Polls show Mitt Romney lost badly to President Obama in the Battle of Conventions. Obama appears to have gained ground during the GOP convention and to have widened his lead over Romney during the Democratic convention.

So what does Romney do? He doubles down on culture war lies, implying over the weekend that Obama plans to remove the word “God” from the nation’s coins. Call it coining lies. I have to ask once again, should Romney somehow manage to win, why would anyone grant his victory legitimacy?

Cory Robin and I go way back. We were in a political discussion together where the hot topic was the WTO protests in Seattle—the “Occupy” movement of 1998. Since then, I’ve always been a deep admirer of his essays; if he’s saved his emails from the intervening fifteen years, I’m sure he’d find a bunch from me praising his various pieces from the London Review of Books when they came out. I was thrilled to learn he was collecting his pieces into a book. I was even more thrilled when I read it and saw how he was able to link them together into a coherent argument which—well, read my blurb on the book…