Forget the Obama interview–go straight to Walter Kirn’s piece on guns. It’s a brilliant piece of writing:

I also know the opposite feeling, of outmanning someone else, because I pulled a gun on a guy once. It happened outside of the building where I live in downtown Livingston, Montana, a town of 7,000 that I moved to from New York City 23 years ago, back when New York was still considered dangerous. I was in the cab of my Ford pickup after a trip to a mini-storage locker with my two children, who were nine and six. Right across the street was the Mint Bar, a cavernous old brick hideout for midday tipplers in front of which was standing a lean young man who’d glared at me with a manic, feral focus the moment I’d parked and opened the truck door. He seemed high, not just drunk, with that toxic aura of meth, and when our eyes met, he bared his teeth and hissed that he was going to kill me, that I was dead, shifting his weight toward the curb at the same time. Somehow my kids didn’t hear him as they climbed out, nor did they see my reaction to his threat: I opened the glove compartment and removed a long-barreled .22 target pistol that was there by chance, as part of the move. Its rubber grip met my hand and melded with it in a smooth, reflexive motion. I held the gun across my belt line, displaying its silver profile as I turned. The scary young man was about ten yards away by then, but when he saw the gun, his body rocked backward as though in a cartoon. I watched his flushed face drain pale as he backed off, one shoe untied and dragging a long, loose lace. He vanished around the bar’s corner, a full retreat that left me presiding over a total victory that no one, because the street was empty, had witnessed.

A single win is not a streak. It may, in fact, be a basis for self-delusion. Statistics on the dangers guns pose to the health of their owners and those who live with them suggest that I’d be safer selling my guns than reserving them for Tombstone II. Trouble is, in an armed showdown, statistics tend to lose. In those who’ve learned to imagine assailants everywhere and may even have faced a real assailant, guns encourage a sense of personal exceptionalism. It’s the essence of their magnetism. Firearms exist to manage situations where rationality has failed, so thinking rationally about them can be hard.

Kirn’s stuff is so good right now that he might resurrect TNR all on his own.

It’s going to air this Saturday on C-SPAN2 (the Deuce!) at 10:00 pm, then again at 9:00 pm on Sunday morning and 3:00 am on Monday.

And that, I’m afraid, is only the beginning. Big, big publicity push coming next week. I’ve got some really big media appearances lined up, which I’ll tell you all about later this week. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but if you listen to North Dakota’s AM 1260 during overnights, boy are you in for a treat . . .

Also, you may have gotten emails from Amazon/B&N yesterday letting you know that copies of What to Expect have shipped. Hope you get them soon.

Finally, I don’t quite know how to say this without sounding like a jackass, but: I’m a huge fool for signed books. I love them. Always gives me a thrill. If you’re a signing-nerd, too, and want me to sign your copy of What to Expect, just drop me an email and I’d be happy to do it.

One of the interesting side matters about Barack Obama is that so many of the anecdotes about his sense of self come from people close to him, who view them not as horrifying indictments of his character, but as testaments to his awesomeness.

For example, Valerie Jarrett, who contributed lots to the large American Narcissus clip file now has a charming story for the NYT from Obama’s first term:

Valerie Jarrett, White House senior adviser (2009-present): We’re sitting in the Oval Office, and the president asked [the legislative director] Phil Schiliro — who always could figure out what’s that third way — “Phil, what’s the third way?” Phil said, “Mr. President, unless you’re feeling lucky, I don’t know what the third way is.” And so the president gets up from his chair and he walks over and he looks out the window, and he says, “Phil, where are you?” Phil says, “I’m in the Oval Office.” He goes, “What’s my name?” Phil says, “President Obama.” He goes, “Of course I’m feeling lucky.”

Sub out “Obama” for “George W. Bush,” obviously, and this goes into the pantheon of presidential arrogance.

Blogging has been light non-existant because of a combination of off-camera events and a surprising amount of pre-publication work for What to Expect.

Yesterday, for instance, I taped an hour-long interview with C-SPAN’s After Words. During which I may, or may not have said that having children “blows.”

I can’t figure out whether I said it, or was just thinking it before my brain over-ride kicked in. It was all kind of a blur.

We’ll have to wait for the show to air in a couple weeks to find out.

Heather Wilhelm has a review of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting over at RealClearPolitics. She’s very kind to the book, but independent of that fact it’s a really elegant and engaging essay.

Also, she establishes what I hope will be convention: After the first mention of the title, it’s probably best to just call it “What to Expect.”

Galley Friend G.R. passes on a link to a podcast where James Lileks is very kind about What to Expect. It’s at the 11:09 mark and it’s just a quick, off-hand compliment, but it’s James Effin’ Lileks. So that’s pretty awesome.

Update: Sorry, obviously that was the wrong link. Fixed now.

Galley Brother BJ and I spent yesterday in classic Philadelphia fashion: Rooting hard on an NFL game in which our only investment was a default position against our hometown teams. This sort of imbued dissatisfaction is one of the perks of being a Philly fan. Once the Eagles are gone, you can always find a reason to root against the remaining teams. Is this emotionally and spiritually corrosive? Sure. But it’s who we are.

Anyway, until this season, I’d found my anti-Redskins bias waning in recent years. The Skins were so awful that it was hard to hate them. But more importantly, a goodly number of my friends and neighbors genuinely like the team. The prospect of Redskins’ success giving them pleasure made me happy.

But this year reminded me all over again why the Redskins diaspora is so insipid: They’re the most Pollyanna fans I’ve ever seen. Every game is full of promise, they’re always a long win streak away from the playoffs, every above-average player is a Hall of Famer. Listen to the Redskins radio broadcast and it’s way, waaaaay beyond normal sports homerism–it’s like listening to North Korean state radio. Most of the local media is like that, too. (With honorable exceptions for the Czabe and his posse.) The fans–again, with honorable exceptions among my friends and neighbors–are even more happy-go-jacky.

And when the Skins did get a top-flight quarterback in Griffin and did got on a long win streak and did make the playoffs? I’m not kidding when I say that the general sense over the last week or two was that this Redskins squad was a Team of Destiny en march to the Super Bowl.

I was not unpleased to see the Redskins get crushed by Seattle. (For all the same reasons, Galley Brother BJ was pulling for Washington.)

Yet I suspect that today Redskins Nation will still find the glass nearly full. So just a few random thoughts:

* That 7-game win streak? Two wins were against a team that finished 4-12, and was lucky to win 4 (my Eagles). Two more came against an 8-8 squad (Dallas). One win came against 5-11 Cleveland. The only quality wins were against a flailing 9-7 New York and a playoff-bound 10-6 Baltimore. Even an average team would have gone 5-2 during that stretch. A mildly-competent team would have gone 6-1. That 7-0 said nothing about the Redskins except that they were better than mildly-competent.

* As for Robert Griffin III, is he really Fran Tarkenton, John Elway, and Peyton Manning rolled into one? Look, Griffin has a totally bad-ass sports nickname. Maybe the best sports nickname of all time. But if everyone just called him “Griffin” the way we do normal players, would people be running away to crown him the way they’ve been doing all season?

Griffin’s rookie numbers are awesome. Good for him. But quarterbacks have outlier seasons all the time. Michael Vick. Cam Newton. Vince Young. Kordell Stewart. Don Majkowski. Maybe this time it will be different. If the Eagles had Griffin, there would be cautious, albeit occasionally giddy, optimism that he might turn out to be an elite quarterback, should he survive the next few seasons and learn to be a pure-pocket passer.

In Washington, they’ve been sniffing his jock and scouting his place in Canton since the third game of the season.

* Maybe Griffin was worth giving up all those drafts picks. Without actually crunching the numbers, my guess is that he probably was, and then some. The problem is that even if he’s worth it, making that trade was a bid to Win Now. Because having given away the picks, the Redskins will find it comparatively harder to build the team over the next few years. So was Washington’s triumphant three-hour appearance in the playoffs just the start of big things to come? I guess anything’s possible. For now they’ll just have to savor the joy of having been the worst team in the 2013 playoffs.

* But as a parting gift to Redskins fans, I’ll give you two free wins in each of the next four seasons, courtesy of the Philadelphia Eagles. Because no matter how mediocre Washington is, the Eagles have begun a nuclear winter. Like a failed, autocratic state losing its long-time dictator, the Eagles have entered a perfect storm where they lose, simultaneously, not just a coach, but also a head of football operations, the “franchise” quarterback, and probably the entire staff of coordinators and assistants. Basically, the entire organization below the owner has been dynamited. And this happened during a spectacularly thin draft year, affording little opportunity to turn failure into gain.

The Redskins might be annoyingly mediocre. I suspect it will be a while before the Eagles even attain that level again.

Courtesy of Galley Friend J.T., comes Tagg Romney explaining why Mitt Romney spent the last six years running for president:

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”

Yup, all those shots across the bow of Mitch Daniels in the newspapers where reporters somehow tracked down Jason Horowitz–who knows where they came from. Ben Smith said it was from a “rival campaign aide.” Probably from the Santorum or Pawlenty oppo shop. Goodness knows how much money those guys were spending on oppo. Not good ol’ Mitt.

Sure, Barack Obama’s reelection means higher taxes, continued unseriousness about debts and deficits, further expansion of an already unsustainable welfare state, and further war against religious liberty and the role of religion in the public square.

But on the other hand, imagine how insufferable it would be if we had to listen to stuff like that every day for the next four years. And pretend that Tagg-2024 was a real possibility.

So Happy New Year.