This is a graphic from a Salon piece on presidents whose tenure coincided with transformational social change. Imagine the company he’ll keep after he’s sworn in:

I suppose it’s connected to this story, which has been lavishly linked: preparations for an official Obama holiday. But a weekly meeting at a McDonald’s restaurant does not seem to rise to the level of a mass movement, even if it’s held twice a day to get both the Breakfast Burrito and the BigMac demographic.  You can chalk it all up to enthusiasm and anticipation – harmless at best, a benchmark for the depths of disenchantment at worst.

Conservatives cannot help but be saddened and left out – the only possible event that could lift their spirits right now would be a headline that said REAGAN, BACK FROM THE DEAD, EATS BIN LADEN AND CRAPS TAX CUT, but pictures like this reminds the right that no one was ever this happy about Bush, even when the love was at its zenith. No one put him with George, Abe and Frank before he took office. Really, he was just The Next Guy, a caretaker in a post-history world. People forget how much “compassionate conservativism” stuck in the craw back then; the party’s own standard-bearer modified the terms in a way that managed to insult, mischaracterize, apologize, and reshape the debate all at once. It would be like a Democrat running on a program of “Logical Liberalism,” and not knowing why his own followers found the catch-phrase unhelpful.

Anyway. There are rumors of new Executive Decrees, which include magic Federal dollars for stem-cell research that uses human embryos - if you have any objections,  you hate science -  and a ban on domestic drilling and nat-gas exploration in public lands in Utah. (If you have any objections,  you hate the environment.) The two form a nice mirror image: the former was a ban put in place to preserve a particular definition of human life; the latter is a ban lifted to preserve the environment. Again, it’s understandable: we only have one Utah, but we can always make more people. As long as they don’t live in Utah.

Will executive unilateralism remain a bad thing, a threat to our rights, or suddenly gain favor with old critics? Hmmmm. Cue the Jeopardy! theme. That’s a stumper. Then again,  this is Washington we’re talking about. Heaped alongside the altar of politics are numberless goats with eyes open in shock. Principles be damned; when it comes to doing the things you want to do, there’s a knife for every throat.