Sometimes I feel like my brain is one of those whimsical Rube Goldberg machines and that it takes the longest possible root to the most elegant explanations. And sometimes inspiration lands on my like a piano out of a window.

I’m in the middle of a Rube Goldberg thing at the moment.

As a kid, politics was the religion of my house. We spent Sundays watching Meet the Press and reading the paper. My mom always told me that politics is not a spectrum from left to right, but a circle where the right and left eventually met in totalitarianism. It was her argument for the moderate middle, and I believed it for a long time.

But now I don’t see that it makes any sense unless you are arguing for moderation. I think that the left’s attempts to appear moderate have sent us running to the far right in an effort to keep at a constantly changing mid-point.

What I have decided is that there is a spectrum for policy and another, independent one for execution.

You can have lefty dictators (Stalin) though the nature of conservatism is one that is likely to limit access to power and policy making, there must be a few conservatives out there who actually respect the idea of pure democracy (just because I have never met one doesn’t mean they don’t exist).

That’s what I’ve got so far. Now all I need is a candle that burns through a string that then releases a spoon that launches an egg that falls in a hot skillet that catches on fire and sets off the smoke alarms that make the whole thing more clear in my head. Simple- no?