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There are numerous ways of understanding this disheartening turn of events. Maybe the secret note that George W. Bush left in the top drawer of the Resolute desk on Jan. 20, 2009, contained a “Manchurian Candidate”-style code word that switched on the programming! Or maybe, somewhat more plausibly, the entire secret apparatus of American counterterrorism at home and abroad has become an independent and self-replicating organism, a Hydra-headed monster that can’t be killed. The president himself indirectly took that tack on Friday, when he tackled questions about the surveillance revelations for the first time, during a supposedly unrelated press conference.

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I’m not spoiling much of anything in telling you that the magic trick is an illusion: The money was in Vegas the whole time, and Monsieur le Teleport never went anywhere. Then again, “Now You See Me” is a kind of illusion or inversion as well. For one thing, it’s a fantasy in which tourists depart Las Vegas with more money than they started with. It’s a movie that plays with dangerous notions of class warfare, payback and redistribution of wealth – with the ancient concept, in fact, of Jubilee, a celebration in which slaves and prisoners are set free and debts are forgiven – and then assures us that it was just kidding, and that in America redemption is always an individual matter.

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She was at heart a populist taking on the Conservative party’s old guard, who disdainfully referred to her as “That Woman.” The disdain was mutual. She referred to them as “the not so grand grandees.” As Thatcher later said, “It didn’t matter what they called me as long as I got the job done. I mean, to me they were ‘Those Grandees.’ They just don’t know what life is like. They haven’t been through it. And eventually if they didn’t help our cause, they had to go. But it didn’t bother me too much that they were patronizing like that. Frankly, the people, who are the true gentlemen, deal with others for what they are, not who their father was. Let’s face it: Maybe it took ‘That Woman’ to get things done, and the real reason why they said it was because they knew they just hadn’t got it within them to see things through.”

As she continues:

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Given that background, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken Stone this long to tackle a straightforward nonfiction project like his Showtime miniseries “The Untold History of the United States,” which tries to counter the jingoistic mythmaking and obligatory “American exceptionalism” of most public discourse about 20th-century history. That phrase refers to a creed that still holds sway (or so polls suggest) among a large proportion of the U.S. population, although it hasn’t been taken seriously by historians for many years: The idea that America has a special and even sacred role to play in world history, and cannot be compared to other nations driven by the grubby realities of politics and economics.

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I guess it’s not going to work out. I guess this is goodbye.

For 20 months now, since a few days after the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl and Gov. Scott Walker moved to crush public unions in Wisconsin and the protests began at the state capitol building in Madison, we have argued nearly every day of the week. We have argued late at night, in our underwear, with you full of Evan Williams and me full of French red wine. We have argued during your son’s football games. We have argued when my daughters have been playing Monopoly with me. We have argued at the mall, at the grocery store, out for dinner, out for a stroll with the dog, at work, at ballgames, at weddings, at funerals, in the sunshine, in the rain, in the snow, in sight of the beautiful summertime dew that clings to the grass here in Wisconsin, way early in the morning, even during that long drought in July and in August when rain was as scarce as good will toward people whose political views are not the same as our own. We never stopped, Rick.  We never surrendered.

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I was a city girl, after all. I’d moved to Wisconsin seven weeks before, though by election night it felt like it had been longer. I’d chosen Wisconsin strategically: It had 10 electoral votes and was the swingiest of swing states. I was idealistic, a new college graduate, a life-long Democrat. I began work — calling voters, knocking doors, distributing yard signs — the day I arrived in Green Bay.

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Then again, it can often seem as if the entire electoral process consists of questions of style and messaging that have nothing to do with one’s ability to govern the country but carry all kinds of perceived psychological and cultural freight. Political culture is full of wisdom and waggery that conveys the message that it’s all a Madison Avenue con, to which only you and I and other savvy observers are immune. Every four years, we choose between Coke and Pepsi; Americans vote for Dad when it comes to the White House and Mom when it comes to Congress. (Actually, in the era of the Tea Party, that has shifted. A whole lot of Americans have voted their crazy racist uncles into Congress, often all too literally.)

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Do we see sometimes us going overboard in our campaign — are there mistakes that are made or areas where there's no doubt that somebody could dispute how we are presenting things? You know, that happens in politics.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney still won’t release more than two years of full tax returns.

What do these two situations have to do with each other and the election? Everything.

Despite baseless Republican assertions to the contrary, Barack Obama has sought from Day One to take responsibility for his actions as president. So, after three and a half years in which Republicans have blocked every piece of legislation Obama has proposed and generally been as uncooperative as possible  — economic recovery be damned — Obama repeated this weekend what he has said before:  “I take full responsibility for everything that we do."

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The poll finds that 60 percent of those surveyed have "not very much" trust in the media, compared with 40 percent who said they had a great deal or a fair amount. The numbers have been steadily on the decline over the last 20 years, dragged down by Republicans and independents. The same poll shows that Democrats have more trust in the media than they did last year.

On the whole, the survey shows that 39 percent of people are paying "very close" attention to political news, up from 35 percent last year, but down from 43 percent during the last presidential race in 2008.

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So Americans are not unique when it comes to our ambivalent or hostile relationship to history, our preference for simplistic myth-making over the unsettled and perennially conflicted character of the past. Given our nation’s short and bloody history – and the fact that there’s so much of it we’d rather not think about – it’s possible that we suffer from an exaggerated version of this syndrome. Whether or not that’s true, in this historical moment we face an especially stark choice between different versions of the American imagined community, which is what I believe accounts for the poisonous character of this presidential campaign.

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Certain things should not be mixed together. Bleach and ammonia. White wine and red meat. Alex Jones and Joseph Farah.

Proof of the latter mixture’s toxicity came last week, when Jones, the gravelly voiced Internet personality best known for his obsession with “truther” theories about the government’s supposed complicity in 9/11, interviewed Farah, the mustachioed overlord of all things “birther,” on his radio show.

For the most part, the two conspiracists’ conversation went pretty much as you would expect: chitchat about a supposed plan to disarm all Americans; furious denunciations of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act; speculation that the government would soon declare that “mom and apple pie and George Washington are terrorists.”

Then Farah dropped a bomb.

“By the way Alex, remember when you were in my office in Virginia, one of my crew asked if you’d ever seen a drone, and you answered no you hadn’t,” he said. “I get home and within a week or two of that conversation, I’m taking my dog for a walk, and guess what I see right over the tree line?  Right above my head is a drone.”

The “confirmation,” Farah said, came from online images of drones that “resemble what I saw.”

Farah, who lives in a Virginia suburb about 20 miles outside of the nation’s capital, could think of only one reason why a drone (if that is really what he saw) would be monitoring the area.

“There could only be one thing that this drone was spying on, and that would be me,” he said. “That would be my property.”

Jones lapped it up. “It was obviously looking for something on your property, probably harassment,” he fumed. “You have to ask the police, I mean, if that scenario happened, and like a Simpsons episode, and a giant green lizard was at the podium, would you submit to them? This is an outside globalist takeover.”

Jones and Farah seem to be reacting to recent reports that the government has permitted limited use of unmanned drones in civilian airspace. Last June, an antigovernment “sovereign citizen,” whose family had chased police off their North Dakota farm with high-powered rifles, became the first American citizen to be arrested with the aid of such a device. The government reportedly plans to expand the use of drones within the next few years, an idea that unsettles civil liberties watchdogs on both the left and right – and leaves antigovernment activists like Farah and Jones giddily unhinged.

“This is a game of control for them,” Farah told Jones. “We have to resist all attempts to control us, whether they’re telling us our kids have to have these mandatory vaccines, or they tell us in order to get on an airplane you’ve got to be groped. This is where the resistance starts, because this is part of conditioning for what is really the endgame for them, which is, you know, we’re all going to be global citizens, we don’t have any say in our government and so forth. It’s everything our Founding Fathers fought against, and we’ve got to be like our Founding Fathers all over again, and the only question in my mind is whether we have the fearlessness, and the courage and the conviction that they had to do that.”

He continued, “If [Obama is] re-elected, it’s gonna be war. We will be at war. We will be hunted down like dogs, Alex Jones, just keep that in mind. That’s what the stakes are.”

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