In fact, doesn't it have the same eerie ring of something you would have expected to have heard in the late 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition or during the Salem Witch Hunt? "The absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence." Alas, burn them at the stake in order to be sure to save them from themselves

And how many innocent Iraqis have been killed since the invasion? How many others have had their lives insensibly and incontrovertibly warped? And for why?

If not because of weapons of mass destruction, how does the president square reality with what he now says the urgent purpose was: to save Iraqis from Saddam's torture chambers?

But, yet, are we really all to be that surprised, as a consequence of the momentum of the road we've gone down, to be found in the bowels of the dungeon of Abu Ghraib, administering it in a manner, in the softening up of souls, that befit the notorious Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, himself...why, as if desperate for some sign, some shard of vindication out there of the righteousness of our cause? For someone has got to be in the know about a weapon of mass destruction if only but a little more pressure would be applied....

Or will apologists for the administration, like Ted Stevens, manage to have the buck, for the unspeakable excesses that occurred at Abu Ghraib stop neatly at the bucket of a few bad apples like Linda English and her ilk who, somehow, took their assignment to the point of "Apocalypse Now." I wonder how that could have happened? Might you suppose that maybe, somehow, they'd been effected by a campaign of "Shock and Awe," predicated, again on what compelling reason?

Anyway, speaking about old Ben Franklin, on leaving the Constitutional Convention someone shouted out to him, "What kind of government Ben?" He tersely retorted, "A Republic if you can keep it."

And for the sake of our nation there's one particularly bad apple I know of we'd be best to vote out this fall. Then we wouldn't have to put up with Rummy's or any others neo-cons warped version of wisdom. For, I believe, I once heard said somewhere "he that walketh with wise men shall be wise; but a companion of fools shall be destroyed." Was that in Proverbs?

Tim O'Leary is a longtime Homer resident.