I would love to see Bush and Cheney arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for what they've done to the rule of law. I would love to see them arrested at some foreign airport.

But really, as a practical matter, not to mention a foreign relations matter - despite how much foreign leaders believe these two men (among dozens of other Bush appointees) should be tried for their crimes, is any of them going to be willing to have his or her own police force take on the Secret Service agents protecting the ex-president and ex-vice president?

I'd like to see the effort made, yes, but I don't expect it. Arresting Doug Feith would seem to be a possibility, maybe, but Bush or Cheney? They may be the American equivalent of Pinochet, but they are not Chileans, they are Americans, and that makes all the difference.

Unfortunately.

to say it's "therapeutic" to kill people?

Cohen wrote: ..."I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic."

Good therapy? That's what the Iraq War is all about? No thought at all is given to the innocent victims of this kind of therapy? That kind of thinking is the essence of evil.

What is it about Cohen and Friedman and their ilk? These kinds of statements go beyond mere mental illness.

They're like something out of a novel by Bret Easton Ellis: American Psychos. Well-spoken ghouls, the Jeffrey Dahmers of American journalism. Something essentially human is missing from their psyches.

The two-state solution, which means removing all Israeli settlements from the West Bank and allowing East Jerusalem to become the capital of the nation of Palestine, or...

Become part of a single nation combining Israel and Palestine, which would truly mean the end of Israel.

This choice can be forced on Israel, with the U.S. in the lead by virtue of its multi-billion-dollar annual subsidy to Israel, but with vital help from Europe and Israel's remaining friends.

Over time, the Palestinians and Israelis have grown more than a little demented and must be brought to their senses. Israel holds the power, and has to make the first move. And apparently that move will have to be imposed from the outside.

There is no longer any option. The current path has run its course. We must no longer allow Israel the freedom to make disastrously irrational decisions that imperil the peace, safety and well-being of an entire region of the world, as well as that of the United States itself.

Does Obama have the moral strength to make this decision? Does he have any legitimate alternative?

There's no such thing as nonpartisan politics! It's an oxymoron, and the fact that so many people bought into Obama's sophistic call to move beyond partisanship is indicative of their general political ignorance.

Nonpartisan means that everyone agrees because everybody believes in and wants the same thing. Nonpartisan is the absence of politics. Taken to its logical conclusion, it's rule by fiat.

Yet this was what Obama ran on - his primary appeal, the cornerstone of his candidacy. And it's meaningless. There's no there there. This was my original problem with him. I was asking myself, what the hell does this guy stand for if he's so nonpartisan? And my doubt was validated as the campaign wore on, and as he flipped and flopped. When he voted for the FISA bill after promising to vote against it, I decided not to vote for him.

That left me with Nader or McKinney, for chrissakes!

But when I entered the voting booth, the historical significance of the moment struck me, and I ended up voting Obama. That was my one moment of faith, and it was faith in country, not in man - Obama was merely the medium of that faith. It was a fleeting moment, and every once in a while I regret my vote, but those are moments of anger, admittedly increasing in frequency.

One of the problems that we may not recognize is that in our demand that the president and the system perform, we expect that performance to occur on a computer-software-broadband timetable - you know, when if it takes a minute to load a page you start cursing or just cancel the page and go somewhere else. I think maybe we unconsciously apply that sense of super-condensed time - where seconds seem like minutes and minutes like hours, almost as if we live in a time machine - to the real world of politics.

It's hard to face the reality; so much of our lives and the events of the world seem to move at warp speed; we can barely keep up and so we live almost in a permanent state of shock. Especially the bad stuff - 9/11, war, hurricanes, death. Meanwhile, making the world a better place often seems like one snail's pace forward and two kangaroo hops back.

This is where Glenn's advice about giving Obama time becomes important - we have to remember that we live only part-time in a nanosecond world, and that the real world of human moral progress lives at a much slower pace. I have a real problem with that - it's hard to bounce back and forth umpteen times a day between virtuality and reality. Christ - the guy's had three weeks in office already! What's taking so long?

The good part is that reality gives us time to work on change for the good and on prevention of the bad - it took years for Bush to impose the surveillance state, and it's taken years for us to obtain what environmental protections we have. It will take years to dismantle the surveillance state and years to mitigate global warming.

Virtual reality can help solve the problems of reality, if only because political action can happen so quickly over the Web. Reminding Obama that politics is nothing but partisan takes only seconds. So here's his Web address: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/