Despite the mountain of evidence against them, Mukasey has decided that the people involved in this scandal have been tortured enough. "The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the Department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity," he said. Clearly the most brutal punishment possible for committing a crime is being ridiculed in public. "I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people," said Mukasey.

Poor babies! Goodling and the other former Justice employees who have left have been subjected only to having "[t]heir misconduct [...] laid bare by the Justice Department for all to see." Current Justice employees involved in this scandal have been subjected to "disciplinary referrals."

And what of the crimes they committed? This is not an issue of sexual harrassment in the office. This is not an internal issue. Multiple people, knowingly and repeatedly, violated the laws of the United States. Moreover, these people were employees of the Justice Department and were paid by us, the taxpayers, to uphold those laws.

Mukasey hardly thinks that it's worth his time. It depends on your definition of "crime," which for Mukasey, is quite elastic. Listen to this gem: "Where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. [...] But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime." That's odd, because according to Merriam-Webster, it is the very definition of a crime!

Clearly Mukasey, like Alberto Gonzales before him, is a "loyal Bushie." The Justice Department vociferously prosecutes alleged, phantom instances of voter fraud that didn't happen, but when it comes to real crimes committed by Justice employees, a trial is not the answer: public humiliation is good enough!

I think I'm going to be sick.

Wait? What?

Oh, it turns out he was right. While Republicans are making fun of his plan for the sheer novelty of the suggestion, no one has refuted the merits of what he said. Yes, it's true: keeping your tires properly inflated can increase your gas mileage. This means that it can save you money on gas. And it can do so right now.

New offshore drilling, on the other hand, would have an economic impact ... by the year 2030. What about the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR)? Surely it can produce enough oil to bring down those gas prices! Well, maybe someday. Drilling in ANWR "would have its largest impact nearly 20 years from now if Congress voted to open the refuge today," says U.S. News & World Report.

Republicans would like to find more fuel-efficient ways for us to continue consuming (all goods) at our present rate. Democrats would like to find alternatives to consumption. The latter most necessary; our resources are not finite, and rather than try and come up with new fuel substitutes, we need to learn how not to use so much fuel in the first place. The American way of life trumpeted by Rush Limbaugh and others -- the way of life where every American drives a Hummer and has a three-acre lawn with a sprinkler system -- is quickly coming to an end. As it should, for that lifestyle was not sustainable in the long run. It is an historical abnormality unique to a particular time -- a time when the United States had limitless power and resources. Times have changed, and it's time for proponents of limitless consumption to recognize that.

The West might have a stronger argument in questioning China's potential for intrusive surveillance if it weren't moving rapidly in the same direction. London is believed to have the largest number of closed-circuit TV cameras of any city in the world. Many countries have seen vast troves of personal data lost or stolen. Financial records and phone calls are now routinely monitored.

Way to lead by example, West! We all thought that the Internet would make China more free and democratic. Turns out that the threat of terrorism has turned formerly democratic countries into less free and less democratic countries. It won't be long before the U.S. government is contracting with Chinese firms to think up ways in which Americans can be covertly monitored.

And what does London's surveillance get it? The cameras don't reduce crime.

The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq -- it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

That's right: the U.S. government is paying Sunni militias to join their side. That's your "surge." Sadly, it's the same strategy the government has used again and again, including when the U.S. backed a group of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, which including a younger Osama bin Laden. Back then, they were our best friends because they fought guerilla battles against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Then we promptly abandoned them. And the rest is history.

The Clear program is not, as it initially appears, a way to skip the security line at the airport. For $100 per year and some intrusive background checks, you get to ... skip ahead in line. But you still have to go through regular security just like everyone else.

Security systems are only as good as the human beings who administrate them. If some fool is able to download personal information onto his laptop -- probably unencrypted -- then the millions and billions of dollars that we've spent on a complex security system means absolutely nothing. It's very simple to implement good computer security: for example, one rule would be under no circumstances is sensitive information ever to leave the office, no matter what your title is.

And so it is with refuting allegations of wrong-doing. As has been reported today, Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World, comes with an allegation that Bush & Co. fabricated a 2001 letter between Saddam Hussein and Hussein's director of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti. The letter purports to discuss how Mohammed Atta, one of the nineteen September 11 hijackers, trained for the hijacking mission in Iraq. If true, the letter would confirm the White House's previously long-held belief that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which would then provide a rationale for invading Iraq.

Which the letter did. But, according to Suskind, the letter was fabricated at the White House's request. And no operating relationship has ever been found between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Any piece of evidence that has ever been put forward as evidence of a relationship between the two (and thus, a justification for the war) has been refuted as unreliable at best and an outright lie at worst. This letter, if Suskind is right, falls into the latter category.

The White House, true to form, is not using logic and reason to dispel this accusation; rather, it has resorted to name-calling. White House spokesman Tony Fratto called the accusations "absurd" and said that Suskind practiced "gutter journalism."

This is something that the White House still hasn't learned, for all of the whistleblowers that have come from it: Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, Scott McClellan, et al. The White House says, through its spokespeople, that these whistleblowers are bad people and calls their motives into question, but never refutes the merits of the arguments beyond calling them something general, like "absurd."

Here in the world of logic and reason, it doesn't matter if a person has an axe to grind or is a gutter journalist; what matters is whether or not the statements are true. Certainly Harriet Miers could have been the nicest, sweetest lady in the country, but that did not make her qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

Sorry, White House, you'll have to do better than "absurd" if you want to deal with such an alarming charge.

Judge John D. Bates, himself appointed by George W. Bush, was unequivocal in his rejection of Bush's assertion of executive privilege:

The Executive cannot identify a single judicial opinion that recognizes absolute immunity for senior presidential advisors in this or any other context. That simple but critical fact bears repeating: the asserted immunity claim here is entirely unsupported by case law. In fact, there is Supreme Court authority that is all but conclusive on this question and that powerfully suggests that such advisors to not enjoy absolute immunity.

The issue of "executive privilege" is murky and is not to be found in either the Constitution or federal statutes. The privilege has been created by case law, under the assumption that the president may not be able to get sound advice from his advisors if that advice cannot be delivered candidly and without fear of it being rebroadcast to the entire world. Executive privilege was slightly curtailed by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon. In that case, the court ruled that executive privilege is not absolute and specifically cannot be used to shield the executive from criminal investigation.

In its opening pages, Judge Bates' decision re-emphasizes -- in case President Bush forgot -- that "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Bush has asserted that he alone should have the ability to decide certain issues of constitutionality, espeically when it comes to the War on Terr'. Judge Bates, however, quotes from the very recent Boumediene v. Bush when he declares that particular branches of the government may not "switch the Constitution on or off at will." Bush needs to be reminded of this fact frequently, despite the fact that the federal courts have rejected every single one of his assertions of absolute power.

Anyway.

Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has said before that he is definitely opposed to attempts to de-privatize the health care industry. McCain, ever a Republican, believes that the market will sort things out. As I have opined before, this position makes no sense: the "invisible hand" trope invented by Adam Smith works only when the interests of business and the interests of the public are congruous. In the case of health care, the market cannot sort things out by design. The health care customer wants the most health care he can get. The health care company wants to provide the least health care possible. Why? Because the less health care a company provides, the greater its profits, and in a capitalist economic system, profit maximization is the name of the game. Therefore, it is impossible for the market to solve the problem of health care.

Health care is one of those things that the market may do "efficiently" in the sense that it maximizes marginal benefit and minimizes marginal cost. But this efficiency is averaged out over the entire health care industry. On average, Americans have good health care. But on the individual level, things are rotten. 18 million Americans are un-insured, and millions more are under-insured, meaning they can go to the doctor for a routine visit, but if a catastrophe were to happen -- a family member needed a heart transplant, for example -- they would be unable to afford the expense and would have to let that family member die, or go into massive debt. Contrary to what Bush & Co. would have you believe, the number one reason Americans go into debt is not unrestrained spending on Faberge eggs; it's health care spending, necessitated by aa health care system that provides a level of service equal with a person's ability to pay. Can you pay $1,000 a month? Great! You get top-tier care. Can you pay $300 a month? You'll get middling-level care.

And, truthfully, the market is not sorting things out. The markets sloughs off onto the government -- as it always does -- those people who cannot afford its products. If you can't afford health care, then you are shuffled to Medicaid, where taxpayers foot the bill because insurance companies don't want to. This is typical of the private market, and a trait that is frequently overlooked by Republicans who trumpet the superiority of the market. The "this" is this: the private firm reaps for itself the benefits of private spending, but passes its losses onto the government. For all the trumpeting of free enterprise that Republicans make, they are unwilling to let the market deal with the losses as well as the profits. This is why they routinely vote for corporate welfare: tax breaks, exemptions to regulations, absorption of debt by taxpayers, monopolization. This is what the housing industry is receiving right now: taxpayers will end up absorbing the losses generated by a mortgage industry that knowingly fooled consumers and made a boatload of money unsustainably. This is what happened in 2005 when Congress voted to take over United Airlines' pension plan after United decided it could no longer afford to pay out pension benefits.

Is this not the definiton of a double standard? Private individuals are expected to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, to be unflinchingly self-reliant, and not expect the government to save them when they fall. Yet, a corporation is allowed to reap the benefits of an unfair, unsustainable, and possibly illegal practice, and yet, when that practice breaks down and starts costing the corporation money, individual Americans -- many of whom had nothing to do with the corporation -- are expected to pick up the check. How does this make sense?

Enjoy!

The Declaration was authored by a committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert Livingston of New York, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut. The document was authored mostly by Jefferson, with the rest of the committee making changes here and there. The Declaration contains references to God, but that by no means indicates that the official religion of the United States was intended to be Christianity; indeed, the Declaration is not even legally binding. At its heart, it is a persuasive essay that declares, in no uncertain terms, that the American colonies intend to separate from England, and then enumerates the reasons why.

The colonists were unhappy with their treatment by their king, George III. Though technically British citizens, American colonists saw themselves as different from their countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic. The sheer expanse of time and distance that separated London from New York was enough to create in Americans the sense that they were at once Englishmen, but also not Englishmen. Couple this with their sense that they were being treated as second-class citizens: they paid taxes to the crown, and yet had no voice in Parliament. When the king began to punish them for their actions – with legislation like the Townsend Acts (a tax on various manufactured goods), the Tea Act (a tax on tea), and the Quartering Act (a requirement that American colonists house British soldiers in their private homes, and the reason for our Third Amendment) – some of the colonists revolted. Southerners more than Northerners wanted to make peace with England (the former had more economic ties to the mother country due to its huge agricultural economy) and initially refused to support any resolution declaring independence from England.

This essay, though, is about a different George who only acts as though he were a king. Of course, his name is George W. Bush – George II – and he fancies himself the be-all and end-all of government. On this July 4, the day we celebrate our fracture from England, how true do Jefferson’s accusations of abuse of power ring when they are applied to the 21st century King George?

The Declaration begins with a statement that overturns everything an 18th-century Englishman would have believed about the nature of government: first, “that all men are created equal,” and that man, through God – or, more appropriately for Jefferson, et al., by virtue of his being a reasoning being – has inherent or “inalienable” rights. Rather than go with the top-down formulation that had characterized government in the West since the Middle Ages, Jefferson instead starts government at the bottom, with the people themselves. Taking a page from social contract theory, the Declaration posits that it is regular people – not deities or kings – who create governments, and create them for particular ends. If a government no longer fulfills the needs of the people who created it (and herein lies an implicit acknowledgment that even the so-called Divine Right of Kings was a human endeavor), then “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

None of this is particularly relevant to our analysis; however, it establishes that governments spring from the bottom up, and not the top down. As far as the Declaration of Independence is concerned, governments ought to be created to serve the people, not the other way around. This has been the basis of western political thought for over two hundred years.

And what of Jefferson’s laundry list of complaints? Here they are, in bullet point format:

1. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
2. He has forbidden his Governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, has utterly neglected to attend to them.
3. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
4. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
5. He had dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
6. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
7. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
8. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
9. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices. And the amount and payment of their salaries.
10. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out of their substance.

This isn’t even the entire list of complaints against King George III. And yet, the list is not unfamiliar. Regarding item 1, George W. Bush has refused to assent to laws. He has repeatedly claimed that his powers as commander in chief allow him to ignore limitations placed upon him by Congress, most notably in the field of warrantless wiretapping, although he has also ignored the law in his signing statements and in his refusal to permit White House officials to testify before Congress.

Bush passes laws that are convenient. Recall last year, when the FISA expansion was about to expire, Bush – who claimed that such an expansion was absolutely necessary for the security of the United States – refused to sign a temporary extension of the law so that Democrats would be forced to either give him the limitless powers he asked for, without expiration; or face his public relations wrath as he berated them for not wanting to keep America safe.

Thankfully, item 3 is not possible in this country. Although, Bush has refused to pass legislation that would benefit large numbers of people, most famously SCHIP, which would have expanded government-sponsored health care for low-income children. Bush would rather that they use the private insurance system, which he thinks does a much better job at keeping people healthy.

Item 4 is also not possible in this country, since Congress is required to meet. However, in the early days of the Bush administration, the Republican-controlled Congress prevented investigations into malfeasance and corruption from going forward. Bush was also initially vehemently against the establishment of a commission to investigate the September 11 attacks. And then there’s the establishment of Camp X-Ray, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was placed there because the administration’s legal eagles believed it was outside the reach of U.S. law. The Supreme Court nixed that notion in 2005.

Item 5 is definitely not within President Bush’s power.

Item 6 is reminiscent of the clamor about Michael Mukasey. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, concerned about Mukasey’s evasive comments regarding torture, did not want to confirm him. Bush challeneged them, saying that Mukasey was his nominee, and if the Senate didn’t want to confirm him, then there would be no attorney general. The Democrats did not call his bluff, and Mukasey – who doesn’t think that waterboarding is torture – is now in charge of enforcing the laws of the United States.

Item 7 is familiar to anyone who has tried to gain “legal” access to this country as an immigrant, or even as a vacationer. Homeland Security requires fingerprinting of every tourist or temporary visa-holder who enters this country. They’re currently trying to pass legislation to require fingerprinting when people leave, as well. And, with the latter plan, the administration wants the airlines to pay for it.

To people who say, “Well, why don’t they just come here legally?” it is clear that those people have never tried to come here legally. Without any well-placed business connections (and, yes, it is mostly business or other money-making connections that get you into the fast-track), an immigrant can expect to wait at least ten years before becoming a U.S. citizen. It can take half that time to become a permanent resident. The system is so confusing and bureaucratic as to render it unusable – to say nothing of the increased cost: almost $1000, up from $325 a few years ago. It’s no wonder that people come across the border illegally.

Regarding item 8, see item 1. Bush selectively enforces the laws he wants to enforce. When Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton didn’t respond to their subpoenas to testify before Congress, Congress ordered the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute them for contempt. Bush, in turn, in his capacity as the chief executive, ordered the U.S. Attorney not to respond to the contempt request.

Item 9: refer to the U.S. attorney firing scandal. Yes, U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, but all evidence points to the attorneys being fired because they were not sufficiently enforcing the political machinations of the president, who has been in a state of “permanent campaign” since his inauguration in 2001.

And, finally, item 10: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, warrantless wiretapping, the USA PATRIOT Act, the abuse of National Security Letters, and Orwellian projects like Total Information Awareness have eaten away at our right to privacy so much so that Americans no longer possess an expectation of privacy.

Here we are, 232 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration, and we are – where? In the same place! We face tyranny at the hands of a king named George, who believes that he alone has the power of the entire government at his fingertips. We face a government that seeks to erode the principle that governments serve the people. We face an executive who is uninhibited in his protestations that he is above the law. We face a system that, if it had its way, would be able to delve into the minds of all Americans and know what each one is thinking at any given time.

Jefferson’s best axiom is not contained in the Declaration, but around the inside of the rotunda in his monument in Washington, D.C. If I may be nostalgic, the first time I read this line as an eighth-grade student on a field trip, I felt inspiration tingle up my spine: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Whether you believe in God or not is immaterial: swear on whatever you want, but as Americans, each of us is obligated to declare our hostility against tyranny over one of the most important things that has ever appeared on planet Earth: the mind of man (and woman). The "inalienable rights" Jefferson wrote about are what keep that mind up and running; without them, there is no freedom of the mind, and thus no reason to exist.

This Independence Day, remember that an American’s political loyalty is to the Constitution – not the president, not the military, not a party. For it is that Constitution that keeps our worst dystopian fears from coming true and from rendering the words Jefferson wrote as nothing more than vacant poetry.

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is politically a Baby Boomer, and I'm among the throngs hoping the 2008 presidential election "turns the page" on the culture wars of the 1990s, which means getting beyond the Boomer clashes of the 1960s. Still, the underlying issues will remain, and a key one is good to think about around the Fourth of July: What is America?

From the ads on TV, you'd think we're just an economy, a conglomeration of consumers and hustlers. But we'll undoubtedly get an old-fashioned Fourth of July speech or two that remind us of the birth of the Great Experiment: the American Republic. That's one theory, and the one I like. But the Republic has competitors.

In a book in 1999, Patrick J. Buchanan argued that we're "A Republic, Not an Empire," so there's the imperial option, but that one is out of favor. For a while we won't be hearing about a benevolent American empire using our military to bring democracy and free-market civilization to Earth's lesser folk. Afghanistan, as a cynical observation has it, is where empires go to die, and Iraq and Afghanistan have exhausted for a long while any US fantasies of empire.

What competes with the Republic — in most Americans' vocabularies and subconscious minds, and as a subtext of conscious debate — is America as a nation.

I'm old enough to remember people for whom there was nothing subconscious or subtextual about it: people declaring America "a White Protestant Nation." We've progressed, and the "White" has mostly dropped out, and "Protestant" has been ambiguously expanded; so what you hear nowadays is "Christian nation" or sometimes "Judeo-Christian nation," or, most often, just "nation," with the listener free to supply any modifiers.

On the one side, then, there's the republic, perhaps "a secular revolutionary republic," in, if I recall correctly, Anthony Burgess's disapproving formulation.

Or we may be a nation: one people, with a shared history and descent, and maybe with one religion — or at least one monotheistic religious tradition.

How you usually see us has important implications.

To start with, a Christian nation includes just Christians and excludes a lot of American citizens, including Catholics if the nation is run by people who can say, as one of my students did, "I used to by Catholic, but now I'm a Christian."

A nation can have all sorts of governments, with the most "natural" one probably monarchy: nations are tribes "writ large," and tribes can be confederations of clans — and clans can be seen as big extended families. As the father is the natural head of the family, even so, the king is the natural head of the nation.

Trust me on this: I'm not old enough to have heard such arguments in church, but I've studied enough English history to have read the old homilies on obedience to rulers. Nowadays, most people would never make such arguments explicitly: we speak of ourselves as democrats, not mere republicans. Still, the old arguments for kingly prerogatives are implicit in arguments for unrestrained presidential power, or talking about the president as "commander-in-chief," even over civilians — reversing the theory of the president as chief executive but still a servant of the (capital "P") People.

A republic can have only one philosophy of government: republican, and you become a citizen of the American by loyalty to that doctrine. Implicitly or explicitly you agree to defend the Constitution of the United States, and, in theory, you're willing to risk your life for that Constitution and even put your children at risk, if need be, to defend it.

For the nation, you can pledge allegiance to the flag and throw in the Republic almost as an afterthought. And if the Constitution gets in the way of protecting the nation — most centrally its people and maybe its flag — then elements of the Constitution can go.

If America is the nation, national security and survival trumps all, and even national symbols become nearly sacred.

We're not going to get beyond this tension, and to some extent shouldn't. The republicans get the Glorious Fourth (of July) and get to wave the flag a bit on the Fourth and read the Declaration of Independence; the nationalists have the flag most other days, and patriotic songs and the possibility of celebrating the very neat holiday of a religious, family Thanksgiving.

But the tension is serious.

The question came up over printing the Pentagon Papers of how many Americans one might sacrifice for the First Amendment, and that question remains with protecting Americans against terrorism. I'm a republican, and I'm willing to put myself and other Americans at some risk to protect America: primarily the Constitution, the rights and liberties of Americans. So I'm a mild threat to the nation. And from a republican point of view, people willing to sacrifice key liberties for safety are among the "enemies foreign and domestic" against whom the Constitution must be protected.

We need "to turn the page"; but the political conflict will continue.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University, Oxford, OH, currently living in Ventura County, California.

From the article:

Many universities pass those letters directly on to students without questioning the veracity of the allegations. The R.I.A.A. in particular follows up some of those notices by threatening legal action and forcing alleged file-sharers into a financial settlement.

But the study, released Thursday by Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor, Michael Piatek a graduate student, and Arvind Krishnamurthy, a research assistant professor, all at the University of Washington, argues that perhaps those takedown notices should be viewed more skeptically.

The paper finds that there is a serious flaw in how these trade groups finger alleged file-sharers. It also suggests that some people might be getting improperly accused of sharing copyrighted content, and could even be purposely framed by other users.

The RIAA and MPAA, the trade organizations for the music and movie industries, respectively, have successfully lobbied to have Congress place line-items into federal university funding legislation requiring public universities to police their networks for copyright infringers and/or allow the RIAA and MPAA to have access to their networks to catch infringers. This is incredibly stupid because of (1) the privacy issues concerned (after all, FERPA strictly limits disclosure of student records to only the student, if the student is over 18) and (2) the fact that colleges are not in the business of policing for copyright violations. The article demonstrates how the RIAA and MPAA's own tools for finding violations can be easily misdirected, resulting in false positives.

Last year, the University of Nebraska agreed to comply with RIAA requests to hunt down file-sharers — for a price. The university estimated that it cost them $11 per accusation to find the culprit, and that if the RIAA wanted them to do a job that wasn't theirs to begin with, the university would charge the RIAA for it.

Ajami's complaint begins with Scott McClellan, who last week suggested that the Iraq War was one of choice, not necessity. Ajami argues:

The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power.

While lamenting the way that war critics have "launched a new attack on the origins of the war," Ajami simultaneously creates a brand-new justification for the Iraq War. Previous justifications provided by the Bush administration for invading Iraq included:

• Saddam Hussein provided material support to al-Qaeda
• Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa
• Saddam Hussein was developing biological and chemical weapons
• Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons
• Saddam Hussein was in violation of U.N. Resolution 1441
• Saddam Hussein is trying to take over the Middle East
• Saddam Hussein threw the weapons inspectors out before they had finished their job

Points one, two, four, six, and seven have been debunked outright. Saddam stopped his nuclear program exactly when we thought he did: after the Persian Gulf War. Saddam never had any desire to take over the Middle East; he was perfectly content to run his ego-centric dictatorship. What most Republican students of foreign policy don't understand is that not all dictators are the same. Different dictators have different reasons for ruling. Some, like Saddam, or Turkmenbashi the Great, want to have their own personality cult. Others, like Adolf Hitler, wanted to take over the world. It is for the reason above that Saddam did not cooperate with al-Qaeda: Saddam's was a crazy secular dictatorship; al-Qaeda wished to impose a crazy theocratic dictatorship on the Middle East, which would have been a threat to Saddam's power; thus, the enemy of Saddam's enemy was not his friend simply because they had a shared enemy. It's not as simple as that.

Bush claimed, per point seven, that Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out before their job was done. It was actually President Bush who told the U.N. weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, and then claimed it was Saddam who had thrown them out, providing another wonderful pretense for war. Bush, the brilliant conflict resolver, felt that the time for diplomacy had ended.

With regard to point three, Saddam did use chemical weapons — but they were chemical weapons the United States gave him back when we were best buddies in the 1980s. (Here's a picture of Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Reagan Administration special envoy Donald Rumsfeld in 1983.)

As for U.N. Resolution 1441, Iraq was in violation of that, but so were some ninety other countries.

Now, back to the op-ed. In three sentences, Ajami syntatically links "9/11" and "Saddam Hussein" the same way the Bush administration did in 2002. First, he invokes "9/11" and the "gathering dangers" thereafter. 9/11 provides the rationale for the War on Terr'. It was not enough, says Ajami, to go after the people that attacked us; we then needed to go after the Arabs that didn't attack us! What a brilliant military strategy: attack people who haven't attacked us! Let the Canadian, Australian, and Azerbaijanian Wars begin!

Okay, okay, so the real policy at work here is preemptive warfare, and in the history of war, it hardly ever goes well. Saddam Hussein is a metonymy for "Arab radicalism," therefore he must be attacked. Why him specifically? Ajami isn't quite clear on this; he suggests that Saddam "had drawn the short straw," leading one to believe that we picked Saddam at random after blindfolding Paul Wolfowitz, spinning him in a circle, and then giving him a thumbtack to place on a giant world map. Too bad he didn't stick the tack into Micronesia; that mission against someone who never attacked us would have been accomplished much faster!

There's one problem with the idea that Saddam Hussein represents "Arab radicalism." This problem is that he doesn't. Conservative theologians have struggled for six years to come up with a word to describe the kinds of people who want to attack us. Because these conservatives want democracy to be rammed into the Middle East like a battering ram, their requirements for a word to describe the people who attack us must relate to the Middle East; if we used the word "terrorist," we'd have to invade the Basque country of Spain. Ajami uses the phrase "Arab radicalism," which sounds great, but doesn't describe very much. Iranians, for example, aren't ethnically Arab, but their government still doesn't like us very much. Also, what qualifies an Arab as radical? Saddam Hussein is a crazy dictator like any other crazy dictator. It just so happens that he's in the Middle East and sits on a honking pile of oil.

And what about the ethnic Arabs who aren't Muslim? Another important &em and implicit — requirement of a definition of "terrorist" is that it must refer to Muslims. Enter the phrases "Islamofascist" and "Islamist," the latter of which Ajami uses in his op-ed. "Islamofascist" has very little meaning; it's a P.R. term designed to conflate Islam and fascism, the latter of which Americans know (or think they know) a lot about. "I may not know what an Islamofascist is, but I know what a fascist is! It stands to reason that they're the same thing! Let's kill them!"

The word "Islamist" similarly has no meaning and is actually insulting to Muslims. What is an Islamist? Someone who believes in Islam? Does it follow, therefore, that people who believe in Islam are terrorists? Would we have called Timothy McVeigh a "Christianist"? Using Ajami's logic, we should, since McVeigh's attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 was terrorism based in his "radical" Christian faith.

Ajami suggests that the United States' policy of preemptive warfare has frightened enough Arab states into combatting terrorism in the Middle East: "If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq." Ajami has here created a conditional statement: "If X conditions are met, then Y results follow." The counterfactual of a conditional statement is a defense against that statement: "If X conditions were not met, then Y results did not follow." Ajami's statement is, "If Islamism is on the ropes [and] if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, [then] no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq."

The question is: are Arab states showing greater resolve in fighting terrorism? Well, we have Iraq, which is currently engaged in its own in-fighting, notably Muqtada al-Sadr against the rest of the government. In Iran, we have Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, who materially supports Shi'a fighters in Iraq. We have Lebanon, which elected members of the terrorist group Hezbollah to the Lebanese Parliament in 2005. We have Saudi Arabia, which, as far as we know, still supports terrorism. In July, 2006, Lebanon and Israel got involved in a war in which Hezbollah scored a moral victory merely by surviving the onslaught of the Israeli military. We have ignored Afghanistan since 2002, and as a result, the Taliban as just as powerful there as they ever were. So — has "this American project in Iraq" put "Islamism on the ropes"? Certainly not. If anything, it has reduced America's diplomatic credentials abroad. America is now not the country of reasoned talks and brokering, but the country of swaggering, militant ignorance that shoots first and asks questions later. Thanks, Iraq War.

Even in numerical terms — in which Ajami claims that terrorists have been "bloodied in Iraq" — reports from the CIA, NSA, and Department of State show that terrorist activities have increased since the start of the Iraq War. Terrorists don't seem to be particularly intimidated by a country whose military is stretched paper-thin in a country in which it doesn't seem likely it will ever leave gracefully.

Ajami also takes a new tack on the WMD argument: "The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith." So we were wrong, but we meant well. The road to Hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Also, there is plenty of indication that the claims about WMDs were made in bad faith, with the administration picking intelligence that it liked and ignored the intelligence it didn't, regardless of how correct this intelligence was.

He then proceeds to say, Hey, so what if we kept on changing our rationale for the war as each rationale was successively proven wrong or misguided? "The aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances." He cites the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's focus on slavery as an example of how a war against secession became a war against slavery.

Except that it didn't. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to piss off the Confederacy. Personally, Lincoln had no problem with slavery and he would just as soon have avoided discussion of The Peculiar Institution altogether.

Ajami closes by suggesting that our war in Iraq spared "people of threats and dangers." But it is extremely disingenuous to suggest that our Iraq War policy has preventing more domestic terrorism. There is no evidence to suggest that anything we did or did not do in the War on Terr' has prevented another terrorist attack. Using Ajami's logic, it could have been appointing John Roberts to the Supreme Court that has prevented another terrorist attack. It could have been Ruben Studdard winning American Idol that has prevented another terrorist attack. That we invaded Iraq — a country that hadn't threatened to attack us — has made us safer somehow is a dubious assumption that has little factual support.

But who needs facts? Ajami doesn't! "Five months from now, the American public will vote on this war, in the most dramatic and definitive of ways. There will be people who heed Ambassador Crocker's admonition. And there will be others keen on retelling how we made our way to Iraq." Ajami is blissfully ignorant of the extreme irony that he himself is one of those people desperately retelling how we made our way to Iraq, hoping beyond hope that people's memories are as transient as he thinks they are for them to believe newer, more made-up stories about why we got into Iraq in the first place.

"Pronatalism" is a word we don't hear much any more, not for a generation or so, but it's an important word and needs to be recycled.

"Pronatalism" refers to social policies encouraging the production and successful raising of children. Often these policies have included conscious policies on population; maybe more often, pronatalism has been incorporated into religious beliefs and from there into law and custom.

It doesn't matter much where pronatalist practices come from. "Cultural evolution" is more than a figure of speech: customs that function to help cultures survive will tend to be retained the way useful genetic traits are retained — and pronatalism, by its nature, has been useful for survival.

Until recently. Until humankind's population went into the billions, and the unchecked reproduction of humans became a threat to human species-survival. Until some cultures became somewhat democratic and individualistic, and the press of population put stresses on democratic principles and individuality. It has always been difficult to argue that any individual human is special; the argument becomes almost impossible when there are over six billion other human individuals. "Freedom" has been defined informally as the right to swing your arms until you endanger someone else's nose; some place along the line, population density gets to where there's little room for figurative arm swinging.

Alternatively, an individual human has the same right as any other animal to urinate in the local stream; the people of a small village probably have the right to put their excrement in the river; towns and cities, however, have no right to dump in the river untreated sewage, poisoning decreasing supplies of water.

More of that later. For now keep in mind that surviving societies often have built in a strong degree of pronatalism.

You need to know this if you're to understand the underpinning of the sex laws and "mores" of the United States, including our rules on marriage and attitudes toward the wide range of sexual activities.

Start with obvious questions: Why would people care about occasional or even frequent masturbation in private? Why were there ever laws against oral or anal sex, or just about anything done between or among two or more consenting adults in private? The short and most basic answer, one that underlies both religious and secular, official and popular-culture prohibitions, is "pronatalism."

Humans are highly sexual animals, and across a significant population people will practice all sorts of sexuality. Cultures, though, can evolve ideologies and customs that tend to direct sexuality into practices that are reproductive and nurturing. Consciously or unconsciously, societies can try to limit sex to vaginal sexual intercourse between fertile couples who are likely to conceive, bear, and then raise babies.

Cultures can try to limit sex to "making babies" by people who'll stick around to raise babies: for a very important example, limiting approved sex to married heterosexual couples who have conception as a goal — and, hence, don't try to prevent conception and who avoid sex when the woman is menstruating.

Sound familiar? It should if you know the traditional rules for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

Under a doctrine of pronatalism, such rules make sense, and pronatalism itself makes a lot of sense in military, nationalistic, and economic terms.

Pronatalism becomes a bad idea when it's a game many societies play and the human population rises rapidly, when the standard of living rises enough among many of those societies that they strain the environment.

Think of a billion or two Chinese and Indians starting to live like rich Americans.

Pronatalism in our time makes sense for individual countries that want to maintain their eminence; pronatalism makes sense for older generations who want to retire and be supported by lots of young workers.

For the human species, and for humans who like freedom, pronatalism is a problem.

"Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it" (Genesis 1.28) was good doctrine, and it may be the one commandment we humans have fulfilled; but it is fulfilled now, and it's time to cut back.

We — we humans generally — need to move rapidly toward zero growth in our population, which means rethinking the laws, policies, customs, and attitudes based in pronatalism.

People are going to have sex, but it doesn't have to be reproductive sex; and contraception can be very low-tech, inexpensive, and almost as effective as abstinence in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases. To start, we need a campaign to "Wrap that Willy," making condoms readily available and condom-use a manly thing to do, and a womanly thing to demand.

For other things to do, look at the pronatalist aspects of human cultures, and try to figure out practical ways to encourage reproductive restraint.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), currently living in Ventura County, California.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

According to Wired's Threat Level blog, "The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush's longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration's analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001."

A quick look at Article II of the U.S. Constitution will demonstrate that warrantless wiretapping is not one of the powers given to the president. The theory that he can collect foreign intelligence initially comes from his authority as "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States," as well as several Supreme Court opinions. The president's case for warrantless wiretapping rests largely on United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), which mandated that the president does not have the authority to conduct domestic wiretapping "without the detached judgment of a neutral magistrate." Interestingly, President Nixon made exactly the same argument as President Bush; namely, that "the surveillance was lawful, though conducted without prior judicial approval, as a reasonable exercise of the President's power (exercised through the Attorney General) to protect the national security." Nixon also made the assertion that the understanding of the technical parts of electronic surveillance were beyond federal judges, meaning they would be unqualified to judge the qualities of such surveillance; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said as much when he intimated that federal judges weren't qualified to adjudicate issues of terrorism.

Here's another good one: "These Fourth Amendment freedoms [from "unreasonable search and seizure"] cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch. The Fourth Amendment does not contemplate the executive officers of Government as neutral and disinterested magistrates." For the president to argue that he is allowed to conduct wholly domestic electronic surveillance -- as is the case with the telecom wiretapping -- without a warrant contravenes the language of the very case he uses to bolster his opinion! Bush's minions are content to quote parts of cases that support the president's arguments and are equally content not to mention that there are vast swaths of the same cases that contradict the president's statements of "inherent" authority. Ultimately, as with the Youngstown steel case, the court decided against granting the president his crazy, self-proclaimed powers. "We recognize, as we have before, the constitutional basis of the President's domestic security role, but we think it must be exercised in a manner compatible with the Fourth Amendment," wrote the court in the 1972 case. "In this case we hold that this requires an appropriate prior warrant procedure." The case, by the way, was decided 8-0 (newly-minted Justice Rehnquist, formerly of the Nixon Justice Department, did not take part in the case). There was no hesitation or ambivalence on the part of the Supreme Court in this matter. In an unequivocal, unified voice, it declared, "The president has no constitutional authority to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance."

All this is moot if McCain's spokesman is not speaking for him, but I don't think so. Over the years, McCain -- who was once truly a "maverick" in the Republican party -- has normalized his beliefs. After his failed 2000 presidential bid, McCain surely realized that the key to winning the Republican nomination was falling into lock-step with the Republican mainstream. Sadly, the Republican mainstream is exactly the wrong place to be on civil liberties matters, as Republicans in the White House are willing to sacrifice constitutional guarantees in exchange for security.