It's a good song. Randy Newman is, once you get past the corny instrumentation, an extremely pointed songwriter. Take Elvis Costello at his crankiest and you haven't even begun to scrape the top of Randy Newman's dark pit.

The album "Good Old Boys" will leave you with your jaw dropped at the venom of it all.

Anyway, this is a single Mr. Newman recently, and it's probably all over the internet, and you've seen it eighty times already, but I have such a woefully tin-ear and hideous timing for this sort of thing, so bear with me.

It's sort of speaks to how I feel nowadays, in my civic soul. It's been a stupid, ugly eight years, and we're (Americans) going to be paying for all the mediocrity, fear, neandrethal posturing and wishful thinking we've foisted on the rest of the world for the past eight years. The ultimate payment for this debt is the sunset on our influence. Not a bad thing, necessarily.

Anyway, here's Randy Newman singing "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country".

Happy New Year. Here's to bring sanity back.