There are movies, and there are epics. I watched an epic last weekend. It is the recent DVD release of the original version of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale.

Lancaster plays an Italian prince during the period known as the Risorgimento, the mid-19th century movement to unite and liberate Italy. The key figure was the patriot Garibaldi.

Based on a great Italian novel, The Leopard is about change, transformation and history, as seen by a man whose world is vanishing. In a pivotal soliloquy, the prince declares that he lives in two eras, and he detests both of them.

The prince is invited to serve as a senator in the new Republic and declines the offer. He feels life ebbing. He also looks at the younger generation in disgust. He observes the young women in a sumptuous ball scene and declares: “This is what comes of our practice of marrying cousins.” He likens the beautiful young things to monkeys, swinging on vines, “baring their behinds.”

Many great leaders have had their feet planted in two eras. Franklin Roosevelt was a Hudson River grandee – not unlike Lancaster’s Italian prince – who saved capitalism and created Social Security. Lyndon Johnson carried water for the segregationist South for more than a decade in the Senate, and then as president moved America into a new age with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

I’m not sure what era George W. Bush lives in or what era he is taking us to. To say that this is a curious moment in our nation’s history is a huge understatement.

There is a deafening silence among fiscal conservatives as our federal debt explodes and the nation’s financial obligations continue to grow. Do fiscal conservatives believe the record deficit and the debt that will come from four more years of war in Iraq and a transition to private Social Security accounts is a good thing?

I remember what U.S. Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia – a conservative if ever there was one – said following the death of Oregon Sen. Richard Neuberger. Russell said he was not inclined to like the liberal Neuberger. But he noticed that when Neuberger proposed raising postal workers’ salaries, he paired it with legislation to raise revenue to pay for it. Russell admired that.

Perhaps we are so deluded with labels that we don’t recognize what’s going on. After years of deriding tax-and-spend liberals, the radio talk show crowd doesn’t recognize a new breed: the borrow-and-spend conservative. It is awesome. It is scary.

Watching the second Bush administra-tion take shape reminds me of the line from a Saturday Night Live skit: “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!” In the case of President Bush, I guess the line should be: He’s conservative and radical.

The religious right and some commentators proclaim that the presidential election was about values and that we are embarking on a new era to sweep away liberal expectations, such as a woman’s right to choose abortion. Others point to mixed messages in the voting and note that the fundamentalist vote for Bush actually declined between the 2000 and 2004 elections.

None of that has anything to do with a debt that threatens the American economy and a war that will take hundreds of more lives and cost billions of dollars.

A lot of the talk out of the Pentagon these days is reminiscent of what the brass said during the Vietnam War. As with Vietnam, the guerilla never has to win a battle. All he must do is bleed the occupying army. For Islamic extremists, this is a cheap war. For this nation, it is expensive.

– S.A.F.