Over at DonkeyRising, Alan Abramowitz avers that "the dominant political creed in America today is neither conservatism nor liberalism but centrism," and he's right. A solid majority of our fellow citizens could be brought together fairly easily around a set of practical, non-ideological solutions to many of the nation's most pressing challenges.

Sadly, though, there's real cash to be copped in today's atomized media environment by making America's ongoing experiment in self-government look like a Sherwood Schwartz production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. And as long as that's the case, the Beltway players will keep learning their lines and hitting their marks. And the American people will keep trying to puzzle out the plot of a national debate that's all cheap jokes, chewed scenery and false choices.