It's easy to vilify conservatives, and tempting and satisfying after their overreach led them into stunning defeat. But they haven't given up, they'll be back, and even with an elderly demographic, they'll be around for quite a long time to come. Condemnation is a necessary beginning, but there has to be more if we're to deal with the problem.

Just as conservatives are anxious about the future, and extreme conservatives extremely anxious, I'm picking that up in everybody. As I walk around the neighborhoods I see elaborate Halloween displays in just about all the front yards. And the zeitgeist is grim. The only theme any more is the front-yard cemetery, with tombstones and half-buried skeletons, a rotting corpse or two for garnish. One house nearby came up with a hundred dead and stuffed birds to perch in the front yard cemetery. Frankenstein and Dracula are nowhere to be found, and Casper the Friendly Ghost has been driven off by the bad vibe. It's all about death. I sense a lot of people are not optimistic about the future.

I think a lot of is we're being infected by the Teahadi pessimism, and the derivative pessimism of watching them run America right into the ground. They express nothing but contempt for the "rest of the world", but those are our trading partners and creditors we're talking about. China ($1.3 trillion) is calling for a "de-Armicanized world" after this latest political train wreck. Honest to god, can you blame them? But we'll be the ones paying a high price if the dollar stops being the global reserve currency.

I'm a little pessimistic myself.