"Life is such a fucking disaster," a prominent New York hedge fund manager said recently. "We all live in some kind of world we create for ourselves. And I think that what happened is that built into that world were very enlarged expectations about what life was going to be. There's been this sensation of excessive expectation that, frankly, became unsustainable."

He had just returned from his ranch in the wilderness of central Idaho. "I just like it because it's massively low human density. It would be a place you could hole up in. But, gosh, I hope that doesn't happen."

Last week, not very far from the hedge fund manager's ranch, the billionaire John Malone gave a little-noticed interview to The Wall Street Journal from Allen & Co.'s annual Sun Valley conference. Asked about the biggest risks to Liberty, his media conglomerate, Mr. Malone said his concern was this country's survival. "We have a retreat that's right on the Quebec border. We own 18 miles on the border, so we can cross. Anytime we want to, we can get away."

His wife is more concerned: She's already moved her personal cash to Australia and Canada. "She wants to have a place to go," said Mr. Malone, No. 400 on this year's Forbes list of the richest people in the world, "if things blow up here."

Before the financial crisis, furious pessimism about the national economy started with a small and mostly scholarly group of doomsayers, like N.Y.U.'s Nouriel Roubini and Yale's Robert Shiller. But that pessimism has now gone mainstream, spreading from wonks in finance to the city's daily conversation as last year's rebound drifts further away. Growth is slow; unemployment is enormous; the world feels sludgy. It won't help if banks post withered profits later this week, as they're expected to.

Part of what makes this second wave of gloom different is the sense that the rot isn't going anywhere. You read through The Times and worry that the country will sink into a third depression-Paul Krugman said a few weeks ago that it already has-unless the U.S. government does something serious. But then you think about where money for another stimulus would come from, and what will happen if trillion-dollar deficits get worse.

"I think that a lot of people are becoming realistic over the outlook, because let's face facts," said David Rosenberg, the chief economist and strategist at the investment firm Gluskin Sheff. "It's going to leave some pretty deep emotional scars, don't you think?"

Still, optimism lives. After this month's Times profile of Robert Prechter, the forecaster who says we've begun the worst market decline in something like 300 years, Mr. Krugman's colleague Ross Douthat used his Independence Day column to complain about worrywarts. If Jimmy Carter was wrong about shortages, grim sacrifice and an energy emergency, he said, the new pessimists are, too.

HUMANS HAVE THIS poignant desire to feel that we're in control," the hedge fund manager said. "I know there will be abrupt change."

"We have Ben Bernanke, who has figured it all out; but you and I know he's just guessing," said Mr. Shiller, the Yale professor. The first edition of his book Irrational Exuberance warned in 2000 about a stock market bubble, and the second edition in 2005 predicted the real estate collapse. "When you see something like the BP oil spill, you know we're just plunging headlong into the future without knowing what we're doing."

"If you've got job security and wealth preservation under lethal pressure, then you're going to take the negativism into a place that it hasn't been before," Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's non-executive Asia chairman and the firm's former chief economist, said. "TARP, zero interest rates, trillion-dollar budget deficits, you name it, we've thrown anything we can at the system. And that has been successful to a limited extent at stopping the bleeding, but it has not really allowed the patient to get up off the table and resume a normal life again."

One problem is that there isn't a consensus about what our catastrophes are, or how they can be fixed. Mr. Roach and Mr. Krugman, for example, have feuded this year over China. (One said a baseball bat should be taken to the other.) This week, Lloyd's of London and the monolithic English think tank Chatham House warned about peak oil, the semi-apocalyptic moment when the world's oil production will max out and then decline. Not preparing for the new energy realty, they say, will have "potentially catastrophic consequences."

On Friday, just before that report was published, the blog Zero Hedge, a kind of global hub for catastrophists, posted a "wall of worry." The American government, said the first of 50 factoids about the economy, is projected to issue about the same debt this year as the other governments of the world combined.

"Few appreciated that the shift would be as deeply structural as it was demonstrated to be," the site's editor, who writes pseudonymously as Tyler Durden, said in an email. "With trillions of dollars spent to prevent an all-out economic collapse we have only managed to buy under two years of time and the economy is once again starting to roll over."

The hedge fund manager said he doesn't even trust gold. "It's worthless if the social fabric tears," he said. "We're going to have to do something different, before we get down to where it's really bad."

mabelson@observer.com

The question came from Christopher Glazek, a fact-checker at The New Yorker, who wanted to know whether Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam believed that former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, who has apologized on behalf of his party for the Southern Strategy, should also apologize for the Republican party's gay politics.

At first Mr. Douthat seemed unable to get a sentence out without interrupting himself and starting over. Then he explained: "I am someone opposed to gay marriage who is deeply uncomfortable arguing the issue in public."

Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public.

He added that the conservative opposition to gay marriage is "a losing argument," and asked rhetorically if committed homosexual relationships ought to be denied the legal recognition accorded without hesitation to the fleeting enthusiasms of Britney Spears and Newt Gingrich.

After the panel, Mr. Douthat told the Observer: "If I were putting money on the future of gay marriage, I would bet on it."

He added: "The secular arguments against gay marriage, when they aren't just based on bigotry or custom, tend to be abstract in ways that don't find purchase in American political discourse. I say, ‘Institutional support for reproduction,' you say, ‘I love my boyfriend and I want to marry him.' Who wins that debate? You win that debate."

Marco Roth, editor-at-large for n+1, interrupted. "We're taking you to Stonewall," he told Mr. Douthat.

Actually, the columnists and their hosts decamped to the considerably more middle-of-the road bar on Christopher Square, Kettle of Fish.

"I can tell you that we consider him a brilliant and exciting thinker, and he's writing a deeply probing and thought-provoking examination of how Christianity in America has gone astry," Ms. Loose said.

The 29-year-old Mr. Douthat, who rose to prominence as a blogger and columnist for The Atlantic Monthly, joined The Times in April, replacing William Kristol as the resident conservative on the paper's Op-Ed page. He published his first book—the 2005 polemical memoir about his time at Harvard—with Ben Loehnen at Hyperion, and his second—a prescriptive volume on the future of the Republican party Grand New Party co-written with Atlantic colleague Reihan Salam—with Adam Bellow at Doubleday.

For this deal, Mr. Douthat was represented by DC lit agent Rafe Sagalyn. Neither Mr. Douthat nor Mr. Sagalyn responded to requests for comment this afternoon.

In this climate, it was only sensible that newspaper editors and television producers would go out of their way to make sure that the prominent architects, adherents, and enablers of the Bush/Rove governing philosophy were represented on op-ed pages, in news reports and on opinion-shaping discussion shows. Theirs was the dominant political philosophy, and one that wouldn't be fading anytime soon. Best for their voices to be heard.

Of course, the folly of the "permanent majority" forecast, which should have been fairly clear even in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Bush's reelection, became evident less than a year after the '04 vote, when rising violence in Iraq and the horrors of Hurricane Katrina sent support for the president and his party plummeting. Two straight electoral blood-lettings for the G.O.P. followed, and now Democrats dominate Washington like they haven't in decades.

And yet, months after Mr. Bush took his Madoff-level popularity and exited the White House, his loyalists are still routinely called upon by influential media to represent the "conservative" perspective—bestowing unwarranted legitimacy on them and guaranteeing an unsatisfying experience for viewers who might be interested in hearing an intelligent conservative perspective, not a mindless rehash of the slogans Mr. Bush spouted to increasingly ill effect over eight years.

This unfortunate phenomenon reared its head over the weekend on Meet the Press, which convened a discussion with three essentially nonpartisan journalists and two men with more clearly defined ideological views. From the left, there was William Rodgers, once the chief economist for Bill Clinton's Labor Department. And from the right, there was Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter who is credited with coining the phrase "axis of evil" and coming up with perhaps the single most important line to sell the Iraq war—that "the first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud."

If you missed the show, you'll be happy to know that Mr. Gerson, who regularly provides "conservative" perspective for The Washington Post's op-ed page, is still at it. His most significant contribution to the panel came when he complained about the new administration's decision to stop using the "war on terror" phraseology in which Mr. Gerson so eagerly trafficked.

"We've pursued a strategy against Al Qaeda that assumed we were at war that's been fairly successful since 9/11," the ex-speechwriter said. "And so calling something an overseas contingency operation, which really sounds like you're looking for lost luggage, doesn't necessarily, you know, move this debate forward."

Maybe this would have passed for "balance" back in, say, 2005, but exactly whom does Mr. Gerson represent anymore? Iraq, at least in theory, destroyed his credibility with the general public. And while conservatives generally remained loyal to Mr. Bush while he was president, the ever-increasing denunciations of his policies from the right since he left office have made clear that the Bush philosophy—unilateral interventionism overseas with little regard for the G.O.P.'s traditional emphasis on small government—was never really representative of his party's grass roots; they simply stuck with him because he was their president and the Democrats hated him.

Nor is Mr. Gerson the only conservative to emerge, after hitching his wagon to the Bush administration's star, as a supposed representative of current conservative thought.

Turn on CNN and chances are you won't have to wait long to see the face of Stephen Hayes, who distinguished himself earlier this decade for his insistence, long after it was clear that the opposite was true, that "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans." He also penned a fawning biography of Dick Cheney.

Or pick up The Washington Post, the same paper that gave Mr. Gerson his post-Bush home, and you'll find a regular op-ed column from William Kristol, the tireless Iraq war champion whose offerings, worse than being wrong, are usually unreadable; Or there's Ron Christie, a little-known Bush and Cheney aide who has somehow become one of the cable networks' go-to guys for the conservative viewpoint—which he unfailingly expresses with the language his old bosses favored when they were in power.

All of these people, of course, are entitled to their views. But, besides outdated and discredited bluster, they add nothing to the current discussion. And there are plenty of intelligent conservatives out there who aren't interested in just defending the last administration (and, by extension, themselves) and who offer fresh, thought-provoking and often unpredictable perspectives.

A good example is Ross Douthat, who's been writing for The Atlantic. His instincts are conservative, but he is far more loyal to critical thinking than partisan rhetoric—something he demonstrated in an appearance on Hardball in 2007, when he unexpectedly confronted Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn, who was mouthing a series of meaningless platitudes about Fred Thompson.

When Mr. Kristol's one-year Op-Ed contract with The New York Times ended earlier this year, the paper chose as his successor Mr. Douthat. That's the kind of upgrade that other media outlets would do well to emulate.

UPDATE: For more information on the question of who coined "Axis of Evil," see here.

Crazy? Sure, but for a moment, some serious people were thinking about the idea semi-seriously: The Atlantic's Ross Douthat wrote

Predictably, the commenters on that post were not kind to Mr. Carlson, but one person named Derek was open-minded: "I actually like Tucker and enjoyed his show (it's unfortunate it was cancelled). He seems like a sensible small-government conservative type and was openly rooting for Ron Paul this past year. I'd gladly cast a vote for him over McCain or Obama." (The comment immediately following that one: "Why is Tucker's mom posting here under the name 'Derek'?")

Reason's Nick Gillespie also saw fit to weigh in, noting, "The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors that former MSNBC talk show host Tucker Carlson may be gearing up for a last-minute run at the Libertarian Party presidential nomination." ("Tucker Carlson? The conservative shill? The eternal frat boy? WTF?" asked one commenter.)

The Draft Tucker campaign appears to have come to abrupt end, brought on by Jake Tapper at ABC News, who wrote, "Tucker, whom I should disclose is a good friend, would be loads of fun to cover on the stump, but he is probably too honest to actually win an election."

Mr. Tapper revealed that Mr. Carlson emailed to say he wouldn't be running for President, thus ending the Draft Tucker campaign after only a few days. But there may still be some hope: The same day Mr. Tapper shared his email from Mr. Carlson, the Opinionator asked, "If Carlson isn’t running, who keeps calling Michael Munger, asking him if he supports a Carlson candidacy?"

It’s a look that says, “I’m with it—but I’m just a little chilly, too!” It’s a look that speaks of a fear of emotional commitment, of sensible Hill dreams, but still retains just a hint of lust-in-the-dust-under-the-cherry-blossoms.

In that village somewhere south of Staten Island, the hometown newspaper this year scored the first-ever Pulitzer Prize awarded to a fashion writer—The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan. Mustn’t that mean it’s time for New Yorkers to finally learn some fashion lessons from the District of Columbia, our much-maligned and terminally lame capital city?

Because, hello, how hot is D.C.? It’s soooooo hot that Tucker Carlson confided over the weekend that he will move his MSNBC show from New York to D.C. (He’s put on a few pounds, too, in preparation. In D.C., weight connotes a specific meaning: Since the early Clinton era, the plump man is well-off, he is a proud member of a well-fed and nearly certainly disease-free leisure class.)

All told, the festivities of Saturday, April 29, proved just how much style D.C. has. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, reeked of eccentric power and masculinity that Saturday, looking New Lagerfeldesque under white hair and black sunglasses. He was on the veranda of the Washington Hilton, talking to a group of writers that included New York Times columnists David Brooks and Maureen Dowd.

“It’s sizzling tonight at the White House correspondents’ dinner,” said Mr. Wieseltier. “All the men are hard.”

His Op-Ed audience laughed—Oh, Leon!—but the man had a point. Something was definitely sizzling in the District!

“It’s hard for me to say without seeming immodest,” said Mr. Wieseltier.

“Darfur is very hot right now,” said one guest, suggesting hotness in the following day’s rally on the national mall.

(That event would draw thousands of mostly young people and George Clooney; it would also send them forth afterward in a sea of hoodies that read “help darfur” in sincere-yet-cutesy lowercase type. One young woman boldly arrived at the rally in a tight white tank top with the words “Save Darfur” stenciled in pink. This was paired with a jean miniskirt and footless pink tights. Take that, Janjaweed!)

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Wieseltier said, giving his wife a peck on the top of her head. “We have swimming lessons for our son at 12:30, and genocide at 2.”

One hot thing about Washington is that you can be both selfless and fashionable.

What else? At Hardball executive producer Tammy Haddad’s Saturday-afternoon garden party, four separate members of the D.C. media elite approached the guest of a network executive and confided that they had begun using sunless tanner. Vanity: In! Sun damage: Out!

What else? What else? “Celibacy is hot,” said the Times columnist Mr. Brooks.

But also on the out list: New York’s increasingly popular Anderson Cooper silver-fox look. (Hello, Vanity Fair cover!) Unfortunately, D.C. harbors, as it must, more ample salt-and-pepper helmets than anywhere else in nation, if not the world. But gray now means old and weathered, not experienced and stately—all qualities Washington should prize, but which, said silky-maned former Ambassador Joe Wilson, are now passé.

“I was bending down yesterday, and my daughter ran her fingers through my hair,” he told a tuxedoed Greta van Susteren outside a Fox News party, imitating the 6-year-old’s subsequent look of horror.

“It’s all gray, daddy,” his little girl had exclaimed. “All gray!”

Valerie Plame, Mr. Wilson’s wife, smiled knowingly. She looked tan—was it fake?—blonde and elegant in a sparkling ivory dress. She’s taking the kids on a skiing vacation out West this summer, she said. Free time is very big for her these days. “It’s so wonderful,” she said.

“Not being famous is hot,” said Kathleen Parker, a Washington-based syndicated columnist and frequent panelist, along with Mr. Brooks, on The Chris Matthews Show. “You know, if you Google someone and get nothing? That’s what I aspire to!”

False modesty is both hot and timeless. (Lying has always been Washington’s Chanel suit!) Ms. Parker gathered her bold melon-colored skirt and her lime-gowned friend, smiled warmly at Mr. Brooks and sashayed off.

Hot: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But hotter now is skipping the dinner to have a quiet meal with friends at one of Washington’s fine eating establishments—say, Bistrot du Coin.

On the way, one can spy what’s really in. Teal, darling! On 18th Street, near Lauriol Plaza—where they serve margaritas just as delightfully big as your head!—the women are all in teal shirts and boot-cut jeans. Blonde highlights abound. For the men, the equivalent of highlights is now the newest bracelet—not in yellow, like the Lance Armstrong one for testicular-cancer awareness, but in lime green, for Darfur awareness!

All the restaurants now give waiting diners those light-up buzzers. On a spring evening, the streets are thronged with young and old alike, clutching their maître d’ beepers, making D.C. feel just like one big fun theme restaurant.

Bistrot du Coin is on Connecticut Avenue, just south and west of the Hilton. The 100-seat restaurant—Washington’s “most vibrantly Gallic eatery,” according to United Press International—had an hour-long wait during peak dinner hours last Saturday night. It features traditional Belgian-French cuisine, including a $24 beef tenderloin, which, per restaurant policy and despite any diner’s most vigorous protestations, the chef will not cook above medium-rare.

There, a waiter reads the night’s specials through a plastic Stella Artois bullhorn. In 2004, The Washington Post, describing it as “tres chic,” identified “Bistrot” as one of the District’s “six hot foosball spots.” Foosball! Hot!

Bistrot du Coin—pronounced “du KWONN,” as one Congressional communications director helpfully explained—hosted a few small and super-hot groups of tuxedoed correspondents’ dinner escapees, as well as a large crowd of well-dressed locals.

And also: one bachelorette party.

Six twentysomething women had donned black feather boas to fête Vanessa Kramer on the way to her May 27 nuptials. The blessed event will be held at the Hotel Dupont in Wilmington, Del. Ms. Kramer herself wore a gold, fake-jeweled tiara and a purple feather boa.

“We’re wearing Jessica Simpson jeans,” said Erika Orloff, a Capitol Hill staffer who declined to specify where on the Hill she works, or in what capacity.

(Last month, the maker of Jessica Simpson jeans filed suit against the pop star because she herself refused to wear Jessica Simpson jeans out in public.)

But it’s not just the clothes that make the town: Washington also has a rich and colorful nightlife! The “Dupont Circle–Adams Morgan–U Street corridor area,” a group of abutting neighborhoods in the city’s northwest region, essentially contains the District’s entire panoply of night-out hotness options. A few local clubs have even started to offer bottle service—just like New York City!—said bachelorette celebrant Katherine Martin. “That means that instead of buying drink by drink, you can get a whole bottle of alcohol for $160 or $200.”

Which may seem cheap to New Yorkers, but in Washington, they explained, it’s not money that matters. “It’s power,” said Ms. Orloff, to nods all around. “It’s where you work. It’s who you know. It’s what committees you’re on.”

“As an example,” she said, “I just went into the bathroom, and there were some women in there wearing gowns. So I said, ‘What are you ladies dressed up for?’ And one of the women said, ‘The White House correspondents’ dinner. We work for Bloomberg.’”

Ms. Orloff pronounced “Bloomberg” as if working there were the sort of thing men wrote in to Playboy about.

“Typical,” she shrugged and went back to her drink.

There was a temptation to venture to Smith Point, a Georgetown bar recommended by Ms. Martin as “Young Republican Central. It’s where Jenna and Barbara go.”

Instead, an investigative journey was made to what was said to be the heart of D.C. hotness: the infamous Bloomberg after-party to the White House correspondents’ dinner.

MSNBC president Rick Kaplan wasn’t feeling the hotness of either the party or D.C. He said the whole affair gave him the “heebie-jeebies,” and get him back to the city—he meant New York, silly!—please, the sooner the better.

Asked what was hot in D.C., CNN anchor and District resident Wolf Blitzer launched into a five-minute monologue about the athletic prowess of the Washington Wizards. (It’s a basketball team!) “I love them,” said Mr. Blitzer. “I’m a season-ticket holder!”

“We’re one of America’s premiere second-tier cities,” said American Prospect staffer Garance Franke-Ruta, caught waiting in line for the bathroom. “I’ve been here nine years, and I can say one thing: It’s much better than it used to be.” And? “And it’s way better than St. Louis, I’ll tell you that.”

And that was the party where Tucker Carlson was seen. Mr. Carlson borrowed the fire-engine-red lipstick of a companion to write down a phone number. It was the phone number of a member of the Cleveland Browns who wanted to appear on Mr. Carlson’s meagerly rated MSNBC show.

The previous day, Mr. Carlson said, his boss, Mr. Kaplan, had given him the permission to relocate to Washington. “This is where the energy is if you do what I do,” Mr. Carlson said. “I know it’s hard to imagine: Brooklyn isn’t the epicenter of the universe.”

Mr. Carlson paused to take a sip of his drink.

“Where do you live?” he asked.