He's crying, in part, because he's probably not on Halcyon anymore, or whatever they were pumping him with when he was in office so he didn't have a complete breakdown. Even so the man was never very coherent — it's a wonder of modern medicine that he could stammer and meander through even the few speeches he did give, I suppose. So let's not laud Bush, Sr, too much out of amnesiac goodwill.

But in a larger sense, I imagine he's on the verge of tears not just because of torture but the whole of American aggression during the past six years. Before the Iraq war, American soldiers used to be able to say, with at least some validity, that they were part of a military tradition from which no war of aggression had ever been waged — and you can be sure that perception among even our battlefield enemies was an important asset in American military planning.

Now they can't anymore, just as they can no longer say that America has never condoned torture, or any of a number of areas where the neoconservatives have, indeed, broken new ground. And Bush knows we can never go back, and he knows that he raised his son to be what he is and that, uniquely, his influence and impact as a man and father are on display right now.

They say even when you can't go back you can at least return. Here's hoping for an end to these fools, pere et fils and all they represent, in 2008.

The lack of ideological familiarity enables many people with unconventional (even extremist or bizarre) political views to read into those candidacies whatever they want to see -- even if it isn't really there -- and to use the candidate as a proxy for their otherwise ignored and stigmatized causes.

Interestingly, this (accurate) characterization of fringe followings of indie candidates is completely at odds with Glenn Greenwald's more general contention that the appeal of someone like Ron Paul is somehow particularly rational. Clearly people with poorly-thought-out ideas and contradictory, emotionally-invested views are just as attracted to Ron Paul as they are attracted to (or repelled by) other, more mainstream candidates.

The basic tenet of Paul's brand of libertarianism — that for 200-some-odd years Americans have all been massively duped by an enormous Constitutional fiction that has pervaded the Supreme Court and deluded millions for generations — is on its face absurd. The US Constitution embodies a set of principles for federal governance that include things like equal justice and social welfare. We as a people have applied these principles as we've seen fit over the years and as our views and social conscience have evolved.

The Constitution was never intended to be interpreted through some kind of fundamentalist reading. "Going back to basics" or to some "strict" interpretation is in reality nothing more than a lame reaction to modernity that bespeaks poverty of imagination.

As for the question of Ron Paul's opposition to the American military, I doubt it would last past the first 24 hours of a crisis that impinged on the ability of American businessmen to do as they wished abroad. No one who is as serious about the "free market" as Paul appears to be can possibly tolerate the idea of American economic interests being held hostage by threat of force, and since he seems equally serious in opposing the idea of international law, where else does that lead except American force majeur?

Don't get me wrong, it's great to hear a multitude of antiwar voices right now. But either Ron Paul is no more thoughful than his fringe followers, or he's being insincere in claiming to oppose American military adventurism on principle.

Genital mutilation affects a woman's experience of sex and her own body, while sterilization affects a woman's ability to reproduce. The latter, she says, has greater cultural value -- especially in (some very blinkered) men's eyes.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but isn't the difference that an immigrant woman (or a man for that matter) who has been forcibly sterilized won't be dirtying the precious, snow-white linen of American racial heritage any further once we let her in?

Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating the "race-consciousness" of the INS — but surely they're thinking on some level of how bad for America it must be that poor, "ethnic" refugees come in and start reproducing left and right. It seems like an economic issue (or more precisely a racist reflex disguised as an economic issue), more than a cultural one.

Imagine if an ethnic Russian victim of some (hopefully hypothetical) Communist-revival genital mutilation cult were to apply for refugee status based on a well-substantiated claim that her home government would do nothing to redress the injustice she had experienced, or protect her daughters from a similar fate. There would be no question she would be accepted.