I look forward to the Tea Party’s future moralizing on the virtues of compromise and good sportsmanship.

O dear sister, you read me all wrong. I’m no Tea-partyist, nor even any real Republican. Yes, I embrace the conservative ways and means of the people around me, who don’t know it but have saved my life just by being the extraordinary, ordinary neighbors they are. Neither they nor you will ever know what a rare and precious gift that has been for me.

For our purposes here, I’m just a guy who has a really, REALLY circuitous and intentionally vexatious (at times) way of reworking my dad’s favorite axiom:

This, too, shall pass.

(’cause he already says that, all the time…)