I missed this column by Cockeyed Platonist (CP) when it was first published. 'The Tree Of Failure' is a title redolent with possibilities and CP exercises his good judgment and ethical restraint to telling effect.This is not simply a column but a sermon preached by a 'Social Conservative' on the 'Fallen State of Man', to use the vocabulary suitable to this piece. This is supposed be a commentary on the speech given by President Obama in Tucson after the shootings. But CP cannot resist the opportunity to engage in his favorite rhetorical exercise, of reducing historically located actualities into large, but manageable abstractions; the better to instruct his readers, to use the opportunity for pious sounding political moralizing: for the ethical posturing, that the thinkers on the Right cannot resist.The vocabulary is a compendium of the mainstays of sermonizing: Sabbath ( the seventh day of the week),redemption, renewal, with the additions of a sociological/political nature; social organism, communal improvement, social enterprise and civility,to add sociological relevance to his narrative, but clearly understood as intellectual garnish by his readers. Joe DI Maggagio then appears, as exemplary of a non-narcissist athlete, of the old school, and almost completes this collection. Reinhold Niebuhr has that signal honor of being the final example of American Uprightness, and is quoted, at length, on forgiveness. Mr. Niebuhr, a man who eventually founded,by time and cogitation, the school of political/moral thought of 'Christian Realism', an apologetically rationalized American Exceptionalism: the narrative richness and diversity of The American Political Melodrama is thereby secured, made empirically concrete.