Rod Dreher:

... the other day I was part of a conversation in which people were talking about the Blagojevich mess, and I overheard an elderly veteran say, "What we need in this country is a coup. Just bring the military in and straighten things out."

I asked him if he really meant that, and if he understood what he was saying.

"Hell yeah," he said. "Look at 'em." He meant Congress and Wall Street.

I think we'll be hearing a lot more of this in the years to come.

Some of you may have read Charles Dunlap's famous early-1990s piece imagining a military coup d'etat in the near-future United States. (He also participated in a Harper's roundtable on the same theme several years ago.) But even if you have read it, you may not remember - as I did not until I looked it up - the year in which he set his coup scenario.

It was, of course, the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve.