We saw the Decemberists last night at the Bowery Ballroom. They rock. They played “Sixteen Military Wives,” a new song, which proves that in addition to outsider-figures-in-historical-periods rock, they are masters at contemporary-political-protest rock. Are there any angry/ironic rock songs about the Iraq war one quarter as good? (Are there any other ones at all?) It’s my most fervent wish right now that they release it as a single in time for the election. (My next-most-fervent wish is that they accompany it with a B-side about Louis Napoleon, child of a famous political dynasty who spent his youth drinking and brawling and of whom little was expected, whose 1851 coup was facilitated by the deliberately created but misleading impression that he would be almost liberal or at least, well, compassionately conservative, but in fact led France into a few dozen years of imperialism.)