As you look at the newspapers these days it is almost impossible — for me at least — not to get the sense that we are on the cusp of what Barack Obama calls an “inflection point” in history. Of course, his inflection points are different than mine. He thinks (thought?) that his election marked the beginning of a grand new era in progressive politics, when our festering social inequities would be healed with the soothing balm of new New Dealism, when we would all unite in the spirit of unity and bipartisanship around his own hyperpartisan agenda. I see something else. The main front-page stories in the Washington Post this morning are all about how the nation is being thrown into a chasm of debt and how the CIA has released its interrogation methods — a sure sign that the CIA is out of the business of interrogating anybody. On this latter point, David Ignatius has an excellent column on exactly that, and how the CIA is going to lawyer up for years to come. For years to come, this moment will resonate. Columnists will talk about how the deficit spiraled (even further) out of control in the summer of 2009 and the emasculation of the dollar became irreversible. Hawks will blame the castration of the CIA as the fons et origo of the next terror attack or the cause of the bureaucratic calcification of the CIA that led to some other intelligence catastrophe. Of course, there will be rebuttals to these contentions, there always are. And today’s events are the children of yesterday’s. The Church Committee didn’t burst into existence ex nihilo and neither did the Holder inquisition. But this moment, it seems to me, will be the symbolic inflection point in conversations and arguments for years to come. So take notes, folks.