In 16 seasons, Rice played 238 games for the San Francisco 49ers. I think I saw 236 of those games. Like tens of thousands of 49er fans, and millions of football fans across the country, I was blessed: For 16 years we got to watch someone who was better at what he did than anyone else has ever been. Every sport has certain images that sum up greatness: Michael Johnson flashing around the final turn in the 400 meters, Michael Jordan drilling the game-winner at the buzzer, Willie Mays whirling to throw home. To that list, add this one: No. 80 reaching out to catch a pass, turning upfield and running — and now that the image will never be more than a memory, running forever.

If God had sat down to make a wide receiver, he would have whittled out Jerry Rice. At 6 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds, Rice was taller and heavier than most cornerbacks, but just as fast as them, or faster, with the exception of a few blurs like Washington’s Darrell Green or Deion Sanders. Receivers, like football players in general, are getting bigger and faster: Terrell Owens, at 6 feet 3 inches and 226 pounds, is a super-muscular freak, but there are more and more wideouts in the mold of Randy Moss (6 feet 4, 210). But since no one, no matter how big, is ever going to break even a fraction of Jerry Rice’s ridiculous laundry list of receiving records, he gets to claim the prototypical body type.

Jerry Rice didn’t do any one thing on the football field better than anyone else. He didn’t have hands like Cris Carter, didn’t have the strength of Terrell Owens, the speed of Randy Moss, or the grace of Lance Alworth or Lynn Swann. But no one else had all of those things combined as much as he did. And it wasn’t what Rice did on the football field that ultimately set him apart. It was what he did off it.

NFL football is a brutal and exhausting game. Everyone on the field is world-class at what they do. There are something like 600 people who start in the NFL, and they are bigger, stronger and faster than anyone else, including the thousands of gifted athletes who play major college football. The game involves frequent massive traumas to all the muscles and bones in the body, followed immediately by all-out exertion. Your career can end at any moment. Every player drives himself year-round as hard as he can to make himself stronger, tougher, more agile, faster. Pain and sacrifice are the currency of the league.

In this elite company of willpower-driven warriors, Rice was the champion. His off-season workout regimen was legendary. “He just works harder than anyone else,” Barry Bonds once said. Rice’s workout routine consisted of morning cardiovascular work and afternoon strength work. Rice would run fast up a steep five-mile trail on a course called The Hill, pausing at the steepest section to do 10 — yes, 10 — 40-meter wind sprints. Roger Craig, the former 49ers running back and himself a superbly conditioned athlete, ran The Hill with Rice. Afterward, Craig said he felt like he was going to die. In the afternoon, Rice would do weight work — 630 repetitions’ worth.

It was an inconceivable amount of pain. But it would be paid back. It would be paid back in the fourth quarter, with the game on the line, when Rice would line up across from his body double on the other side of the line of scrimmage, a young man just as fast and tough and strong as he was, paid millions of dollars to follow Rice like his own shadow, but who maybe hadn’t stuck through all of those 40-meter wind sprints when every breath was a spear in the chest. And so when Rice would burst off the line and run that slant, Body Double would start out right there, backpedaling fast, staying with the move, swiveling — and then the debt would be collected, as Body Double’s powerful legs wouldn’t answer and suddenly Rice would be running free, alone, the way he ran up that trail.

They call what Rice had “football speed.” Football speed is how fast you run in a game, not on a track with a coach clicking off your 40 time. Rice never came close to matching the speed of Bob Hayes or Warren Wells — there were even reports in the days when they were teammates that Steve Young was as fast as he was (which wasn’t that much of a dis, because Young was fast.) But on the field, in his prime, Rice was almost never caught. And when he was running under a deep pass, being chased by a free safety or a corner who on paper was faster than he was, he always got there first. Speed is about heart. Actually it’s about two kinds of heart: the one that beats, and the one that beats other people. Jerry Rice had a lot of both kinds, which is why he beat more people than anyone else in the history of football.

I saw that football speed from a few feet away at the San Francisco 49ers’ training camp in 1987. Here’s how I described it years later.

“I was watching defensive backs drilling against wide receivers. No linemen were involved. Joe Montana was the quarterback, Jerry Rice the receiver. The players were in shorts and light pads. The defensive back, Darryl Pollard, lined up about four yards off the line of scrimmage from Rice. I was standing just behind Montana. A ringside seat at Mt. Olympus.

“At the snap of the ball, Rice took off upfield. On television, I had always noticed his odd running style, at once fluid, powerful and almost mechanically repetitive, with his upper body kept very straight. Standing a few yards away as he accelerated like a drag racer at the backpedaling Pollard, I realized, with a sympathetic shudder for the defensive back, not only that Rice was much faster than he appeared to be on TV, but worse, that his almost exaggeratedly efficient stride was absolutely unreadable: No shift in body weight, no slight tilt, betrayed either a fake or a move.

“It was like watching a very fast robot. After 20 yards, the robot’s feet executed a double fake, rightleft. The two stutter steps took about a tenth of a second. Incredibly, Pollard didn’t bite on the left move, but he was forced to react to it, turning his hips just slightly to his right. At exactly that instant, Montana released the ball and Rice pushed off his left foot and cut upfield to the right on a post pattern, not breaking stride, his body still as straight-up and robotic as ever. He suddenly appeared under Montana’s pass — which had been thrown before the cut to an empty space on the field — snatching the ball out of the air with his big hands just as Pollard, who had spun back from his right and closed ground with extraordinary rapidity, jumped high into the air, missing the ball by inches. Rice jogged back to the line of scrimmage, expressionless.”

Some critics try to play down Rice’s greatness by pointing out that he played for Bill Walsh, whose West Coast offense befuddled defenses that had not yet figured out how to respond to its complicated short-pass system, with multiple fast reads for the quarterback and option routes. They also point out that the guys throwing balls at Rice for most of his career were named Montana and Young. That’s all true. But after watching Rice run that post pattern that hot summer day 18 years ago, I don’t buy it. Jerry Rice would have been great with Ryan Leaf throwing to him.

There are so many Rice memories, it’s hard to pick one. But one play has always stood out for me. It was from perhaps Rice’s greatest game — Super Bowl XXIII against the Cincinnati Bengals, the thriller won in the last seconds when Montana hit John Taylor in the end zone after Taylor had lined up on the wrong side. Rice caught 11 passes for 215 yards and a touchdown and was named the MVP of a Super Bowl that some still say was the best ever. But the most important pass was not his TD but one he caught on the final drive, with the clock running out.

A penalty had put the 49ers in a deep hole — second-and-20 from the Bengals’ 45. Everybody knew the 49ers had to throw and pick up at least 10 yards. Everybody knew they were going to Rice. The Bengals knew it and double-covered him. Rice lined up on the right and ran a deep square-in. This was not a pattern he ran very much — his signature patterns were the quick slant, or the post. It’s a dangerous pattern. It takes the receiver horizontally across the field, where he can be creamed by a safety or a linebacker in a deep drop. It’s also hard to throw — it’s tricky to lead receivers running sideways. Rice beat the double coverage. Montana led him perfectly and Rice snatched the ball out of the air, beat the safety, and ran for 27 yards. Taylor later scored the winning touchdown, but that was the play that won the championship for the 49ers. Afterward, one of the Bengals defenders said they had the play covered: “It took a perfect throw and catch.”

Those who watched Rice grew accustomed to perfection. It’s going to be a hard adjustment to reality.

My final memory of Jerry Rice has nothing to do with football. My aunt Wendy was a huge Jerry fan. She had his No. 80 jersey and screamed louder than anyone else at 49er games. She adored the guy. Wendy had hepatitis that she had incurred from a bad blood transfusion decades earlier. After defying all prognoses and living years longer than she was supposed to, her liver finally began to fail. No donor livers came in. Her other organs began to fail. She was dying. A nurse at the Stanford Medical Center who knew her happened to know Jerry Rice and mentioned to him that she might appreciate a call.

Jerry Rice called my aunt, who could no longer speak — she could only grunt. A friend who was present told me that he talked to her for a few minutes, told her to stay strong. The man who embodied strength, who had faced down The Hill, was trying to raise the spirits of a dying woman who could no longer raise her head. No press was there and no one knew about it. Afterward, the friend reported that Wendy’s eyes were shining. She passed away a few days later.

207 touchdowns. 1,549 receptions. 22,895 receiving yards. An infinite number of memories. And one phone call.

Thanks, Jerry. You were the greatest.

This deal would have been a major diplomatic breakthrough. It would have greatly reduced Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, defused tensions in the region, calmed the oil markets, driven prices at the pump down and made it impossible for Netanyahu to attack Iran. In a presidential campaign as tight as this one, a significant drop in gas prices could be the difference between Obama being reelected and Romney defeating him. So why didn’t the Obama administration take the deal?

The ostensible reason, piously mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that the U.S. believes that the upcoming, even harsher round of sanctions on Tehran will generate even further concessions. According to this line of reasoning, Iran only came to the bargaining table because of sanctions, and more sanctions will produce better results.

But this justification is transparently false. First, Iran has made it clear again and again that it will never allow itself to be seen as folding under U.S. pressure. It is prepared to negotiate, but successful diplomacy requires not just sticks but carrots. The carrot the P5+1 offered at Baghdad was ridiculous: If the Iranians agreed to suspend 20 percent enrichment, what they would receive in return was not a reduction in sanctions, but rather spare aircraft parts. For Tehran, accepting this deal would have been tantamount to surrendering. As Iranian analyst Hasan Abadini said, “Giving up 20 percent enrichment levels in return for plane spare parts is a joke.” These are not arcane diplomatic mysteries. As Iran expert Gary Sick pointed out in an interview on NPR, what it will take to reach a resolution of this issue is clearly understood by all the players involved. It is no more possible that the Iranians would have taken that deal than that the Palestinians would agree to establish their state in Jordan.

Second, Clinton’s argument that the Iranians will make more concessions begs the question: what concessions? The only remaining significant concession Iran could make would be to agree to give up enriching uranium altogether – and it has made it clear that it is never going to give up that right, which it is guaranteed as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Agreement. In an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, former Iranian negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian made it clear that Iran would be prepared to give up 20 percent enrichment if its rights to enrich uranium were recognized.

All of this makes clear that the U.S. knew going into the negotiations that they were not going to succeed. The entire process was an elaborate ritual whose dual purpose was to inoculate President Obama against charges that he was “soft on Tehran” and to make it impossible for Netanyahu to go postal.

In fact, despite the conventional wisdom, it is extremely unlikely that the far-right Israeli leader will attack Iran. His constant threats to do so were the reason that Congress imposed the latest round of sanctions, against the Obama administration’s wishes. But despite Congress’s lockstep support for Netanyahu and anything he decides to do, up to and including an attack on Iran, it would be far too risky for Netanyahu to actually do it. The American people, unlike their bought-off, coerced and/or ideologically myopic political representatives, are sick of Middle East wars. Many, including increasing numbers of American Jews, are growing weary of Israeli intransigence and extremism. They’re also broke. An Israeli attack on Iran would draw in the U.S. and plunge the world into a depression – and the American people would hold Israel to account. Netanyahu may, as the former head of Israel’s spy service said, be “messianic,” but even he knows better than to jeopardize his country’s relationship with America. However, in order to manipulate America, it is essential that he constantly give the impression that he is about to attack Iran.

The Obama administration probably knows that Netanyahu is bluffing. But it has to play out this farce to placate Congress, keep pro-Israel Democrats writing checks, remove a Romney attack line and generally appear tough on Iran.

The irony is that the U.S. and Israel are always claiming that Iran uses negotiations over its nuclear program to play for time while it works feverishly to develop a bomb. But playing for time is precisely what the U.S. just did.

Obama is trying to run out the clock on Iran before the November election. He adroitly stalled the nuke-Iran hysteria that built up during the AIPAC conference in March, but he did so at a price, painting himself into a corner with tough rhetoric denying that containment of a nuclear Iran was an option and threatening to use military force. The negotiations in Baghdad had to fail in order for him to maintain that posture.

His strategy may work. He may stumble over the finish line in November, still dragging out negotiations. And he may overcome the serious headwind of high gas prices and beat Romney. But there is nothing good to be said about his weak and pandering approach. It will not stop the Iranian nuclear program, it is causing the Iranian people to suffer, and it hurts the average U.S. citizen. At bottom, it is an approach predicated not on achieving real progress in dealing with the Tehran regime but on overthrowing it. As such, it is antithetical to Obama’s proclaimed desire to reach out to Iran and to reset America’s relationship with the Middle East. In the long run, he will have to decide whether he really wants to continue a brinkmanship game that locks the U.S. into the self-defeating Middle East policies it pursued during the Bush years.

For the truth is that Obama’s Iran policy represents the last vestige of Bush-era neoconservative extremism. The moralistic, shrill, militaristic Manichean worldview that brought us the “Axis of Evil” and the Iraq war is gone – except when it comes to Iran.

Obama’s schizoid foreign policy – extreme and ideological on Iran, pragmatic and flexible everywhere else — was brought into sharp relief this week. Even as the Baghdad summit broke down, events elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia demonstrated the utter failure of Bush’s approach – and provided a cautionary warning to Obama of the follies of continuing it with Iran.

Start with Iraq, where Bush’s nine-year-long military adventure is coming to an inglorious end. That unprovoked invasion was supposed to bring an end to an evil regime and transform the Middle East – the same reasons neocons now give for attacking Iran. It left an ethnically fractured, horribly wounded land in the grip of a strongman that is just now emerging from a nightmarish civil war and is still plagued by sectarian violence and terrorism. Our moral responsibility predates the war: America’s crippling pre-war sanctions devastated Iraq’s entire society, and they were one of the reasons why it was so difficult to rebuild it. Congressional proponents of sanctions against Iran should take note.

Then there’s Afghanistan, where after 11 agonizing years we have essentially given up. Afghanistan has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even a superpower cannot always succeed in imposing its will, that cultural and anthropological differences are critical, and that trying to combine nation building and counterinsurgency in one of the most backward and impoverished places on Earth is a recipe for disaster. The best we can hope for now is that not too many more U.S. troops are shot dead by the Afghans they are training – and that the Taliban does not roll into Kabul the moment we roll out.

Next there’s Syria, where an appalling regime is locked in a brutal struggle with a murky opposition and where all the options are so bad that we have no choice but to remain on the sidelines.

Finally, there’s Egypt, where a nascent democracy is fighting to be born. Everything about this inspiring, painful and threatened revolution, culminating in this week’s elections, was generated by the Egyptian people themselves. America had nothing to do with it. Contrary to claims made by Bush apologists, the appalling example of Iraq was actually a disincentive to throw off Mubarak’s tyranny. As for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, that dire event so feared by neoconservatives and Islamophobes, they may turn out to be the stable, conservative, don’t-rock-the-boat party.

The lessons these different situations hold for our dealings with Iran are very simple. First, we have far less ability to control what happens in the Middle East than we think. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to impose our will directly and failed. In the other two, we either do not have the ability to intervene (Egypt) or the risks of doing so would be too high (Syria). Second, none of these situations are susceptible to the kind of good-and-evil moralizing that characterized Bush’s approach to the Middle East. Individually they are incredibly complex, and as a whole they are even more complex. There is no simple way to approach any of them. Basing our policy toward them on a Manichaean, good guys vs. bad guys worldview is self-defeating. Bashir Assad is a bad guy, but if we sided with the rebels, we could unleash a civil war even more catastrophic than the one going on now. Some of the Salafis in Egypt may be planning to ban beer and abrogate the Camp David treaty, but if we tried to prevent them from taking power, we would be thwarting the will of those Egyptian people who want those outcomes. Nouri al-Maliki may be a sectarian thug, but the alternative could be worse. Hamid Karzai may be a corrupt, drug-addled charlatan, but he’s the guy who’s there.

And so on, down the list, from Pakistan to Hamas to Netanyahu to Libya. The real world, as opposed to the black-and-white world of the neocons, is all about complexity, grey areas, compromises, diplomacy, flexibility. It’s about accepting that America will have to deal with regimes that do not toe our line. It’s about realizing that our soft power is more effective than our military power. It’s about putting down the Big Stick and trying to actually listen to what the people in the region are saying. It’s the opposite of the Bush Doctrine.

Obama knows this, but the dead hand of neoconservative ideology still drives his Iran policy. Until he shakes it off and accepts that Iran is a regional power and must be dealt with realistically, even though it does not always share our interests, his Middle East policy will continue to resemble that of his predecessor.

That does not mean that all of the North Carolinians, for example, who voted Tuesday for an amendment outlawing same-sex marriages are homophobes. Many of them simply believe that marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples because that’s the way marriage has traditionally been defined, and they believe that defending tradition as important. But their personal views have become irrelevant. The fact is that same-sex marriage has become a national civil rights issue, and as such, it has enormous symbolic importance. To simply stand on the sidelines and not take a position on it, as Obama tried to do until Wednesday, is to tacitly accept that gay people are second-class citizens. This narrow, legalistic approach to gay marriage only encourages bigotry and stands in the way of needed progress. It was necessary for Obama to take a risk – and take a stand.

I did not think he would do it. But he did.

Obama dislikes conflict, and he dislikes risk even more. Some of that is both understandable and justifiable. Politics is the art of the possible. You have to get elected to get anything done. And to get elected, or reelected, you have to make compromises. That is why Obama hid behind the transparently false excuse that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.” He wanted to avoid a hot-button issue that could potentially cost him the election.

To be sure, that was a questionable political tactic. Advocates argued that Obama faced little political risk in endorsing same-sex marriage because the social conservatives for whom this issue is crucial were not going to vote for him anyway. Moreover, they argued that the number of swing and independent voters the president would lose would be more than made up for increased turnout among his supporters.

Those arguments may be correct – but they may not be. We just don’t know. North Carolina is a swing state. It just voted to ban same-sex marriage. It is indeed possible that Obama will lose the election because he took the opposite position.

It is no secret that Obama has sorely disappointed his most ardent supporters. Throughout his first term, he has consistently refused to do anything truly politically risky. He spoke of fundamentally changing the rules and culture of Wall Street – then stood by as the same looters who destroyed the economy gamed the system. He talked up a progressive reform of healthcare – and ended up with a watered-down version of a Republican idea. He announced a bold stimulus package – then made it too small to be fully effective. He gave the best speech about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis ever given by an American president – then caved in to the Israel lobby. And so on.

But there are times when pragmatism must take a back seat to principle. And to his undying credit, Obama decided that this was one of them. He decided that it was more important for him, the leader of the United States, to stand up and defend the rights of an abused minority group, than to accept the unacceptable status quo.

We don’t know why he decided to take the risk. A cynic – or perhaps a realist – might simply say that he decided there was no risk, that most Americans would stand with him on this issue. But I prefer to think of his decision as being at least in part shaped by the two most crucial, and inseparable, parts of his identity: his blackness, and his profoundly inclusive ideals. As president, Obama has never played the race card, never asserted his racial identity in any significant way. This reticence is both politically astute and deeply grounded in Obama’s own sense of what race means – and does not mean. For Obama, race matters – but paradoxically, it matters precisely because it offers all of us, black or white or brown or yellow or red, an opportunity to transcend it. In that regard, Obama is a true child of the civil rights movement. The men and women who struggled and died at Selma and Birmingham and Little Rock and Neshoba County are his heroes, and he was not going to betray their memory. That’s bedrock for him.

What happened yesterday is that Barack Obama, as flawed and brave and human as the rest of us, just struck his own bedrock. And the sound of that pick hitting stone brought tears to my eyes.

He did not have to do it. History is filled with crucial decisions that did not have to be taken. Gandhi could have decided the Salt March was too divisive. John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have decided that extending the hand of friendship to the USSR at the height of the Cold War, in his famous American University speech, was too politically risky. Lyndon Baines Johnson could have decided the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not worth spending so much political capital on. Martin Luther King could have decided that white America was not ready for a campaign of civil disobedience. The hundreds of thousands of Arab men and women who risked their lives to demand justice, opportunity and freedom could have turned back when the club-wielding thugs appeared. The Occupy protesters who came out in the rain to demand that America live up to its ideals could have stayed home.

But they did not. Those people – leaders and ordinary citizens alike — took the risk. They did the right thing. And history will remember them, and honor them, when the pragmatists and calculators have long been forgotten.

The night before he was shot, Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to prophesy his own death. “But it doesn’t really matter with me now,” he said. “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Obama could lose the presidency because he stood up for the rights of gay Americans. But if he does, for the rest of his life he can look back and know that when it counted most, he did the right thing. That is something no one can ever take away from him. Or from the American people.

There the debate rested. Then Romney hit the campaign trail, and the pendulum swung decisively toward those who held that he was constructed out of high-impact plastic. Even the skeptics admitted that Romney’s “personality” did not appear to be of organic origin. He seemed uncomfortable in his own skin (which of course would make sense if he did not have actual skin), and did not know how to tell jokes (humor is notoriously difficult to program). Even the words he used to describe himself sounded like they were auto-imported from a slightly archaic database, as when he oddly described himself as “severely conservative.”

But the clearest sign that Romney had fiber optic cable coiled in his midriff was the bizarrely smug and clumsy way in which he constantly referred to his plutocratic lifestyle. When asked at the Daytona 500 whether he followed NASCAR closely, Romney completely failed to take advantage of this traditional GOP opportunity to demonstrate the common touch. He replied, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans, but I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.” Two weeks later, in an interview about the NFL, Romney again went out of his way to affirm his membership in a tiny fraternity of disliked multimillionaires, saying, “I’ve got a lot of good friends – the owner of the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets – both owners are friends of mine.”

The subject of money, in particular, seemed to produce continual script errors, including inappropriate answers, dead-end loops and other rudimentary programming flaws. In Detroit, Romney boasted that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs” – the political equivalent of showing up for a photo op at a diner wearing an ascot and a monocle. He casually challenged Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet during a debate, an unforced error that evoked vote-losing images of Fortune 500 CEOs snapping towels at each other in the sauna. But that weird glitch was dwarfed by a statement Romney made a month later. His hard drive apparently malfunctioning after his tax returns were revealed, Romney referred to the $370,000 he had earned giving speeches one year — an amount it would take the average American worker 14 years to make — as “not very much.” In short, Romney came across not only as an obscenely rich person, but as an obscenely rich person from another planet.

At this point, some leading technology analysts had begun to openly accuse whoever programmed Romney of gross incompetence. But others defended the unknown scriptwriter, pointing out that the Republican Party’s worship of plutocrats as emblems of “aspirational” capitalism made it impossible to for even the best programmer to write a coherent GOP script about wealth.

Romney’s performance in the primary debates also provided strong empirical support for the Mitt-is-a-cyborg thesis. For the entity claiming to be “Mitt Romney” that appeared onstage bore no resemblance to the Romney-like entity Americans had come to know in previous years. The moderate, conciliatory governor of Massachusetts was gone, his place taken by a strange, harsh figure who appeared to have been programmed by a disciple of Torquemada. Romney Version One had strongly supported a healthcare plan identical to Obama’s; Romney Version Two denounced “Obamacare” as opening the door to socialism. Beta Romney, who had defended a woman’s right to choose, had been replaced by an updated model that, like a doll that speaks a few simple phrases when its bottom is squeezed, intoned “abortion is immoral” again and again.

Different observers had different explanations for this strange phenomenon. Some maintained that “Mitt Romney” had been originally programmed in the factory to flip-flop when politically necessary. Others held that the earlier version had been surreptitiously refurbished, or possibly completely replaced.

Since he clinched the GOP nomination, Romney’s behavior has become even less recognizably human. Following his mechanical move to the far right during the primary season, his even more mechanical attempt to move back to the center has made it appear increasingly likely that he was assembled by nano-machines. His victory speech in New Hampshire was a tape loop of Reagan-like platitudes about free enterprise and Reagan-like blasts at the apocalyptic evil posed by Big Government, topped off with a weird, casuistic attempt to claim that his laissez-faire, I’ve-got-mine-Jack ideology was “fairer” than Obama’s attempt to shrink the increasing gap between rich and poor. Instead of the Great Communicator, Romney came off like a Frankenstein monster, cobbled together out of various right-wing bits and pieces, trying simultaneously to appease Tea Party extremists and clank back to the middle, all while smiling a big, artificially-whitened smile.

His inability to impersonate a human being poses severe political problems for Romney. But the worst is yet to come. Republican strategists are now advising Romney to stop attacking Obama and offer a “positive vision.” Most experts believe this simply cannot be done. Romney’s CPU, set up to defend cutthroat capitalism, destroy his opponents, and present the innocuous centrist Barack Obama as the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin, cannot accommodate the impossible demand that he suddenly become “human.” No one knows whether he will literally melt down in public with smoke pouring out of his eye sockets, or will simply begin regurgitating meaningless phrases about an “opportunity society,” like the unplugged super-computer HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But sooner or later, Romney is doomed to a fatal system error.

Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator,” Romney is about to be turned into scrap metal. But there is still time for him to save his campaign. If Mitt Romney wants to be president, he must appear before the American people on prime-time TV and admit that he is a robot.

With this one bold stroke, Romney would dispel all questions about his authenticity. After all, unlike human beings, robots are not expected to demonstrate consistency in their beliefs and actions. They do not have “selves,” only circuits that react in programmed ways to new situations. The instant Romney shows the nation the power cable hidden in his posterior, his self-contradictory positions and blatant pandering will cease to be seen as a cynical grab for power. Instead, they will become the visible manifestations of an advanced Google-like algorithm, inspiring technological interest and respect.

A frank confession that Romney plugs himself into a socket in his garage every night would also end the criticism of his wooden demeanor. “Star Wars,” “Mystery Science 3000,” “The Terminator” and other pop-culture hits have popularized lovable, wisecracking, helpful robots. Romney would be far better served if he was seen as C3PO, rather than a stilted, fake-Tea-Party plutocrat boasting about his friendships with other plutocrats.

Moreover, by forthrightly admitting that his head swivels around on a titanium base, Romney would instantly wipe out Obama’s advantage among young voters. Tech-savvy young Americans prefer Facebook, Tumblr, Zynga, smartphones and iPods to reality anyway, and would jump at the chance to make their generational mark by electing a president who is one of them (and can be easily disassembled and shipped back to the factory for repair.)

Finally, if Romney were to stand before the American people, remove his head and forthrightly admit that he is a robot, he would get rid of the biggest albatross around his nonexistent neck: his leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As a human being, Romney cannot justify the rapacious, job-destroying actions engaged in by Bain. When critics – including his GOP rivals – rightfully accused him of practicing “vulture capitalism,” all Romney could say was “In the free economy, in the private sector, sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful.” Coming from a human, this answer is heartless. Coming from a robot, it feels almost cuddly.

Which points to the real reason Romney should admit to being a robot – whether he is one or not. As a human being, Mitt Romney is a flop. But as a robot, he’s positively human.

There is a very good chance that this slow-motion blood bath could go on for years. And at the end, Assad could still be in power.

As this dreadful situation festers, calls for America to arm the opposition are growing louder. And they are not only coming from neocons, neo-imperialists and warmongers, proxy warriors for whom defeating Assad is part of a Great Game whose real goal is defeating Iran. No one is surprised that neocons like Joe Lieberman, for whom America’s foreign policy comes down to “Is it good for Israel?” or his chest-beating partner in imperialist Islamophobia, John McCain, want the U.S. to arm the Syrian opposition. Nor is it surprising that Elliott Abrams, Fox News or the Washington Post editorial board have beat the war drums. But these predictable hawks have been joined by an increasing number of liberals and humanitarians who have no ideological ax to grind.

Saying “the basis for any settlement must be a rough equality of forces,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen called for the U.S. to arm the Syrian opposition. Analyst James Traub similarly called for the U.S. to back what he called a “neo-mujahadeen strategy.” Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall blasted Obama’s refusal to get the U.S. more involved, saying that the world had a “moral imperative” to intervene. “A shoulder shrug will just not cut it any more,” Tisdall wrote. In a column titled “Syria is not Iraq. And it is not always wrong to intervene,” Tisdall’s Guardian colleague Jonathan Freedland denounced facile left-wing opposition to Western intervention in Syria, writing, “we must not make the people of Homs pay the price for the mistake we made in Baghdad.” Oxford economist Paul Collier argued in the Financial Times that Assad’s regime was doomed and arming the opposition would push it over the edge.

None of these commentators are neoconservatives or proxy warriors, fans of the “War on Terror,” the Bush Doctrine or the unbridled use of American force. In their different ways, they are driven by simple, and legitimate, moral outrage. That outrage was expressed in its purest form by the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile whose powerful indictment of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny played a large role in convincing liberals like George Packer and Paul Berman to support the Iraq War. In a largely pro-intervention symposium posted recently by the New Republic, Makiya wrote, “I don’t really think there is any kind of a reasonable argument against intervention in Syria. Quite the opposite: There is a moral and a human imperative to act that is larger than any nation’s interests and larger than any strategic calculation. That is so obvious it is an embarrassment to have to say it. This is how I thought about intervention in Iraq 20 years ago and it is how I think about what needs to be done in Syria today.”

To their credit, most of these observers recognize that their call for the West in general and America in particular to support the Syrian opposition holds considerable risks. For example, after acknowledging the murky and disorganized nature of the Syrian opposition, the looming possibility of sectarian massacres, and the unhappy outcome of America’s mujahedin experiment in Afghanistan, Traub writes,  “[T]here are no good solutions; only less bad ones … I’m open to a better suggestion.”

So these commentators deserve respect for their intellectual integrity, their good intentions and their moral outrage. All of them find the unfolding carnage in Syria unbearable to behold, and anyone with a conscience would agree.

And yet, we must bear it. For the worst thing that America and the rest of the world could do is to arm the opposition.

This is not a knee-jerk left-wing response. It has nothing to do with Iraq. Nor does it have anything to do with the proxy war between the U.S. and its allies and Iran and its allies. It is not driven by pacifism or opposition to all war. All U.S. wars are not axiomatically foolish, evil or driven by brutal self-interest (although most of them since World War II have been). The airstrikes on Kosovo and the Libya campaign were justified (although the jury is still out on the latter intervention). If arming the Syrian opposition would result in fewer deaths and a faster transition to a peaceful, open, democratic society, we should arm them.

Every situation is different: There is no one-size-fits-all template for foreign affairs. And in Syria, the truth is that further militarizing the conflict will likely cause it to spiral out of control. Moral outrage alone is not enough. It must be tethered to a coldly rational analysis.

That analysis has been provided by a number of in-depth reports, most notably a new study by the International Crisis Group, as well as the excellent on-the-ground reporting of Nir Rosen for Al-Jazeera. The bottom line is simple. The war has become a zero-sum game for Assad. If he loses, he dies. But the only way he can lose is if he is abandoned by his crucial external patron, Russia, which is extremely unlikely to happen absent some slaughter so egregious that Moscow feels it has to cut ties with him. Assad has sufficient domestic support to hold on for a long time, and a huge army that is not likely to defect en masse. Under these circumstances, giving arms to the rebels, however much it may make conscience-stricken Western observers feel better, will simply make the civil war much bloodier and its outcome even more chaotic and dangerous.

The key point concerns Assad’s domestic support. Contrary to the widely held belief that most Syrians support the opposition and are opposed to the Assad regime, Syrians are in fact deeply divided. The country’s minorities – the ruling Alawites, Christians and Druze – tend to support the regime, if only because they fear what will follow its downfall. (The grocery on my corner in San Francisco is owned by a Christian Syrian from a village outside Damascus. When I asked him what he thought about what was going on in his country, he said, “It’s not like what you see on TV. Assad is a nice guy. He’s trying to do the right thing.”) As Rosen makes clear, Syria’s ruling Alawite minority is the key to Assad’s survival: Absent an outside invasion, the regime will not fall unless the Alawites turn on it. But the Alawites fear reprisals if the Sunni-dominated opposition, some of whose members have threatened to “exterminate the Alawites,” defeats the Assad regime. The fear of a sectarian war, exacerbated by the murky and incoherent nature of the opposition, means that the minorities are unlikely to join the opposition in large numbers.

As for the opposition, it has suffered too many losses to stop fighting.

What this means is that neither side has any reason to stop pursuing its present course, and short of a U.S. or NATO invasion – which only barking-mad neocons are suggesting we embark on – the regime will be able to hold on for years. The longer the struggle goes on, Rosen notes, the more radicalized and Islamist the opposition will become. As Rosen gloomily writes, “Syria is crumbling before our eyes, and a thoroughly modern nation is likely to be set back many decades.”

The International Crisis Group report argues that America’s current posture of talking about arming the opposition while simultaneously pursuing a diplomatic track is a mistake.

“In the meantime this dual U.S. and Arab approach – on the one hand, proclaiming support for Annan and for a diplomatic resolution; on the other, toying with greater militarization of the opposition – arguably is a strategy at war with itself and one that could readily backfire. Some argue that only by dangling the prospect of a stronger rebel force might Assad be persuaded to give in. But a different scenario is more likely: The regime will point to any decision to arm the opposition as a breach of the Annan plan and use it as a reason not to comply and to reinvigorate its own offensive; meanwhile, the military half-measures on behalf of the opposition might satisfy the urge to ‘do something’ – but these will be woefully inadequate to beat back a regime offensive.”

The ICG report recommends “a more pragmatic, consensual approach, a controlled, negotiated transition that would spare the country additional bloodshed … a middle course between chaos without the regime and chaos with it – a controlled transition that preserves state institutions, thoroughly reforms the security services and puts squarely on the table the issue of unaccountable family rule.” To get there, it suggests strengthening some of mediator Kofi Annan’s general ideas, including a monitoring mechanism to ensure that cease-fires are not violated, freezing of weapons smuggling across the border, and a pragmatic compromise on demonstrations that would allow them but not in the center of Damascus, where they would become Tahrir Square-style mass movements that would topple the regime. In the long run, the radioactive issue of the Assad family’s rule and legitimacy and the sectarian makeup of the security forces would have to be addressed. But in the short term, Assad would remain in power.

An Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by two law professors, Asli Bali and Aziz F. Rana, made the same point: The most humane thing for the Syrian people, the authors argue, would be to engage with Assad – which means leaving him, at least for now, in power.

This means that the best-case scenario is that the fighting winds down, the opposition eventually gives up the armed struggle, contents itself with whatever crumbs Assad throws it, and waits for the political winds to shift enough so that real change can start taking place.

For this, thousands of men, women and children gave their lives?

Such an outcome seems morally outrageous. It’s unthinkable. But the alternative – an all-out sectarian civil war between evenly matched adversaries, both of them fighting to the death – is even more unthinkable.

What America and the world are faced with in Syria, in short, is nothing less than a tragedy. And we are not good at dealing with tragedy.

Americans are not a tragic people. We do not understand tragedy, and we instinctively resist it. Our history has insulated us from it. American exceptionalism, the belief that we are qualitatively different from all other nations and immune to the woes that afflict them, goes back to the Puritans. No American president can avoid paying lip service to it. The Republican Party’s foreign policy consists almost entirely of endless variations on it. It is in our national DNA.

The American belief that we live in a city on a hill, that we are immune from tragedy, has not only molded our national character, it has shaped our relations with the rest of the world. Some of its influence has been positive. Optimism and generosity, the benign face of American exceptionalism, drove epochal achievements like the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt a shattered Europe after World War II.  That altruistic, engaged approach to the world known as “Wilsonian idealism” or “liberal interventionism” has resulted in some notable achievements, including the ouster of Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic and the toppling of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. A foreign policy that does not have a moral component, a purely Machiavellian approach to the world, is soulless. Realism is essential, but  realism without compassion is deadly.

But America’s belief that it is inherently a force for good, that American interventions always have positive results, and that we can shape the world at will, have led us to make a number of appalling foreign policy decisions – ones that not only failed to advance our own interests, but that harmed the very people and causes we were allegedly trying to help. Vietnam and Afghanistan, our two longest wars, were both driven partly by altruistic motives – and both proved to be disastrous quagmires. George W. Bush’s Iraq War was motivated by a bizarre mixture of factors – Zimmerman-style vigilante vengeance for 9/11, a half-baked “grand strategy” to remake the Middle East for U.S. and Israel, a feckless and puerile president’s desire to play the he-man – but lurking among them was a myopic, almost drugged belief that because we were the ones dropping the bombs, and God was on our side, everything was going to be OK in the end. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead American and coalition troops and a wrecked country later, everything did not turn out to be OK.

Our national instinct is to come riding to the rescue. It goes against our character to simply sit on our hands.  Our sincere, naive and self-centered belief that America can fix everything, and our equally sincere, naive and self-centered belief that moral outrage justifies intervention, is a powerful tide, pulling us toward getting directly involved in Syria’s civil war.

But in the real world, we cannot always come riding to the rescue. Sometimes, we have no choice but to watch tragedy unfold, because anything we do will create an even bigger tragedy.

America is going to have to come to terms with this painful truth, and a lot of similar ones, in the years ahead. We’re going to have to accept that Obama’s drone war is creating more enemies than it kills and shut it down, even if that means some potential terrorists get away. We’re going to have to accept that Afghanistan and Iraq may end up as basket cases, even failed states. We’re going to have to learn to live with an Egypt run by Islamists, and an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that can no longer be solved with a two-state solution. We’re going to have to give up on the dream of perfect safety from terrorism.

After too many childish illusions, and childish wars that killed too many people, it’s time for us to grow up.

To realize those totalitarian ambitions, China’s authorities, with Bain Capital’s help, are expanding the country’s already vast network of surveillance cameras. The city of Chongqing is spending $4.2 billion for a network of 500,000 cameras, Guangdong Province is installing a million cameras, and Beijing is planning to put cameras in all entertainment venues, the Times reported.

The authorities use these cameras, along with Internet monitoring and cellphone surveillance, to monitor as much of the entire population as possible. But they are particularly interested in keeping a permanent eye on democracy advocates, intellectuals, religious figures and other people they deem dangerous. For example, police used a surveillance camera to record a human rights lawyer named Li Tiantian entering a hotel with men other than her boyfriend, then taunted her about her sex life and threatened to show the tape to her boyfriend. “The scale of intrusion into people’s private lives is unprecedented,” Li told the Times. “Now when I walk on the street, I feel so vulnerable, like the police are watching me all the time.”

But the whining of Li and her troublemaking ilk are of no concern to the patriotic Uniview. In its promotional materials, the company chirps, “Social management and society building pose new demands for surveillance and control systems.”

Bain is also untroubled by the fact that it owns a company dedicated to re-creating the unique societal ambience of George Orwell’s “1984.” It stressed to the Times that Uniview’s products “were advertised” as tools to fight crime, not to monitor dissidents, and that only one-third of Uniview’s sales were to public security bureaus.

Ah, because Uniview advertised that its surveillance cameras were only used to fight crime, it’s OK for Bain to own them. Thanks for clearing that up, Bain! (I take the liberty of addressing you as Bain because, as the Supreme Court has ruled and the GOP believes, corporations are people.)

Speaking of which, Bain, I would be remiss to your investors if I did not draw your attention to an excellent opportunity to acquire a leading Rwandan firm, the Tutsi Machete Co. The Tutsi Machete Co. is a perfect target for you. It is underperforming, has a weak management structure and is ripe for a leveraged buyout. Some have claimed that TMC provides hundreds of thousands of machetes to frenzied genocidal mobs, but that is not a concern: The company ran an ad claiming that their machetes were only used to fight crime. Making the optics even stronger, only one-third of the machetes were given to frenzied genocidal mobs. With a significant downsizing of its workforce – which can be accomplished using the company’s own products, thus ensuring significant additional savings – TMC’s profits should increase by 300 percent. Recommendation: Buy.

Romney and his wife earned at least $5.6 million from their Bain holdings, the Times reported. But according to the person who manages their trusts, the Romneys had nothing to do with the decision to invest in Uniview. All they did was pocket the money.

Owning a piece of the Great Eye of Sauron Company is probably too much even for the free-market-worshiping Romney. He will probably get out of the trust, and it won’t be surprising if Bain suddenly decides to unload Uniview. But that won’t solve the real problem, which this grotesque episode highlights. The real problem is untrammeled capitalism, at whose coldblooded shrine he and the rest of the GOP worship. And that problem won’t go away if Romney washes his hands of Uniview, any more than Pontius Pilate was able to wash away his responsibility for crucifying Jesus.

For the almighty market has no conscience. Private equity firms like Bain are sharks. They were created to maximize profits for their investors – nothing more, nothing less. Buying Uniview was egregious, but firms like Bain buy slightly less nasty versions of Uniview every day. Until they stop making decisions solely based on the bottom line, the same issues will keep coming up.

The same thing applies to the free-market mantra constantly repeated by companies like Bain and their defenders — “improving corporate performance.” “Improving corporate performance” really means “maximizing profits for shareholders.” Sure, it sometimes works out well for everyone, workers and investors alike. But the point is, that isn’t its goal. The fate of human beings is not important. If tens of thousands of workers get dumped along the way, they’re just collateral damage, road kill along the great haj to honor Adam Smith.

Early in the primary campaign, in a desperate attempt to wound Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich both channeled their inner Marx and made this exact charge against Romney and Bain. When Romney fired back that they were “putting free enterprise on trial,” and GOP ideologues tut-tutted, Twinkle Dumb and Twinkle Me realized that they had gone too far off the reservation and changed the subject. But they were right.

As a liberal, I’d like to be able to cite this story as an example of the perfidy of the American right and the internal contradictions of an ideology that exalts “freedom” but somehow leads to totalitarianism. Unfortunately, the Democrats are virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans on this issue. Bain Capital, in all its creepiness, is as American as apple pie.

Bain is doing two things with Uniview. It is helping an authoritarian regime keep an eternal eye on its citizens, and it is doing so for the same reason it does everything: to maximize its profits. The Democrats are marginally better than the Republicans when it comes to the latter issue: they at least pay lip service to the workers who are “downsized” by firms like Bain. But the differences are cosmetic: they, too, have essentially bought the gospel of greed. And both parties have signed off on the Surveillance Society.

It was President George W. Bush who created the Patriot Act. But in 2011, it was President Obama who asked Congress to extend its surveillance powers. It was Obama who signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows indefinite detention and essentially declares that the “war on terror” is permanent. And it was Obama who decided that it was OK to launch drones at will around the world, and assassinate American citizens without trial.

After all, those who are innocent have nothing to fear.

So there’s no reason to worry about the millions of surveillance cameras being deployed all over China. Big Brother is already watching us. Why shouldn’t he watch some other people too?