It’s Even Worse Than It looks

That is the title of a best selling book by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein.

I just finished reading it.

Actually I read a little more than a hundred pages of it.

For the balance of the book I turned pages and read subject headers and occasional snatches of what they were saying.

That sounds as if the book might be not as good as its best seller status would imply, but that is not the case: especially in the first hundred pages the authors discuss stuff that either I didn’t know, didn’t know to the level of detail that they were presenting, or had altogether forgotten; so that was good.

But at the century mark I began to realize the implication of the fact that they had written their book before the 2012 election.

At the point of that realization I was engulfed with despair: I was reading a tome that was discussing the possibility that a patient had cancer and was offering an extensive number of hopeful ameliorative options to treat the patient in the event that he or she did indeed have cancer.

The problem was that I am a being who, from the viewpoint of the authors, has had the benefit of time travel.

I not only know that the patient does have cancer but that the cancer has fully metastasized and the patient has less than six weeks to live.

The last hundred and twenty pages went by with the creation of a small wind storm as they turned; no amount of amelioration can fix the patient, so I just looked at the headings to be sure I was right and looked sadly for another book to read.