Then there are the ones that have not yet crystallized but seem pretty likely. One is Diebold Gate, in which a Republican crony owns the company that sells the voting machines whihc they won't let anyone audit.

Another one is EnergyGate in which probably profiteering asshole-buddies like the Enron crew drove California;'s state budget deeply into the red by gouging under the protection of the Vp and a few closely chosen pals.

Then there's UN-Gate in which for motives not yet exposed fully to the light of day, the major institutions of planetary peace (the U.N. being one, and the U.S. Constitution being the second) BOTH get dumpstered in four short years of high-speed thuggery.

There is also 1K-Gate in which 1,000 brave American youngsters, doing their best for God and country, get sent into the jaws of death in a war that has no foundation, has no end point, and are sacrificed on the altar of our space cadet leader's self-indulgent "intuition".

And the small matter of 100,000 Iraqi lives, give or take a few hundred, needlessly spilled out on the Mesopotamian sands. Murder, high or low, is as unlovely as it can get. Cars full of women shredded with high-powered bullets like so many ground squirrels, children pulped and SHock and Awe unleashed upon peaceful citizens whose crime was seeking a path to survival.

Finally there is what the Nuremberg Trial judge called the worst of international crimes -- the crime of committing a war of aggression. War of aggression is the first offense listed in the Nuremberg Charter as a Crime against Peace. The Nuremberg Tribunal after hearing evidence of Nazi crimes in World War II convicted the leaders of waging wars of aggression, which it called "the supreme international crime."

At Nuremberg, the Chief U.S. Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, promised posterity that in the future all nations, including our own, would be held accountable for such crimes.

A