PREFERENCE CASCADE: Has the decisive shift toward Mitt Romney already happened? Well, we’ll know in a couple of weeks.

DOROTHY RABINOWITZ: The Unreality Of The Past Four Years: The Benghazi fiasco is a brutally illuminating portrait of the Obama White House in crisis mode.

In the 1967 film “A Guide for the Married Man,” a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: “Deny! Deny! Deny!”—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he’s shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.

“What are you doing,” she wails, “who is that woman?”

“What woman, where?” the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, “What woman?” Confused by her spouse’s unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she’s asking him what he’d like for dinner.

For much of the past four years, the Obama administration’s propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script.

All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years.

Indeed.

NEGOTIATING WITH TERRORISTS:  The White House publicly touts its decision to hold talks with Iran after the election.  Interesting timing, to say the least.  As the Wall Street Journal editorial board observes:

At last week’s debate, Mr. Obama got huffy and said he resented any implication by Mitt Romney that his Administration had played politics with national security with its misleading accounts of what happened in Benghazi. The real question is when has this Administration not tried to exploit national security for political advantage?

Shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone familiar with progressive/critical legal thinking, which holds law = politics.  In fact, everything is politics, under this ideology, so there’s nothing unusual about their belief that national security = politics, too.

TOM BLUMER: Romney’s Final Debate Prep: Three must-mention points may be the difference between a win and a mandate.” Here’s one: “The second point is also budget-related, and ties directly to Obama’s whining about excessive partisanship. The president has been quite successful in uniting Democrats and Republicans in bipartisan agreement on one thing: their opposition to his own budget proposals. In the most recent examples, both the House and the Senate unanimously rejected Obama’s February attempt earlier this year.”

BUSTED: Who, exactly, is the cyborg?

But a bit behind the curve.

FRANK WILSON: In The Age of “Unexpectedly.”

MAX BOOT: Too little too late in Libya: Obama repeated Bush’s mistake, and the power vacuum has been filled by jihadists. Not seeing any “Anbar Awakening,” either, but we can hope, I guess.