Your fault

Now that we can all spell "Massachusetts," it's time for the blame game to begin in the White House bunker. You certainly can't blame Michelle. She stayed alone on her birthday while her husband flew to Coakley's aid to perform the same magic he performed in Copenhagen. (With friends like that. . . .) Very soon Ms. Coakley's name will go the way of Geraldine Ferraro.

C.S. Lewis is prescient in The Great Divorce, where he describes the way once famous figures get washed up on the shore of oblivion, becoming smaller and smaller in our rear view mirrors, until all that is left is a vision of them mumbling under their breath about how great they could have been if not for "them."

A traveler on an exploratory bus trip to heaven from hell is hopeful of meeting some interesting historical characters. His seatmate disabuses him:

"The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They'd started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back. About fifteen thousand years of our time it took them. We've picked out the house by now. Just a little pin prick of light and nothing else near it for millions of miles."

"But they got there?"

"That's right. He'd built himself a huge house all in the Empire style---rows of windows flaming with light, though it only shows a pin prick from where I live."

"Did they see Napoleon?"

"That's right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right."

"What was he doing?"

"Walking up and down---up and down all the time--- left-right, left-right ---never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. 'It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English. . . .'"

The latest reincarnation of the syndrome: "It was Coakley's fault!" (uninspired campaign). "It was Obama's fault!" (should have spent the year fighting terrorists instead of big business). "It was David Axelrod's and Rahm Emanuel's fault!" (should have micromanaged Coakley's campaign the way they did the economy). "It was Massachusetts Gov. Patrick's fault" (should have watched the company he keeps). "It was Rush Limbaugh's fault!" (even though he'd never heard of Coakley till a few months ago). "It was Kennedy's fault!" (shouldn't have died).

Like Homer Simpson once whined, "It's everybody's fault but mine!"

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