to do with the reality surrounding them.

Upon taking office, Obama ordered all secret U.S. prisons closed immediately, and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay closed within a year; he stopped the torture of American prisoners; granted access to all U.S. detainees to the International Red Cross; ended the practice by which detainees could be sent to countries where they might be tortured; froze the salaries of all White House officials making more than $100,000; ordered all government agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” regarding Freedom of Information Act requests; ordered all administration appointees to take an ethics pledge; ended a government ban on funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling abroad; and revoked Executive Order 13233, which placed limits on public access to the records of former presidents.

Lately, I’ve been grumbling dyspeptically about all the things Obama hasn’t done since he was sworn in, or has done but shouldn’t have. Seriously, though — whatever happens in the next four years, as far as I’m concerned, he’s already saved the country.