President Bush was so incensed when several prominent Republican senators voted down his plan to legalize torture that he petulantly tore through the Rose Garden on his tricycle and threw his Baby-Huey sized lollipop at the gaggle of reporters who had gathered on the White House lawn.  A bit of overreacting methinks.  It’s not like a bunch of Thai generals surrounded the place with tanks.  But still, in the lock-step Rovian nightmare that enshrouds Washington, any discord is seen as revolutionary.  The Che Guevara this time around is John McCain, whose five grueling years in Vietnamese captivity give him unquestioned authority on the subject.  Against gathering opposition, Mr. Bush at first tried to be adult and work out a compromise plan, though the blunt instruments of coercive interrogation to not easily lend themselves to statutory parsing.

Imagine the difficulty, for instance, electrocuting one testicle without harming its twin.  Could detainees, for example, be wholly tortured on Wednesdays and Fridays, but remain protected by the Geneva Convention during the rest of the week?  There are obvious kinks on the tightrope between desire and accommodation, yet Mr. Bush remained steady enough to insist that any law be applied retroactively. Which will be of the utmost import when the incoming Democratic majority starts cataloging the litany of impeachable offences.  Historical absolution, the President confessed to his cronies, will “define whether or not we can protect ourselves.”  In the end, though, the President capitulated and only days after stating that prisoner abuse was absolutely essential “in order for us to protect America” he declared, in a flip-flop worthy of John Kerry, he intends “to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture.”  In other words, we use outside contractors for that.

Like, God willing, Nancy Grace. Hell, that bitch could get Pakistani President Musharraf to cough up bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and the whole damn gang up in Waziristan. But for the nonce we must, despite Bush’s declaration that “the United States will not tolerate nations that harbor terrorists,” endure Pakistan’s peace treaty – ‘the military will no longer operate where al Qaeda operatives are believed to be hiding… [Moreover,] bin Laden would not be taken into custody as long as he remains a peaceful citizen.” – with the Taliban. We must tolerate it because the President opined that we are precluded from sending in American Special Forces by virtue of the fact that “Pakistan is a sovereign nation. In order for us to send in thousands of troops into a sovereign nation we’ve got to be invited by the government.” Apparently we somehow overlooked such formalities when it came to Iraq or Afghanistan or Nicaragua or, well, you get the point.

Although, to be fair to the Cowboy-in-Chief, party crashers are often met with harsh recriminations. As of last week, 2,690 U.S. servicemen had died in Iraq and over 20,000 had been wounded. Remember, not even television bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman is immune to castigation for unauthorized acts of force on foreign soil. U.S. Marshals recently carried out a Mexican arrest warrant against Chapman following the Dog’s unsanctioned apprehension of serial rapist and Max Factor scion Andrew Luster in Puerto Vallarta. With Luster serving a 124-year stretch in California, Chapman finds himself behind bars awaiting an extradition hearing in Honolulu. Though heavyweights like Colin Powell are beginning to doubt our moral authority, are we not justified in pursuing such evil perpetrators? The Pope certainly thinks so. After the Pontiff intimated that Muslims are violent, they bombed two churches and killed a nun just to prove him wrong. So the stakes are high, and not just for security reasons, but also for preservation of our culture. Which is why immigration is such a hot button issue. Westerners simply do not want to surrender their deities and customs to outsiders.

Towel heads in particular have demonstrably divergent notions of how a society should behave. We are uncomfortable with their edicts regarding the (narrow) rights that should be accorded women, dietary restrictions and the treatment of animals. To wit: An Indian policeman was fined for “allowing” his guard dog to become pregnant. Constable Sunil Kumar “was not serious about his duties,” grumbled Deputy Inspector General S. Bhatnagar. “The Labrador… at the time of her delivery was on leave. It is a very sensitive issue in our department.” Kumar, unsuccessfully, rejoined, “When an animal experiences the urge to mate, it does not pay heed to its trainer.” Unless, of course, the trainer is engaged in the mating. A Sudanese man was forced by tribal elders to take a goat as his wife after he was caught fully mounted and pumping his loins into the animal’s hindquarters. The goat’s owner, one Mr. Alifi heard a loud noise and went outside to confront the barnyard fornicator. “He fell off the back of the goat, so I captured him and tied him up.” The betrothed, a Mr. Tombe, was ordered to pay a dowry of 15,000 dinars to Mr. Alifi, who later quipped, “We have given him the goat and as far as we know they are still together.”

Sadly, the life expectancy of a goat is only a dozen years and while Mrs. Tombe (no kid herself) will happily stick around longer than any of Rush Limbaugh?s three wives, Mr. Tombe must confront the looming reality of widowhood. He may want to put in a call to Dr. Hwang Woo-suk who has successfully cloned a cow, a pig, and most famously a dog. So the goat thing seems well within reach. What has eluded Dr. Hwang, on the other hand, is forgiveness for fudging groundbreaking scientific experiments that ostensibly produced 11 patient-specific stem cell lines from cloned human embryos. A modicum of relief, however, has befallen the good doctor as the guys in the lab coats over at Advanced Cell Technologies have, for the moment, wrested away a sizable portion of his genetic infamy. The company had (falsely) claimed it could successfully harvest a single cell from a multi-cell cluster without harming the embryo. This is important, as it would have obviated the Christian fundamentalist objection to stem cell research as taking life in the effort to preserve life and would have therefore paved the way for government funding. But, alas, it turns out that Advanced Cell achieved results by removing two, sometimes three cells, and in the process murdering dozens of helpless, unwanted, IVF-clinic embryos. Which were to be thrown out anyways. An indignant Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), chairman of the subcommittee overseeing medical research, lashed out at the company for lying about “what you told the world.” Specter then lamented, ‘We have representation which created a lot of hopes… and now they appear to be dashed.” Advanced Cell’s V.P. for research, Robert Lanza bristled, “We have developed a technique and we have indeed shown it does work.” Lanza went on to point out that Senate Majority leader Bill Frist (R-TN) – ostensibly a licensed physician – viewed hours of videotape showing one such embryo following the arc of a Mylar balloon and responding to other stimuli, and had, on the basis of such evidence, disputed the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state. Nonetheless, despite the expert medical opinion of Dr. Frist and the palpable marital bliss visited upon the Tombes, the White House has pledged to veto any legislation that supported “the most egregious abuses of medical research” geared towards “creating human-animal hybrids.” “Human life is a gift from our Creator,” bleated Mr. Bush, “and that gift should never be… devalued.” Baaa-humbug.