Mr. Bush's blind arrogance!

Years ago the FBI knocked on my door; that is a story for another time but it sets a stage. Because given the environment President George Bush has created in this country, we have every reason to believe it will happen again. And it will start when ordinary citizens begin to do small, extraordinary things to take back the country they love.

It may not be as simple as providing housing for young men scared to death of war; trying to discover why students at the University of California at Berkeley were willing to get their head bashed to stop it or having the body count effect a life so personally. This time it may will be more abstract.

But the process of change must begin again.

There is nothing about Mr. Bush that is American, patriotic, loving, good or kind. With each day, each minute, each millisecond he inflicts upon this country the very worst of human nature. Listen to today's news: "Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the (CIA) from using interrogation methods like waterboarding, a technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning."

Even senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has criticized the technique. "Sure," he said on CBS's 60 Minutes, "yes, without a doubt. We prosecuted Japanese war criminals after World War II and one of the charges brought against them, for which they were convicted, was that they waterboarded Americans."

It is universally rejected by military and law enforcement agencies and it is internationally scorned. Yet Mr. Bush thinks it is American, that it is patriotic, that it is a good thing to subject people to it!

Well, damn it, not in my name!

A blight like some Egyptian plague has come over us. Collectively we, as a people, have lost our way. For reasons this one ordinary citizen can not grasp, the United States of America has become the home of the intolerant and fearful where justice is no longer the rule.

There is no rational reason for Mr. Bush's blind arrogance in redefining the rule of law. Only tyrants and evil people would seek to justify coercive interrogation tactics.

At the end of Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet a little noticed character, The Prince who is the ultimate moral arbitrator of the play laments with at his countrymen:
"Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this..."

For never was a story of more woe ... but, now, we need to reclaim what it means to be a good and decent again.