"America wither?' was the question, with headache and heartache in several million homes as coming events were yet to unlock a box of secrets. In the hair-trigger suspense, Pat Buchanan was saying to an aide, 'A dog fight now might cause the gutters to run with blood.'

The high-priced lawyer, Rufus Choate, listening to foreign language operas in New York had told his daughter 'Interpret for me the libretto lest I dialate with the wrong emotion.' In the changing chaos of the American scene, people were dialating with a thousand different interpretations.
Only tall stacks of documents recording the steel of fact and the fog of dream could tell the intracate tale of the shaping of a national fate; of Countrywide Financial investigated for billions in bad loans and the fear going chiefly to the money controllers of New York City; of the exhausted Army of the Republic exhausted encamped on the banks of the Tigris in fabled Baghdad; of the oil scion in the White House lost and wandering after blundering the nation into rivers of blood; of the money men of the PACS delivering dollars in exchange for unwritten promises; of the manufactured embodiment of the Massage Age dreaming in her jet plane to Philly of years next to the phone commanding millions; of her plans to thwart the will of the people via the institutionalized votes of her minions and cowed enemies. Thus might run a jagged skech of the Divided House over which Obama was to be Chief Magistrate.