I regret to inform you. . .

. . . that the big TAS bash this past weekend didn’t produce the results I had anticipated, hoped for, and worked hard to achieve. My goal, of course, was to get my co-bloggers to agree to The Great American Scene Presidential Endorsement Announcement and thereby to turn the election in our favor. Alas, I couldn’t get them to focus on business at all — they were like a bunch of freakin’ lotos-eaters. In retrospect I doubt the wisdom of assembling them at the same hideaway where the A.I.G. executives took their recent restorative retreat. I thought it would be the ideal way to loosen up a band of notorious Type-A personalities, but with Suderman in the sauna and Poulos getting his mud facials and Feeney doing tai chi three times a day and Reihan always lying around with cucumber slices on his eyes and his big Bose noise-canceling headphones on. . . well, we didn’t get a damned thing done. And now the election will have to go its own stupid way without what would have been our decisive intervention. If Millman had not cancelled at the last minute . . . if Frost hadn’t been obsessively focused on his new triplets . . . if Manzi hadn’t been making more weird charts and graphs . . .

But what’s the point of recrimination? I can only apologize to Bob Barr — and to you faithful Scene readers — and, well, damn it all, to America.