Last Sunday I was in San Francisco, watching my daughter run in the Nike Women’s Marathon. It was her first marathon, and she finished it in great style with a sprint to the finish line. My wife and I were thrilled to be along for the ride. It was great fun hopping in and out of cabs, fast-walking shortcuts, leap-frogging the route to be there to cheer her on.

Since the purpose of the race was to raise money to fight leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers, I exercised discretion as to when I would sneak a smoke. Somewhere around mile eight, ahead of the race, I took advantage of the down time. When I finished, I field-stripped the cigarette, as is my wont, and thinking myself a good citizen, I tossed the butt down a storm drain. A San Francisco police officer said, "Hey, don’t do that. It drains to the bay."

"Sorry," I replied. "I won’t do it again."

"You better not," he warned, resting his hand on his holster.

I said, "Don’t tase me, bro."

He said it wasn’t a Taser, it was a gun. I said that would probably be even worse, and we had a laugh. What a neat city San Francisco is, I thought, where you can joke with a cop about him shooting you. We started talking. He told me his father was a Spaniard, 90-years old, and grows grapes for local wineries. "My name is Guillermo," he said, pointing at his name, stitched on his uniform. "G. Amigo."

"Officer Friend, that’s great."

Then he rattled off a sentence in Spanish. When I said, "No comprendo," he came back with an amazing statement. "You Americans are so arrogant, you think you only need to know one language."

I said, "But you’re an American." He replied that he spoke five languages. "But you’re an American."

"I’m European, more international."

"But you’re an American, aren’t you?

He finally, grudgingly admitted that he was in fact an American citizen. He became one just before Vietnam. "Nice timing," I said, and the conversation went off in a different direction. But his original comment, "You Americans are so arrogant," ate at me for the rest of the day. I wasn’t asking him if he was a citizen, I was asking him if he was an American.

I realized this is why John McCain can’t get any traction in this race. This is why Barack Obama’s past doesn’t put people off. This is why his association with avowedly anti-American speakers and actors doesn’t hurt him. This is why his wife can get away with boasting that until recently, she had never been proud of her country. This is why our nation is so divided.

For too many Americans, the idea of identifying themselves as such is anathema. For too many Americans, the American is a fat, ignorant slob, bloviating about shopworn concepts such as individual freedom, American exceptionalism, and "land of the free, home of the brave ." For too many Americans, the very concept of America is yesterday’s news.

When Obama sneers at bitter Americans clinging to their guns and their religion, too many Americans think, "There but for the grace of God go I." When Obama runs away from America, he runs into the arms of enlightened, educated, intelligent, grown up citoyens du monde.

Officer Friend is a great guy, and by all appearances, a good cop. But he’s a lousy American, and no doubt, a proud Obama supporter.

Yesterday, during my weekly foreign intelligence briefing, which is to say while reading the Sunday New York Times, a couple of items stood out. One came at the end of a surprisingly favorable review by James Traub of Linda Robinson’s book, "Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq," which laid out the startling case that the surge was a success. Traub probably felt comfortable acknowledging what many people who don’t read The Times already knew because Robinson stated early in the book that she has no respect for George Bush.

What stood out in the review came towards the end. When describing Petraeus’s Senate testimony that the surge was working (which inspired Hilary Clinton to call him a liar), Traub made reference to the MoveOn.org full-page ad "whose headline read, ‘General Petraeus or General Betray Us?’ At the time, the military top brass . . . continued to oppose the surge; Democratic [sic] congressmen, progressive organizations and many pundits mocked Petraeus as a Bush administration shill. But Petraeus was right; and Moveon’s question sounds almost repellent in retrospect."

My reaction to that statement was that for many people it didn’t take a full year of indisputable success for that question to sound repellent. It sounded repellent from the moment we heard it.

The second notable item was in a story about political humor, or at least what passes for political humor in an era when most people’s minds have been calcified by a steady diet of television. The author, Mark Leibovich, quoted Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, who has determined that "since Mr. McCain picked Ms. Palin to be his running mate on August 29 until the debate, (Jay) Leno and (David) Letterman made her the butt of 180 jokes–or more than the other three principals on the two tickets combined in that period (16 jokes for Mr. Biden; 26 for Mr. Obama; and 106 for Mr. McCain)."

This is truly astounding. The two late-night comedians made mocking jokes about the Republican candidates 286 times, as opposed to only 42 for the Democrat ticket. Where is the balance here? Is it conceivable that Biden and Obama haven’t said or done anything worthy of ridicule? How about Biden’s ludicrous statement that President Roosevelt went on TV after the 1929 Stock Market Crash? Wouldn’t that be worthy of at least a week’s worth of mockery? Possibly. Especially if McCain had said it.

The comedians have made much sport of Palin’s assertion that having Russia as Alaska’s neighbor gives her some foreign policy experience. Granted, the statement in itself is laughable, but surely not as laughable as Obama’s statement that attending a Muslim school in Indonesia at the age of 5 gives him a unique grasp of foreign policy issues. What about Obama’s kneejerk reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, that it should be turned over to the United Nations Security Council? Given that Russia wields a veto on the Security Council, doesn’t Obama’s reaction display a woeful ignorance, if not outright cowardice, highly meritous of ridicule?

Two years ago, in the run up to the 2006 elections, the nation’s media was obsessed with Representative Mark Foley’s indiscrete emails to a former page. The recipient of the emails, who had arguably seduced Foley into sending them, was no longer in the employment of Congress, was of legal age, and therefore was not in anyway a victim of a crime. This was immaterial to the nation’s media. The important thing was that a Republican was caught in a homosexual scandal.

Compare that orgy of moral indignation with the treatment being meted out to Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rangel, as those equipped with microscopes have learned, first was found to be breaking New York’s housing laws by using a rent-controlled apartment as an office. This got a little play, even in the New York Times, which printed a blurb somewhere around page 16, just after the article headlined "Alaska Oil Riggers Call Todd Palin a ‘Girlie Man.’"

Similar focus was brought to bear on subsequent revelations that Rangel has violated US tax laws in reporting income from an offshore real estate investment. Rangel’s excuse that he didn’t understand the law would be laughable if he weren’t the most influential man in Congress on the writing and imposition of federal taxes.

Imagine if Rangel were a Republican.

The title is meant to refer to our elected officials in Washington, the Senators and Representatives who turned the ludicrously huge bailout bill into an orgy of self-aggrandizing expenditure. It isn’t really fair, though, that title. It is nothing more than a gratuitous insult to pigs.

One can argue for or against the bill, which just passed the House of Representatives, on its merits. One can question the wisdom of bailing out those guilty of serious fiscal indiscretion. One can argue that the market must have the opportunity to work itself out, that the consequences, even if they extend so far as to plunge the world into a massive depression, are not nearly as severe as substantially altering, with virtually no debate, the philosophical, moral, and structural assumptions under which our economic system functions. Or one can argue that the bill doesn’t go far enough, or goes too far in the wrong direction, that it is the poor beleaguered mortgage holder who is most in need of succor.

What is beyond dispute is the fact that a three-page bill has turned into a 400-page behemoth. What on earth does a provision requiring health insurance companies to give "equal quality" of treatment to the mentally ill have to do with acting to forestall a global stultification of the credit markets? All that particular clause will do is ensure the legal system will be clogged with a trainload of lawsuits for years to come. Then again, maybe that was the intent of that provision.

In the vice-presidential Debate, Sarah Palin made frequent references to her and John McCain’s goal of ridding Wall Street of greed and corruption. While getting rid of corruption is always a good plan, removing greed from Wall Street will pretty much eliminate Wall Street. Furthermore, it misses the point. Greed didn’t cause this crisis. Hubris did. Hubris always occurs at the end of a bubble. It leads to the sort of excesses which resulted in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The important point is that the greed that needs to be eliminated is not on Wall Street, it is in Washington.

Our elected officials are morbidly greedy. Greedy for power. Greedy for glory. Greedy for the perpetuation of the legislative priesthood from which they derive their dominance. Monetary greed is manageable. It is understandable. It is an entirely human characteristic. Greed for power is unconscionable. It is dangerous to individual rights and freedoms. It is the single defining quality of Congress today.

It is time to clean house. Our system of government today is cluttered with the trappings of action which serve only to obscure the lethargy which obstructs any meaningful reform and even the pretense that Senators and Representatives hold the public’s interests at heart. Occasionally, when some crisis appears, they will bestir themselves to act, and to act quickly. Inevitably, the action they take is ill-considered and hasty, and carries with it the seeds of further damage. Think Sarbanes-Oxley. Think the financial intervention bill passed today.

Aside from making the world safe for children’s bow and arrow manufacturers, the bill, among other things, provides for the Federal Government to take equity positions in American companies, and it allows the government to determine how much individuals can earn. This was done in the name of fairness, and it will be disastrous down the road. It is the thin end of the wedge which ultimately leads to socialism.

Larding this legislation with a witches’ cauldron of special interest giveaways is emblematic of the structural flaws of our legislative system of government. It is beyond tawdry. It is despicable, and it should lead the entire nation to take recourse in the time-honored cry of "Throw the bums out." The only way to reform Wall Street is to reform Washington first, and the only way to reform Washington is through the wholesale removal of every elected official there.

Every incumbent should be voted out, and every voter should pay close attention to the behavior of those who replace them. They should be given one term in which to return to serving the people. If they don’t, then they should be voted out, too. They should be voted out in the primaries, which would result in an election with no incumbents. This process should be repeated as often as necessary until the system is fixed.

The internecine squabble between Team Billary and the Junior Senator from Illinois is fabulous to observe for many reasons, but perhaps for none so much as its resemblance to a tale from Aesop. Aesop, you may recall, was, according to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, one of the three greatest African-Americans in history, ranking just behind Barack Obama and Jesus Christ, in that order. A noted story teller of his day, Aesop immigrated to ancient Greece in order to promulgate his fable-based moral precepts free from the oppressive white power structure in America.

The particular Fable in question is the Hound and the Bone, in which the Hound represents the Democratic party, and the bone is the ascension of that party to supremacy in both Congress and the White House. It was truly a great prize which the hound discovered, and he prowled through the woods and fields proudly displaying his treasure. All was well until he glanced into a pond where he found another dog, with a larger bone. He growled at the dog, and the dog growled back. Thinking "I shall have this bone, too," he barked at the dog, whereupon the bone he had dropped out of his mouth and was lost in the water.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The Democrat nominating process was supposed to be a coronation, the ceremonial process by which Hillary would accept her birthright. With the Republicans in disarray the path was clear, so clear that it was a small thing to "disenfranchise" voters in Michigan and Florida for having the temerity to vote too early. This wasn’t going to be anything other than a symbolic punishment. Once Hillary had the nomination locked up it would be a mere formality for the Rules Committee to vote to seat the delegations.

Then that upstart had to flourish his silver tongue, and all Hillary’s dreams proved to be just that, a fantasy. Her stumble in Iowa destroyed her myth of inevitability, and her campaign’s inability to right itself shattered the illusion of confidence. Once her claims of experience were exposed as the lies one tells oneself to get to sleep at night, the only thing Hillary had left was a gift for making people hate her. Surprisingly, this hasn’t proved enough to put her over the top.

On the other side of the equation, Obama rose from obscurity on a raft of platitudes to become the hope for a downtrodden nation. With time, the interpolation of hope with change and the future with today began to suggest to some that there was no there there. What does Obama represent? What does he believe? As people started to ask the questions, and as the answers started to appear, some began to suspect perhaps he wasn’t the gentleman they were expecting.

Today the Democrat race looks like a scene from one of those old westerns, where the bad guy points his gun at the innocent farmer or saloon keeper, and says "Dance," while firing his six-gun at his victim’s feet. Hillary and Obama are both dancing to today, but they are firing at their own feet. It makes for good cinema, but bad politics, and already Sheriff McCain is polishing up his badge before riding in to rescue the townspeople.