I think I understand the charges against me. I have borrowed a paragraph from Melville who knows a thing or two about obsession, changing the names to protect the innocent. It seems to me that Gibson's complaint runs along these lines:

The Stupid President swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it...all evil, to crazy Amos, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in George Bush.

And to this I can respond that although I am not THAT guilty, I am somewhat guilty. My attention returns tot he problem of George Bush over and over. One reason is that his war, started and designed under his control, belonging to him, is chewing up a thousand dollars a second.

More important, though, is that every day, death is stalking the Americans in Iraq, as well as the children. We have laid down the lives of 1100 soldiers in this cause of taking on Saddam's regime on fictitious pretexts. Iraq has now become a battle field between bloodthirsty extremisms, with no clear political prize to be won except possibly a local government that combines the best principles of democracy with a talent for licking American boots on important issues.

I am not a bloodthirsty extremist. More of a detente-addicted democrat, as one pundit put it.

So I plead guilty to blind spots and deep concern for the mad path the world is taking under George Bush's leadership. I should look on the bright side and calm down. Lives are being lost and treasure is evaporating in this abyss, sure. The nation's repute has declined dramatically -- the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare shows so little sensibility to our previous national character that we have taken on the colors of a war-monger. But at least he isn't getting intimate with an intern as far as we know. There's more than one way to defile the Oval Office, huh?

Guilty, too, of worrying about how we as a nation will get out of this war, preferably in "winning" mode, and undo the damage caused by our cross-eyed leadership.

If these things are madness, then, let it reign.


A