Nuking a foreign nation to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons recalls an aphorism from the '60s, something about killing to stop war being tantamount to copulating to stop love. But the real model for the Bush crowd is that of the '50s.

Bush & co. have manuevered us back to where we were during the Eisenhower administration. Ike cut funding for conventional forces and sought to hide behind the nuclear (sorry, nucular) umbrella. This prevented us from being able to respond to perceived threats to our influence and security with anything other than brinksmanship. Unfortunately, the current cast of characters makes Ike and John Foster Dulles look like Lincoln and Grant.

The current regime has ruled out paying for defense with actual revenue, and has ruled out staffing its grandiose plans for world policing with an actual draft. Who would we send to bring about regime change in Teheran? We may have a few hundred park rangers and IRS agents free, but our military is taxed beyond its utmost. So the obvious solution is nucular saber rattling.

Keep the truth coming, Mr. Conason.

The truth is that four years of McCain may be the best progressives can hope for. If the Democratic Party nominates Hillary Clinton in 2008, it will validate every summary judgment against it that voters in the so-called Red States have made in 2000 and 2004. She is unelectable, and this is probably a good thing, given her utter opportunism. Four years of McCain might be the hangover cure the country needs. He will reverse the worst excesses of Bush (the peopling of the Federal government with political creatures like Michael Brown, the faith-based science approach to global warming, the utterly dishonest fiscal policies, the neocon foreign policy). Also, without the support of the religious right, a President McCain would need at least conditional support from Democrats in Congress. McCain in 2008 will give the Democrats another chance to solve their identity crisis so that someone more appealing than the current crop of old faces – Obama? – can give the party some direction in 2012.

Two things bother me about the encounters you mention, Patrick--

(1) The security personnel that harrassed you did not know the law, and did not see "law" as especially relevant (it's a different world...)

(2) The security personnel that harrassed you are part of the army of privately employed, rented security that currently provide some very large percent of the post-9/11 police presence in this country. Southern Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, is currently infested with contract security officers, many in the uniforms of government agencies like FEMA and the Federal Protective Service (when did we acquire an agency of national beat cops?). Many of the worst atrocities we hear about are probably the work of Blackwater Security operatives working for FEMA or other agencies, like your friends at Logan and Green unbriefed and unconcerned about actual law or policy. (True, many other atrocities were the work of incompetent local police jurisdictions.) By privatizing police work and by taking the law out of law enforcement, we have gone much farther than people think down that slippery slope. Thank you, Patrick, for addressing this issue while it's still possible.

Readers who have posted letters in response to this and other Keillor columns as if they were critiquing a political commentator don't get it. Garrison doesn't need to be a pundit in the Beltway (or Sansabelt) mould; there are plenty of those. What he seems to attempt each week is to reclaim a little bit of the English language from the pundits and flacks. This allows the rest of us to imagine a town square of ideas free from the perpetual shouting matches and sloganeering that have displaced actual discourse in our fine nation. If American during the Philippine Insurrection needed a vitriolic Mark Twain to wake it up and reclaim the English language from the peddlers of Manifest Destiny and Christian Uplift of the Little Brown Brother, America today needs a Garrison Keillor to reclaim its language from spin, finely calibrated wedge issues, and Pilate-like sophistry. His gentle shakes of the head are worth a hundred fortissimo verbal salvos. Please keep it up, Mr. Keillor.

Andrew's question, "what can we do to help those good ideas along?" is focused mainly on what Americans can do to end this cycle of greed. Let's discuss that, certainly; better zoning laws and prohibitions against spending public money to facilitate WalBorg's assimilation of our communities might be a good way to end the spread of the problem. But American solipsism seems to lurk in the way he asks his question; perhaps the permanent solution will only come from overseas, where workers finally are able to organize and demand the right to negotiate with WalMart and their middlemen for decent wages and working conditions. How can Americans help bring about the sort of transformation in China and elsewhere that will allow this? Maybe labor and government here in the U.S. need to figure out the role of labor and the rights of workers in a democracy before we think about exporting our ideas on the subject.