When Sarah Palin went to speak at the Republican convention two years back, a hurricane came in and shut it down. But I suppose it was just a coincidence that hundreds of tornadoes swept across the South when she gave her Wisconsin speech last week. Something to watch, like the apocalypse. When I was raising my kids there in lower Appalachia, apocalypse was well on the minds of the local radio preacher shamans in the mountains and in the serpent-handling so-called “primitive" churches in the hollows, and without question it shadowed the judgment of the born-again George W. Bush and...