Yes, just like former maverick John McCain, who has refashioned himself as a mindless rubber stamp for the most inane policies of the miserably failed Bush administration. Both candidates are embracing, rather than challenging, the fundamental irrationality of Bush's "war on terror," which substitutes hysteria for rational analysis in appraising the dangers the country faces.

Terrorism is a social pathology that needs to be excised with the surgical precision of detective work, inspired by a high level of international cooperation, the very opposite of the unilateral war metaphor that recruits new generations of terrorists in the wake of the massive armies we dispatch. At a time when we desperately need a president to remind us we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we are increasingly being treated to a presidential campaign driven by fear.

Both candidates supported the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has everything to do with violating the basic freedoms of our citizens and nothing to do with making them safer. There was no shortage of alarming intelligence warning the Bush administration of the impending 9-11 attacks, but rather an utter lack of competency in evaluating the abundance of evidence.

To use the failure of the president to pay attention to his daily briefing warning of an impending attack as an excuse for shredding the fundamental rights of our citizens is appallingly illogical. Providing legal protection to the government and the telecommunications giants for unfettered spying on the people does not represent the change we desperately need.

Nor does the battle of the warmongers that has dominated the discussion of foreign policy in the past week. Obama has one-upped McCain's bluff to win in Iraq by raising the prospect of an even more deadly quagmire in Afghanistan. If his goal was to remind us that Democrats have been more often the party of irrational wars than the Republicans, he has succeeded all too well.

Whereas Dwight Eisenhower refused to wage war against Vietnam and Cuba, it was John Kennedy, that charmer of change, who launched both of those military disasters. And then there was that crafty "progressive" Lyndon Baines Johnson, who in order to defeat Barry Goldwater, the right-wing menace of his day, lied about a nonexistent attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify escalating a war that killed almost 59,000 Americans and 3.4 million Indochinese.

Even less noticed is the responsibility of Democrats for the mess in Afghanistan, which provided the incubator for the 9-11 attacks. It was under Jimmy Carter, highly admired as an ex-president, that the specter of modern Islamic fanaticism erupted, largely as a monster of our own creation when we supported Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, asked in a January 1998 interview with the French magazine Nouvelle Observatour whether he regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists," replied: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

I was reminded of that horrid stain on the record of Democratic stewardship of our foreign policy while cleaning out my garage last week. I came across a 1996 press release from the publisher of "From the Shadows -- The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War," written by current Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the ultimate insider who was on Carter's National Security Council staff. The publisher's book promo boasts that thanks to Gates, who ran the CIA for many years, we learn of "Carter's never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen -- six months before the Soviets invaded."

In short, the Democratic president baldly lied to us when he justified support for the Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan who were battling the secular government in Kabul as a necessary Cold War response to a Soviet invasion. That Gates' account is accurate was affirmed in a blurb for the book by none other than Brzezinski, hailing it as "a most impressive achievement ... especially pertaining to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan."

Until then, I had drifted along with the do-it-yourself economy. I bused my own lunch trays. I booked my own movie tickets. I checked myself in at hotel kiosks. I even succumbed when an upscale seafood restaurant expected me to swipe my credit card through a handheld computer as if I were in a supermarket.

But maybe it was the election-year rants about the offshoring of American jobs from steelworkers to computer programmers that finally got me. The outsourcing of work to other countries has produced endless ire. But what about the outsourcing of work to thee and me?

For every task shipped abroad by a corporation, isn't there another one sloughed off onto that domestic loser, the consumer? For every job that's going to a low-wage economy, isn't there another going into our very own no-wage economy?

I'm not just talking about do-it-yourself gas pumping, which is by now so routine that the memory of an actual person washing your windshield has receded into the mists of AARP nostalgia. Back when gas cost $2 a gallon, self-service was offered at a discount. Today, gas is more than $4, and, in most parts of the country, full-service -- a retronym if there ever was one -- is available only at a premium.

What's happening on land is happening in air. We are now expected to book our own itinerary, print our boarding passes and do everything at the airport except pat ourselves down for liquids.

In this self-service economy, we also serve (ourselves) by having intimate and endless conversations with voice-recognition machines simply to refill a prescription drug or check our bank balance. We are expected to interact with "labor-saving technology" without realizing that it's labor-transferring technology. The job has not been "saved," it's been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where suckers 'r' us.

I am tempted to say that customer service has gone the way of the house call but that reminds me that even medicine has been outsourced to patients who buy do-it-yourself kits to test and track everything from HIV to blood pressure. The Internet ad for a do-it-yourself eye surgery kit may be, I pray, a hoax. But in an era when every operation short of brain surgery is done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has already been outsourced to family members whose entire medical training consists of TiVo-ing "Grey's Anatomy."

The axis of this evil isn't really globalization, it's privatization. Consider all the major jobs that have now become part of our personal portfolio. We've become our own computer geeks as help lines become self-help lines. We've become our own pension planners and financial analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be health care analysts, determining which star in the galaxy of drug prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our medicine cabinet.

All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposed to, say, free time.

An MIT economist assures me cheerily that many Americans are willing to accept less service for lower cost. In a society built on the value of self-reliance, I am told, we may even feel virtuous when we put together our own bookcase or install our own hard drive.

But I have yet to find an economist who has figured out the human cost of "lower cost" or tallied up the transfer of labor from companies to customers. I've yet to find a consumer who has added, subtracted or multiplied the amount of time we are now spending on the second shift of life management.

Why, then, does he appear increasingly plausible as the next president? Assurance, grace, and mastery of the facts have helped to lift his stature, as did his daring decision to venture abroad, directly challenging his older opponent's perceived strength. But granting his talent and initiative, the strongest argument for the Democrat is the weak performance of the Republican regime's vaunted "grown-ups," including Mr. McCain and his advisers. They have gone far in proving that experience can be overrated.

Following the 9/11 attacks, conventional commentary constantly informed Americans that we were lucky to be led at that perilous time by the old Republican hands in the Bush White House. Not George W. Bush himself, of course, whose résumé featured an abbreviated stint in the Texas Air National Guard and perhaps a few visits to Tijuana. We were supposed to thank providence for the wisdom and skill of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, along with a phalanx of deputies, assistants and subalterns. They had won the first Gulf War and their presence in Washington dated back to the Nixon era. They would know what to do.

Nearly every decision those highly qualified individuals made, from the day they took over in 2001, has been wrong, starting with the dismissal of the Al Qaeda threat and moving on to the invasion of Iraq; the diplomatic standoffs with Iran, North Korea and Syria; the sidelining of the Mideast peace process; and the unilateral impulse that has damaged American alliances around the world.

Rarely during the past seven years did Senator McCain, whose own foreign policy skills and knowledge have begun to seem seriously overrated, speak up in dissent from the failed Bush policies. His most significant contribution to the national debate--namely, his insistence that the U.S. commit more troops to Iraq--is overshadowed by his much more consequential mistake of supporting the invasion on false pretenses. More than once he has displayed the same stubborn ignorance about Iraq, Iran and the Gulf region that led to this strategic disaster. They underestimated the division between Shia and Sunni, the influence of Iran on the new leaders of Iraq and the resistance of the Iraqi people to any prolonged American occupation.

That persistent ineptitude has brought the supporters of the war to an ironic comeuppance, as the Iraqi government and people demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops on precisely the same timetable suggested by Senator Obama. The bombshell remarks uttered by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his aides over the past several days should not be so surprising to anyone who has paid attention to Iraqi public opinion or to the botched status-of-forces negotiations between the United States and Iraq.

As Juan Cole has pointed out, the Bush administration repeatedly irritated the Iraqis with their insistence that a new agreement ratifying the American occupation must continue to exempt private contractors and U.S. troops from prosecution under Iraqi law, and permit U.S. commanders to operate without consulting the Iraqi government and arrest and imprison Iraqi terror suspects indefinitely. Those perceived outrages against Iraq's sovereignty were underlined by an American operation in the prime minister's hometown that evidently killed one of his cousins.

The net result of the status negotiations is no result, which has made the Iraqi government highly susceptible to pressure from its own people and from its friends in Tehran for an end to the occupation. Attempts by the Bush White House and the McCain campaign to suggest that the Iraqis didn't mean what they had plainly said only provided a darkly comical coda.

As chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, Gramm engineered passage of legislation that effectively ended the major regulatory restraints applied to the financial industry in response to the Great Depression. The purpose of his co-authored Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, passed in 1999 by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, was to liberate the banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies from restraints imposed on their activities more than seven decades ago. It was legislation that the financial community, which contributed heavily to Gramm's campaigns in the previous five years, desperately wanted and obviously has abused. So why now bail them out?

How's about some "tough love" for those bankers suddenly in trouble? You know, the sink-or-swim approach of "welfare reform" that Gramm and Clinton applied to poor people to end their addiction to government handouts. Or, perhaps a heavy dose of "faith-based" personal responsibility initiatives to get those knaves who messed up our entire housing market back on the straight and narrow. Sounds ridiculous, I know, because nothing but the bleeding-heart, big-government, throw-money-at-the-problem approach will do when it comes to salvaging corrupt corporations.

That is the real legacy of what has been ballyhooed as the "Reagan Revolution," which Clinton went along with, but which found its full flowering in the administration of George W. Bush. The bookends of the Bush years begin with the Enron debacle and end with the federal bailout of bankers drunk on their greed. And no two people in this country are more responsible for enabling this sordid behavior than the power couple of Phil and Wendy Gramm.

Enron, lest we forget, was their baby. Gramm sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed Enron's scamming to happen. As Ken Lay, who was chair of Gramm's election finance committee, put it quite candidly when asked for the secret to Enron's success, "basically, we are entering or in markets that are deregulating or have recently deregulated."

Part of that deregulation involved rulings of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, chaired by Wendy Gramm, who upon retiring became a highly compensated member of the Enron board of directors for eight years. She even served on the board's audit committee during the time of the corporation's despicable financial shenanigans. While on the Enron board, Wendy Gramm also chaired an anti-regulatory think tank that received funding from Enron and other corporations that benefited directly from the policies her institute espoused.

My point here is not to expose the dubious ethics of the Gramms' various business ventures, but rather to question why McCain turned to Phil Gramm for leadership in his campaign. Indeed, until his verbal gaffe, Gramm was highly visible and rumored to be the likely next secretary of the treasury should McCain win.

McCain has long promised voters that he learned the hard lessons provided by his participation as one of the infamous Keating Five in the nefarious savings-and-loan scandal that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet he chose as his campaign co-chair a former senator whose push for government deregulation facilitated the far deeper one we now are experiencing. Here is a man whose legislation created what financial guru Warren Buffett termed "financial weapons of mass destruction."

Why in the world would you designate as your key economic adviser someone who left the Senate to become an officer of the UBS bank that is at the very center of this mess, a former senator who not only secured highly paid employment with a banking giant that benefited from legislation he helped pass, but who then lobbied Congress for even more of the deregulatory breaks that got the bank into such deep trouble?

Instead, perhaps naïvely, General Clark stated a very simple fact. Mr. McCain's service in Vietnam doesn't prove his aptitude or competence to serve in the nation's highest office. Or as he told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer on CBS: "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

Nor with all due respect is withstanding long captivity and torture by the North Vietnamese. "I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me, and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war," said General Clark. The reservations he expressed were clear and honest, requiring no apology and no scuttling repudiation by Barack Obama.

Supporters of Mr. McCain insist that his military service should be exempt from discussion, except when they feel like bringing it up to prove some point about national security, terrorism or the presidency that it really doesn't prove at all. But of course he was not the only soldier, sailor or airman to survive such experiences with courage and nobility. There was once another former POW whose candidacy for high office vindicates the Clark argument.

Or has everyone forgotten Admiral Stockdale?

The late James Bond Stockdale epitomized the bravery and idealism of the Americans imprisoned and tormented, both physically and mentally, by their captors in Hanoi. Captured and beaten after his Navy jet was shot down, he lived in leg irons for two years and in solitary confinement for four years between September 1965 and February 1973, when he was finally released. His many honors and citations included the Medal of Honor and he rose to vice admiral. He was a man of indisputable intelligence who taught philosophy at Stanford University and wrote several books before he died of Alzheimer's disease three years ago.

Yet the sad truth is that Stockdale lived out his final years in the shadow of his disappointing independent candidacy for vice president as industrialist Ross Perot's running mate in 1992. He knew little about policy or politics, as roughly 70 million Americans discovered with a wince as they watched a televised debate that pitted him against Al Gore and Dan Quayle.

"Who am I? Why am I here?" were his opening lines, a bid to acknowledge his inexperience that left audiences laughing at him. Although he sounded refreshingly unscripted by comparison with his opponents, Stockdale's evident confusion and unreadiness left him looking like a "bewildered grandfather," as Maureen Dowd put it. Everybody liked Stockdale, but nobody thought he should be running for vice president, and the notion that he might sit a heartbeat from the Oval Office raised serious questions about Mr. Perot's judgment.

Stockdale was too honorable and too wise to claim that the answer to his own question--"Why am I here?"--should be found in his matchless military record or his epic POW experience. After his humiliation in the debate, he liked to say that he was the candidate of "the people," but although the people liked him, they didn't vote for him.

The Stockdale episode also highlights the bias and hypocrisy behind the fury over General Clark's comments. In the days following the October 1992 debate, Stockdale was roasted from all sides, with much of the most withering commentary emanating from the self-styled superpatriots of the far right, who were angry about the Perot candidacy and worried that Bill Clinton would win the election, as he did.

So a headline in The Washington Times called Stockdale a loser, and conservative columnists denigrated him as "geezerish," "lame" and "the big loser." Rush Limbaugh, who evaded the Vietnam draft thanks to an inflamed boil on his behind, devoted nearly an entire broadcast to mocking Stockdale. After playing a clip of the admiral defending abortion rights, the radio host described him as "intellectually vacant" and "pandering" and suggested that his pro-choice views were insincere.

For those of you who do not watch Oprah or read tabloids, Beatie is "The World's First Pregnant Man." While the title of "first" is in dispute, Beatie is certainly the most public transgender poster parent to have a baby bump plastered across the media.

Pictures of him in such gender-bending poses as shaving while his elbow rests on his bump and outside mowing shirtless have appeared from here to Australia. And now -- pass the cigars -- he has delivered the baby.

Unlike Oprah, I will spare you many of the medical details. Let us just say that Thomas was born Tracy and socialized enough into a traditional female role to be a finalist in the Miss Hawaii Teen USA contest. Then, a decade ago she had what we used to call a sex change operation but what we now call sexual realignment surgery. She had her body realigned to fit her self-image.

At this point, she changed pronouns and so will I. Sometime after the surgery, Thomas married Nancy in Oregon, a state that would have banned Tracy from wedding Nancy, but never mind. Nancy, who had two grown children, no longer had a uterus but wanted to be a mother again. Thomas, who had retained a uterus and ovaries, wanted to be a father.

Here is where the story becomes less of a freak show -- Bearded Man Gives Birth! -- and more like an inevitable next step of medicine on the march, or on the makeover if you prefer.

It is only recently that we began to look at the human body as a template to be altered as we please. I'm not comparing sexual reassignment surgery to liposuction, but if Thomas removed his breasts to fit the male model, how many women enlarge them to fit the female model? For that matter, it's only recently that we could reach into the pillbox and pull out male and female hormones.

Add to that the expanding gamut of reproductive technologies. Over Beatie's 34-year lifespan we have subdivided the word "mother" into its many parts. We now have genetic mothers, gestational mothers and birth mothers, as well as the mothers who actually raise children. We have egg donors and surrogates. Grandmothers have carried their own grandchildren.
Sisters have delivered their own nieces.

Indeed, on the list of reproductive technologies, the Beatie baby-making project was as basic as a turkey baster. The sperm came from an anonymous donor. They used artificial insemination and natural childbirth.
But from a social point of view, Thomas and Nancy are going to have an awful lot more 'splaining to do to their child than will Nicole Kidman, who named her baby "Sunday" even though she was born on Monday.

"In a technical sense, I see myself as my own surrogate," said Beatie.
But in a technical sense, he is not a surrogate. He's the genetic mother and the gestational mother. He told Oprah that he has "a right to a biological child." But what he actually has is a uterus and ovaries.

So, in the same technical sense, this baby has two mommies, the birth mother and the social mother. The baby also has two daddies, the sperm donor and the social dad. In a technical sense, Thomas is both birth mother and social father.

There's no way to opt out of the medical march even if we wanted to.
But what made Beatie tabloid fodder is that in a he/she world of opposite pronouns and sexes, he represents the trans in gender, the mind-spinning possibility that gender is not either/or but both/and.

No longer pretending to be enemies, where they engaged in angry rhetoric while doing much business together on the side, a public love affair has broken out across the Straits of Formosa. On Friday, scheduled direct flights began between the mainland and its breakaway island for the first time in 60 years, and the invasion of tourists clicking their cameras was on.

Not that it was much noticed by the media or presidential candidates, but this long chapter of Cold War conflict has been closed and a new era of peace proclaimed by once strident foes. Taiwanese businessmen already are major investors in the mainland, and the new Taiwan government has recognized that reality by quickly pushing for full normalization of trade and other accommodations.

For years now, the Chinese on both sides of the strait have been acting as if they are members of one nation, with the descendants of those who fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek building mansions in their old villages and increasingly preferring that their offspring study in China rather than at American schools.

Thus it was not surprising when the leader of the old nationalist Kuomintang Party, which won the recent Taiwan election, quickly went to the mainland to pledge the dawn of a new era.

Gone is the prime excuse for a major U.S. military presence in the Pacific, now that the Taiwanese have made their separate peace. What good are our fancy military weapons to people preoccupied with a consumer revolution? The concern over mainland missiles landing on Taiwan has been replaced with a fear that some country cousins from the mainland might be given to spitting on the sidewalks.

Those fears were assuaged when over-the-weekend tourists from both sides conducted themselves with proper comportment while shopping 'til they dropped.

That peace has broken out is a nightmare scenario for America's military hawks in desperate need of an excuse for soaking up more than half of the U.S. government's discretionary budget. There was real panic when Mikhail Gorbachev formally ended the Cold War and George H.W. Bush announced a 30 percent cut in military spending in 1992. Then came the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the wildest peacetime spending spree in history. No one in power noticed that the expensive weapons were designed to defeat an enemy that no longer existed.

That's because we were traumatized by something called terrorism, and few questioned the decision to build weapons such as the two new Virginia Class submarines, at a cost of $5 billion, to catch Osama bin Laden, holed up in a cave in a landlocked nation. But submarines obviously have nothing to do with fighting terrorists, forcing Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who represents Connecticut, where the subs are built, to play the China card: "If we do not move to produce two submarines a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind China," Lieberman insisted.

Fomenting fear of China is essential to making the case for the whole range of high-tech war toys that no longer have a legitimate military purpose. But it's a sick joke. We are paying the Chinese the interest on the money we borrow from them to build very expensive weapons to counter weapons the Chinese have no intention of building. The latest word from the Pentagon is that "the intelligence community estimates China will take until the end of this decade or later to produce a modern force capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary."

The only adversary that interested China, according to the Pentagon report, was Taiwan, and as recent events have indicated, that game is over. But don't shed tears just yet for the denizens of the military-industrial complex. Why should they doubt our continued willingness to throw money at weapons that have no targets, when few in Congress or the media ever bother to notice?

Instead, perhaps naïvely, General Clark stated a very simple fact. Mr. McCain's service in Vietnam doesn't prove his aptitude or competence to serve in the nation's highest office. Or as he told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer on CBS: "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

Nor with all due respect is withstanding long captivity and torture by the North Vietnamese. "I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me, and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war," said General Clark. The reservations he expressed were clear and honest, requiring no apology and no scuttling repudiation by Barack Obama.

Supporters of Mr. McCain insist that his military service should be exempt from discussion, except when they feel like bringing it up to prove some point about national security, terrorism or the presidency that it really doesn't prove at all. But of course he was not the only soldier, sailor or airman to survive such experiences with courage and nobility. There was once another former POW whose candidacy for high office vindicates the Clark argument.

Or has everyone forgotten Admiral Stockdale?

The late James Bond Stockdale epitomized the bravery and idealism of the Americans imprisoned and tormented, both physically and mentally, by their captors in Hanoi. Captured and beaten after his Navy jet was shot down, he lived in leg irons for two years and in solitary confinement for four years between September 1965 and February 1973, when he was finally released. His many honors and citations included the Medal of Honor and he rose to vice admiral. He was a man of indisputable intelligence who taught philosophy at Stanford University and wrote several books before he died of Alzheimer's disease three years ago.

Yet the sad truth is that Stockdale lived out his final years in the shadow of his disappointing independent candidacy for vice president as industrialist Ross Perot's running mate in 1992. He knew little about policy or politics, as roughly 70 million Americans discovered with a wince as they watched a televised debate that pitted him against Al Gore and Dan Quayle.

"Who am I? Why am I here?" were his opening lines, a bid to acknowledge his inexperience that left audiences laughing at him. Although he sounded refreshingly unscripted by comparison with his opponents, Stockdale's evident confusion and unreadiness left him looking like a "bewildered grandfather," as Maureen Dowd put it. Everybody liked Stockdale, but nobody thought he should be running for vice president, and the notion that he might sit a heartbeat from the Oval Office raised serious questions about Mr. Perot's judgment.

Stockdale was too honorable and too wise to claim that the answer to his own question--"Why am I here?"--should be found in his matchless military record or his epic POW experience. After his humiliation in the debate, he liked to say that he was the candidate of "the people," but although the people liked him, they didn't vote for him.

The Stockdale episode also highlights the bias and hypocrisy behind the fury over General Clark's comments. In the days following the October 1992 debate, Stockdale was roasted from all sides, with much of the most withering commentary emanating from the self-styled superpatriots of the far right, who were angry about the Perot candidacy and worried that Bill Clinton would win the election, as he did.

But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn.

Doiron works out of his small cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest growing -- I used the word literally -- movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores.
They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and back yard.

He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: "1,500 Miles, 400 Gallons, Say What?" It's a reference to the average miles food travels to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration. It's not the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as passionate about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts.

Doiron spent a decade with a grass-roots environmental group in Europe. Weekdays he worried about mad cow disease and weekends he ate happily out of his Belgian mother-in-law's garden.

After returning to his homeland and hometown the week before 9/11, he became a lettuce-roots environmentalist. As head of KGI, he also walks the walk, showing me 50 varieties of vegetables he grows for his family of five on about a sixth of an acre. Memo to other amateurs: You will be pleased to know that Doiron's garden also has weeds.

The appeal of kitchen gardens -- food you grow for the table -- has been increasing pretty steadily. Taste bud by taste bud. But this year, a harmonic or maybe disharmonic convergence of factors led to a giant leap in the number of grow-it-yourselfers.

For one thing, there's the rising cost of food -- 45 percent worldwide in two years. There's also the rising consciousness about the carbon footprint on your dinner plate. There is, as well, recognition of an international food shortage and moral queasiness about biofuels, growing corn to feed cars while people are going hungry.

Meanwhile, we've had more uncertainty about food safety, whether it was spinach in 2006 or this year's tomatoes. And the floods that ruined millions of acres in the Midwest have undermined our easy sense of plenty.

"When people feel they are living in uncertain times, they turn to things that give them a sense of security," says Doiron. "There are not many sure things but if you put a few seeds in the ground and you don't muck it up too much you'll get a crop." As proof he stands beside a neat patch of potatoes.

He adds, "Don't do it because it's the cheap thing to do or because Al Gore said it's the right thing to do. Do it to make a small yet concrete step. You may not be able to single-handedly take on Exxon and Chevron but you can take on your backyard."

In that spirit, Doiron is pushing for edible landscapes everywhere from schoolyards to governor's mansions to empty urban plots. But Doiron set his eyes on everybody's house, the White House.

He wants the candidates to pledge they'll turn a piece of the 18-acre White House terrain into an edible garden. Or rather, return it into an edible garden.

After all, John Adams, the first president to ever live in the White House, had a garden to feed his family. Woodrow Wilson had a Liberty Garden and sheep grazing during the First World War. And, of course, the Roosevelts famously had their Victory Garden during World War II, a time when 40 percent of the nation's produce came from citizen gardeners.

Washington's "Farewell Address" to the new nation was a warning about the threat of American imperial ambitions and a declaration of his high expectations for a republic of free men: "In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism ... "

We are drowning in the "impostures of pretended patriotism," used to cover the lies that got us into Iraq, the defense of torture and the violation of our basic liberties. In the name of patriotism, we presume a God-given American right to reorder the world to our liking, masking the vice of unfettered greed as an obligation of national security.

Any doubts as to this later governing impulse of our imperial ambitions were shattered with the recent news that U.S. advisers to our puppet government in the Green Zone of occupied Iraq have worked out agreements for American oil companies to gain control of Iraqi oil fields. But, then again, what did we expect when we elected a Texas oil hustler, and a failed one at that, to be our president?

Only in an America dumbed down by constant propaganda about our innate moral superiority will anyone any longer believe that we didn't invade Iraq for the oil, even though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came to the Bush administration from the board of directors at Chevron, where they named an oil tanker after her. Like Vice President Dick Cheney with those Halliburton contracts, Rice has stayed true to her corporate sponsors.

That's what the U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished -- for the first time in more than three decades after Iraq joined a worldwide trend of formerly colonized nations gaining control of their own resources, Big Oil is getting it's black gold back. It was always about the oil -- that's why "we" invaded Iraq -- only "we" aren't getting any, at least not at a reasonable price. The oil companies are.

I know it's difficult for the corporate media and politicians, both fueled generously by energy money, to grasp the distinction, but we the people and they the oil companies are not one and the same. While we suffer at the pump, they make record profits, which is the way they like it.

Don't think for a second that U.S. oil companies are rushing into Iraq to expand production to help lower world oil prices, thus making their investments less profitable. They just want to be on the winning side, which is why the CEO of Halliburton relocated his office from Texas to the United Arab Emirates, where I am certain he and his fellow corporate expatriates are able to happily celebrate the Fourth of July.

So, take that American flag off your lapel and replace it with a button bearing the Exxon or Chevron logo. C'mon Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, be straight about what it is you are really pushing here. 'Fess up -- it's not the good old U.S.A. as represented by the sucker taxpayers conned by your patriotic blather. No sirree, what you would have Americans paying homage to is the majesty of the big multinational corporations that exploit American military power to rule the world.

But recognize that you have shamed the legacy of our first president. George Washington, who distinguished the promise of the new world from the corruptions of the old by shunning imperial conquest, said: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing."

If Barack Obama or John McCain were to offer such words of wisdom this Fourth of July, he would be vilified as "weak," and that is a fit measure of just how far we have descended from the high hopes of our first president.

The only notable difference this year is that neither the money nor the message has crystallized yet behind any "independent" effort to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama. Whether such a campaign against him can be mounted effectively remains to be seen, but it will not fail for lack of trying.

Back in 2004, the Swift Boat group's attack on Mr. Kerry commenced in earnest with the August publication of Unfit for Command, a book purporting to prove that the Democratic nominee's decorations for courage as a Navy officer in Vietnam were undeserved and that he had fabricated his sterling military record. Those sensational charges won immense publicity for the authors and were soon augmented by a wave of national advertising, with millions in seed money provided by a group of wealthy Bush supporters based in Texas. Of course the fingerprints of Karl Rove, then the president's top political strategist, were all over that ugly episode.

The candidates have abandoned the playing field and are sucking down Gatorade while the trainers search for additional wads of cash to stuff into the hollow portions of their uniforms. And the score at halftime finds Barack Obama leading John McCain by about 15 points. Which should excite Democrats. I mean the last time they had this kind of a lead, at this point in the race, was way, way back, 4 years ago when John Kerry enjoyed a similar lead over George Bush. Oh.

Meanwhile, welcome to silly season. To demonstrate their unity, former sworn mortal enemies, Senators Obama (Crips) and Clinton (Bloods) met up in a New Hampshire town named Unity where back in January, both received 107 votes. Get it? They're not at each other's throats anymore. They're in Unity. You can't make stuff up like this. And no, I have no idea if Truth or Consequences, New Mexico or Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming were considered as alternates in case the civic fathers of Unity proved truculent.

We should relish these two months of campaign down- time before the conventions begin, and where just like now, absolutely nothing will happen. The only difference is then, that nothing will be reported upon at such a great length, that grown men are developing rashes on the insides of their thighs just thinking about it.

Who will be number 2? Nobody knows. And we might not for a while. This time around the VP picks are undergoing prodigious scrutiny due to the peculiar vulnerability of each of the nominees. John McCain is old and could nod off at any time and Barack Obama is black and will have to campaign in America, a country more comfortable with guns than library cards. No word as to whether that whole library card thing is scheduled for any future Supreme Court docket.

Both secondary races are wide open and the speculation is so thick you can hide small clusters of cherry tomatoes in the smoke coming out of Chris Mathews' ears. You got your public short list and you got your private shorter list and then you got your slip of paper with Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney's names on it, who only get the nod if every other politician in America co- incidentally trips and falls into an active lava tube.

Some people say that the Vice President doesn't affect the general election. Maybe not, but the choice of the Vice President does have an impact. Do the names Eagelton, Ferraro, and Quayle have any meaning here? How bout Admiral Stockdale, Ross Perots's running mate in 92. "Who am I? Why am I here?" A question never adequately answered. For him or for us. Or for our current presumptive nominees.