It comforts me that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and an architect of the financial bailout plan the House rejected Monday, is a specialist in the Great Depression. This, of course, was the economic calamity that beset the United States from 1929 to about 1942 and ended only when America went to war. What stopped the Depression was a worldwide bloodbath. 

Anyone who knows the history of those awful times has to be chastened. The Depression was not, after all, simply an economic crisis. It was also a political and cultural one. It contributed to the rise of totalitarian movements abroad — both in Europe and Japan — and some pretty ugly political movements here as well. These things are hard to measure, but American democracy’s closest call probably came during the Great Depression.

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Of all the self-proclaimed experts I wanted to hear from about the financial crisis, the one I looked forward to the most was Nick Leeson, late of Britain’s Barings Bank. In 1995, he bet hugely on Nikkei futures (whatever they are) and lost something like $1.4 billion. Leeson was 28 and often drunk, Barings was 233 and in fiduciary senility. Leeson went to jail, Barings went bust and Wall Street, without so much as a pause, went on its merry way.

Sadly, Leeson did not have much to say about the current financial crisis. Writing last week in The Guardian, he instead expressed bitterness that the former owners of Barings went on with their lives while he spent four and a half years in prison. What he did not say, to the regret of us all, is how once again the kids were allowed to play with huge amounts of money without any adult supervision.

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Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. “I broke my promise to always tell the truth,” McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

The precise moment of McCain’s abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on “The View,” the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig — an Americanism that McCain himself has used in the past. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

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Thank God for Sarah Palin. Without her jibes, her sarcasm, her exaggerations, her smug provincialism, her hypocrisy about family and government, her exploitation of mommyhood and her personal attacks on Barack Obama, the Democratic base might never be consolidated. This much is certain: Obama could never do it.

Not, anyway, the Obama who appeared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos. That Obama was cool, diffident, above it all — unflustered, unflappable, unexcitable and downright unexciting. These “uns” ran on, a torrent of cool that frosted my flat-panel TV and had me wondering if, as a kid, Obama ever got a shot in the mouth on the playground, he’d glare at the bully — and convene a meeting.

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One of the great sights of American political life — a YouTube moment if ever there was one — was to see the doughboy face of Newt Gingrich as he extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin, a sitcom of a vice-presidential choice and a disaster movie if she moves up to president: “She’s the first journalist ever to be nominated, I think, for the president or vice president, and she was a sportscaster on local television,” Gingrich said on the “Today” show. “So she has a lot of interesting background. And she has a lot of experience. Remember that — when people worry about how inexperienced she is, for two years she’s been in charge of the Alaska National Guard.”

It’s a pity Gingrich was not around when the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula, reputedly named Incitatus as a consul and a priest. Incitatus was his horse.

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