THE ABYSS

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I hate Barack Obama — I have no respect for him as a public servant or as a man.

In terms of the crucial issues facing America today, I don’t think it makes the slightest difference whether he or Mitt Romney gets elected as President in November.

Having admitted that, however, I also think that The Republican Party, with its efforts at nihilistic obstructionism and voter suppression, and Mitt Romney, with his strategy of cynical mendacity, represent the lowest depths of moral depravity that have ever been sounded in the history of American politics.

The election of either Obama or Romney in November will represent a practical disaster for America. The election of Romney will represent a moral disaster from which the republic may never recover.

OBAMA’S GAME

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You can draw analogies to poker for almost any human enterprise that involves high stakes and competition — politics falling handily into that category.

Obama is a pretty good poker player but he has a major flaw — when he gets a good stack in front of him he grows cautious, you might even say cowardly. This is a disastrous strategy, because your opponents, if they’re any good, will read it eventually and start bluffing you off every hand. You’ll start bleeding away blinds and small bets until your stack is not so good anymore.

Obama reverted to cautious mode in the 2008 primary race every time his chances started looking good. The Clintons, who are very sharp poker players, would then start hammering him, without provoking a strong response, until his chances stopped looking so good.

But Obama is a great short-stack player. He hates to lose and eventually regains his gumption.

He was playing cautiously in the first debate with Romney, letting Romney bluff him off every hand, and his stack diminished accordingly.

If history is any judge, Obama will now start calling Romney’s bluffs and raising the stakes, forcing Romney to take bigger and bigger chances, and it will probably work for him, as it did in 2008.

Romney does nothing but bluff, on every hand, overplaying even the good cards he’s dealt. That’s not a winning strategy, either, unless you’re playing against wimps. Obama looked like a wimp at the debate, but Romney will make a huge mistake if he thinks that’s all there is to Obama’s game.

LOVE ME DO

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Fifty years ago today The Beatles released this, their first single. It still sounds brand new. I didn’t hear a Beatles song for another year, when a friend got sent the Parlophone single of “She Loves You” from a relative in England. He didn’t like and gave it to me. I still have it.

MARY MAGDALENE

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What on earth was Donatello thinking when he created this portrait of Mary Magdalene?

Ever since the early church fathers libeled her as a reformed prostitute, on no scriptural evidence whatsoever — the idea popped into their little patriarchal heads about 500 years after the death of Jesus — artists have loved depicting the Magdalene as a babe repenting over her checkered sexual past.

Donatello’s Magdalene is no babe — she’s a human ruin in old age. It’s hard to imagine that she is still looking back in wracking despair at the sins of her youth, especially since she has in the intervening years had her sins washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb.

Perhaps she is recalling, as she must have often, the horror of Calvary, when she saw her beloved teacher murdered on a cross. Perhaps she is reliving the sorrow of preparing the rabbi’s broken body for burial.

According to the Gospels of Mark and John, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the resurrected Jesus.  Perhaps she has, at the time Donatello chooses to portray her, outlived all the other witnesses to the miracle and thus feels a kind of existential aloneness as the last of those who can testify to it from direct experience.

Whatever Donatello was thinking, he has created the most powerful and haunting image of the Magdalene in all of art.