As cheesy and futile as this gesture always seems to me, I've been writing letters to my Democratic representative (Dave Loebsack) and senator (Tom Harkin), begging them to act quickly to restore the rule of law in this country -- and, most urgently, to restore the process rights of the criminally accused.

I've heard nothing back from Loebsack's office (not even the standard "Thank you for your support" form letter), but Harkin's office, after a long delay, replied with an endless form email setting out Harkin's platform in detail -- pages, literally, of policy objectives on everything from Medicare reform to stem cell research to deficit reduction to agricultural relief to, of course, Iraq.

And nowhere in this holistic, detailed statement of Harkin's political positions was there any mention of reversing the erosion ("destruction" is more accurate, but also too depressing) of Americans' most important Constitutional protections. Completely absent from Harkin's laundry list was any mention of the ongoing international crime -- and the shocking moral failure -- of our "black" prisons in Europe, our lawless internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, and our new program of official torture.

In other words, restoring habeas -- and preventing "extraordinary rendition" and the other, less oblique, torture mechanisms favored by the Army and CIA -- ranks so low on Harkin's list of priorities that his interns can't find a suitable form email to send to a self-identified "single-issue voter" like myself.

What's left, then? The media -- outside of the editorial pages of a few major-market newspapers -- doesn't care. Our Democratic leadership doesn't care. My college-educated friends -- while they're generally turned off by what's happening in this country, and can be relied upon to vote for Democrats in the upcoming election -- don't care enough to follow what's going on with our "military commissions" (and these days, even highly literate college graduates tend to know very little about how our judicial system does, and should, work).

I'm not trying to bum everyone out; I'm sincerely at a loss to figure out what can be done to get some traction on this issue, which happens to be the most important to me.

I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for the MSM to make an all-out push to marginalize Olbermann. (Sigh.)

One of the most demoralizing -- and terrifying -- things about Bush and his cronies is the fact that their consciences cannot be pricked, that their intellectual curiosity cannot be excited . . . that, in short, there's no point in talking to them; they can't be shamed or goaded into doing something selfless, honest or decent.

On the other hand -- and I actually prefer to believe this (because it's less scary) -- perhaps it's not that these guys are irredeemably dishonest and indecent, but simply that they live in a different moral universe. In that case, it isn't inhumanity and indifference that explains their smirking cruelty; they're simply acting on a faith that's incomprehensible to me. (When people of different religious faiths clash with one another, of course, their discussions are often meaningless -- hopeless -- because their competing points of view originate from incompatible fundamental premises. If we can't agree about whether a global holocaust originating in the Middle East is inevitable -- and desirable -- then what can we ever really agree on?)

I always get the feeling, in reading these exasperated posts about Newsweek and Time and the Politico, that more than shaming and denouncing shoddy journalists, or spreading awareness of their bad journalism and its consequences, what you'd really like is to see these people acknowledge their errors -- their devastating lapses of judgment and professional responsibility -- and make a meaningful change in the way they do their work.

That's partly why it's frightening to me to hear these journalists defend themselves against charges that are basically irrefutable. At some point, you start to wonder WHY -- why are these people so insistent on doing a terrible job? WHY do they glibly swat away reasoned criticism? WHY does Maureen Dowd continue to refer to John Edwards as "the Breck Girl?" WHY does Mickey Kaus pound out idiotically contrarian articles with headlines like "Another Genius Move by Alberto Gonzales" and "Another Dumb Obama Move?" Are these people stupid? Cruel? Blinded by arrogance? Sexually aroused by banality? I'm starting to think that, like the neo-cons and evangelicals, these reporters are motivated by some faith that's incomprehensible to me.

Otherwise, I can't fathom why a powerful reporter or columnist -- let's just take Maureen Dowd, because she's always seemed like a smart, pleasant person when I've seen her interviewed, and she surely has the power, at this point, to write whatever she wants -- would persist in writing haircut stories on days when Iraqi civilians are killed (and blinded, widowed, orphaned, paralyzed) by the hundreds, when Russia is withdrawing ever farther from Europe, when fresh evidence has emerged about the transformation of the Justice Department into a criminal organization, etc., etc.

It's not that there's no place, in a dreary world, for frivolity (I watch NCAA basketball . . . I loved Grindhouse and Shaun of the Dead . . . I'm all about wallowing in the trivial) -- but why do these reporters have to make trifles out of the most important things? I mean, as we speak -- right now, at 1:33 p.m. Central Standard Time -- people are almost certainly being tortured at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA "blacksites" all around the world. How can that fact not trouble Maureen Dowd? How can the haircut hold her interest in the face of so much real-time human misery? How can she ignore her own complicity? What's it all about?

Her disses are always so carefully crafted. It's pleasant to remember that literacy and toughness aren't mutually exclusive.