Oh, what a time it was. Evil was everywhere. Evil was a our global modus operandi, our de facto worldview, the way we brushed our teeth in the morning. Hell, evil was so prevalent, there was an entire axis of it. We had evil tyrants and evil dictators and evil mullahs, all lighting their Cuban cigars with a burning American flag, each hell-bent on out-eviling each other in some sort of wacky game of Pin the Tail on the Cheney.

But now, well, not so much. The Age of Obama has brought both a terrific upswelling of general positivism and a concomitant grand lightening up/toning down of outrageous verbiage and ranting extremism among the hotheaded-dictator set, and with it the strangest thing of all: an apparent global decline in overt, easily identifiable flameballs of tangible evil.

Just look around. The entire reptilian Republican party, our cherished font of evil ideas and evil intentions, is now just a cute, leaderless sideshow of circus freaks, all bluster and tantrum and Sarah Palin’s kooky gams. It’s quite a spectacle: One of the two major political parties in the United States is now entirely run by a blowhard talk radio cow, an insane Fox News comedian and a crusty bomb-thrower dug up from the vault of 1988 (Hi, Newt!)