It just shows you that no matter who is in the White House, our republic--with all its awesome and high-priced might--remains at a disadvantage when it comes to asymmetrical warfare.

What do you do if you're the Taliban, you're armed with rocket-propelled grenades and maybe some old Enfield rifles the British left behind back in the Nineteenth Century, and you're fighting a foe who has precision missiles that can rain down destruction from the sky with no advance notice, obliterating an entire crowd?

You make sure the crowd he obliterates is the wrong one.

Remember, this battle is for hearts and minds, not body counts. You use jiujitsu, turning the aggressor's own bulk and momentum against him. Enough of these little mistakes, and pretty soon the whole country sees you as the heroic defender of innocent women and children.

What are a few thousand more deaths in a country that has suffered so much already, especially if they serve a strategic goal? The locals don't know the Twin Towers from the Doublemint Twins, and when you say "terrorism," they look at all the bodies of their friends and loved ones that need to be buried.

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George W. Bush is a lucky guy. He will never be a tragic figure.

A tragic figure is a man who is brought down by some fatal flaw in his own character, and no matter how roundly George W. Bush and his benighted administration may be condemned by history, he will not be brought down, for there is no anguish. His conscience and his sense of his own rectitude remain unshaken.

George Bush has probably never lain awake one night in his life second-guessing a decision he made. This is the advantage of leading "from the gut," rather than by reason.

Gut leadership is strong, swift, sure. Reasoning is more deliberate, and can easily be read as tentative by an electorate that demands immediate action.

George Bush is probably not lying when he says his administration never approved torture. He may be horribly wrong, but he believes he is telling the truth. He has effectively, and enviably, insulated himself from the consequences of his decisions.

If only the rest of us could.

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It takes somebody who really knows what he's doing the better part of a minute to shoot and reload a musket. Longbows are faster, but they can still only launch one arrow at a time.

You have to wonder if the doctrine of habeas corpus, first developed in English Common Law and later enshrined in ours, would be as unconditional had bad guys in those days cared nothing for their own lives and could get their hands on weapons that were capable of annihilating large swaths of the population.

Much as we revere our rights, we live in a tricky new age. Would you want to be the one who stood on principle and sprang some nutball who later came back with a suitcase nuke and laid waste to one of our cities? All of our civil rights advocates would come down with a sudden case of laryngitis while everybody else screamed for your head.

There is one good thing about lawyers: if you pay a smart one enough, he'll figure out a legal path through any thorn bush. I understand they're hiring some pretty sharp ones right now in the Obama Justice Department.

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One school of thought holds that the Obama Administration should investigate the violations of America's moral code that occurred under President Bush's watch: the torturing, the extraordinary renditions, Abu Ghraib, the whole Guantanamo charade. It would be like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Punish those responsible (read here Cheney, Rummy, and lesser-known figures) so that those who might ponder these acts in the future would know that they couldn't get away with it. Also, prosecution would reaffirm to ourselves what we stand for as a nation.

Another school says let's move on, we have far more pressing problems to face down without getting mired in the sins of the past. Besides, it must have worked, because we didn't get hit again after 9/11.

President Obama, as is his wont, would like to split the difference: indulge in a little garbage-picking after we've addressed the immediate stuff. A pragmatic solution, although my gut says we should hold the malfeasance up to the light, and go wherever an investigation takes us. The national guilt we might feel for turning a blind eye to the dilution of our principles might inoculate us against falling prey to such apathy in the future.

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Here is a story that will leave you thanking your lucky stars that you are blessed to live in a functioning democracy:

I have a friend who lives in Santa Fe, NM. A lot of high-profile people either live there full time or play there part time, folks like Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson (whom my friend calls "Flake and the Cupcake"). It's a wealthy, yet quiet environment where people who value their privacy are generally left alone.

My friend was walking along Acequia Madre, a street in Santa Fe's tony East Side, about two weeks after Donald Rumsfeld, arguably the most powerful man in the world while he was in office, had been deposed as Secretary of Defense. If you remember, the pressure became so great on President Bush from all sides of the political spectrum that he finally caved and threw Rummy off the fantail.

Anyway, imagine my friend's surprise to see the former Alpha Male of Washington in well-worn jeans, ambling along the street with his dog, smoking his pipe and carrying a pooper scooper.

Eventually, the dog did his business, the erstwhile commander of the most fearsome military force on the planet scooped up the mess, and strolled off back to his home.

Think this could ever happen anywhere else?

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After Italy capitulated in World War II and then declared herself to be on the side of the Allies, Winston Churchill famously said, "With the Italians as friends, who needs enemies?"

One has to wonder what kind of foreign aid first allows the Pakistanis to export nuclear technology to our enemies, and then permits them to get huffy about U.S. incursions over a border that they are incapable of policing themselves.

Would the old Soviet Union have tolerated this kind of behavior from a client state? No howski. First, a warning--then Islamabad brulee. Certainly no more military funds.

No wonder the world has lost its respect for America when our puppets are doing all the yanking on the strings.

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We probably won't look back on this post-9/11 period as one of our finest moments as the shining city on the hill. As some people are fond of saying, "The Constitution isn't a suicide pact."

OK, that's true. Let's be honest, then: rather than hold trials with joke rules that stack the deck, let's just hold no trials at all. Here's the rationale: "We're holding the prisoners until the War on Terror is over. Which is never." At least, it goes along with the argument that it's too dangerous to let these people loose without soiling our bedrock document in the process.

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That we are even discussing this scenario as a real possibility is a testament to Congress' abrogation of its Constitutional role in declaring war, and the President's eagerness to act like the very king the Founding Fathers feared.

Remember the good old days, like 1941, when FDR had to go and make an impassioned case for war before Congress would even go along? And that was after Pearl Harbor, when they actually DID something to us.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear what G.H.W. Bush has to say about how his feckless boy has taken the old man's carefully constructed web of international alliances and understandings, and just blowed 'em all up real good, like a prankster flushing a cherry bomb down the boy's room toilet. Oh, well...that's the next guy's problem.

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Okay, this cartoon is about as subtle as a brick. Anytime you invoke the memory of Joseph McCarthy, you will appear heavy-handed. But old Joe lacked subtlety, too, and look how effective he was.

Sometimes, the situation calls for directness, especially if you feel we're poised on the edge of a slippery slope.

Judging from the email I get, McCarthy still has a lot of admirers out there, or he would if they knew who he was. The nation's moved on, though. There are no longer any Communists hiding under the bed. Now, we call 'em Liberals. Those who do remember Sen. McCarthy fondly will take the cartoon at face value, so no harm, no foul.

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Yesterday, I heard on National Socialist Radio (a.k.a. NPR), my broadcast news provider of choice, that one in 10 Americans still believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim, despite all the recent brouhaha in the news about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his inflammatory comments. I checked with our editorial assistant in charge of handling nutty calls from readers, and she said that there had, in fact, been a down-tick lately in the almost three per day she had been fielding, demanding to know why we didn't do an expose on Sheik B. Hussein Obama's "Secret plan to turn America into an Arab country." (That's a direct quote).

Anyway, this got me thinking about the continuing misapprehension on the part of many of our compatriots that the Saudi terrorists on the 9/11 planes were actually Iraqis. I suddenly realized that with a brain-trust like this, the Bush Administration must think we'll believe just about anything they feed us. Well, almost.

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Yesterday, when Vice-President Cheney was asked his reaction to the fact that a majority of Americans thought the Iraq war hadn't been worth it, he answered, "So?"

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Thanks to the many comments that ran in response to my first "Reject Corner" posting, Sun-Sentinel Opinion Czar (and more important, my editor) Tony Fins has decided that it wouldn't realign the Earth's axis if we went ahead and ran the cartoon in the print edition after all. See? You DO make a difference.

Many of your responses, both pro and con, were remarkably thoughtful and intelligent, some even impassioned. My thanks to you for all of them. Herewith, the finished version of the cartoon as it will appear on our Opinion Page on Monday, March 24.

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