Who decided that their would be no Obama campaign; just Jeremiah Wright front-n-center 24-7 on every news channel and every front page? Who decided that Wright would have a larger media entourage than candidate Obama? Who decided that Iraq, the economy, and health care would all vanish from the national debate and voters would have to cast their ballots according to whether they liked Jeremiah Wright or not?

The media was tasked to sort through 15 years of backlogged sermons so they could extract a few choice tidbits that could be used to shock whites. The flap over Jeremiah Wright, who no one even heard before, is completely fabricated with the intention of derailing Obama's candidacy. Everybody knows that.

We do not underestimate the impact of high fuel prices on families that need their cars to get to work and school. But the gas tax is one component of the per-gallon price that comes back to benefit the motoring public, in the form of funding for road construction and maintenance. Much of the rest leaves America, going to such places as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Ms. Clinton proposes a windfall profits tax on U.S. oil companies to recapture the revenue forfeited by her proposal. Similar ideas have failed in the Senate because of oil-state objections; this one undoubtedly would, too. We have to agree with Sen. Barack Obama, the only candidate who has refused to play this game. "It's not an idea to get you through the summer," he said. "It's an idea to get them through an election." His opponents no doubt hope that Mr. Obama's stand will prove to be political suicide. We think it qualifies as political courage.

One of my favorite H.L. Mencken aphorisms states, "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." As a nation founded by Puritans and criminals, we always seem to be trying to butt into someone else's happiness. And more often than not, it's the religious half doing the pushing.

Sometimes it just makes you want to laugh, like the recent legislation sponsored by US Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) that would remove Playboy and Penthouse from the shelves of military exchange stores. Right off the bat you can tell Broun must be in high dudgeon due to the name of his bill, the "Military Honor and Decency Act." Broun, while introducing his bill April 16, said, "Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit." It just makes me want to slap my cheek and exclaim, "Well, I never!"

We have seen all this before in the run-up to the destruction of Iraq. You have the incessant allegations and demonization of the target, who is suddenly the main source of evil in the world: just this week, Condi Rice declared that Hamas (an indigenous Palestinian organization whose rise was surreptitiously aided by Israel) is nothing more than a proxy army of Iran, while Pentagon bigwig General Carter Ham charged, ludicrously, that the Shiite government of Iran is supplying weapons and support to the extremist Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan. Again, as with Saddam, we are being told that the Iranian government is behind all of the problems in the Middle East; thus "regime change" in Tehran will remove those problems, and bring peace, freedom and prosperity to the region.

As with Iraq, the reality doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. The horrifying, murderous consequences don't matter. What matters is the militarist, elitist agenda of global domination — in a word, empire — that has driven America's "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" for decades. Iraq was not an aberration; it was an embodiment of this agenda. And the attack on Iran will be the same. A whole new slaughterhouse is about to open for business: more meat for the grinder, more sacrifices to the Moloch of greed and ambition.

George W. Bush has publicly confessed that he ordered torture, thus violating the Convention Against Torture. He, Cheney, Rumseld, Rice and the other Principals must therefore be arrested and, unlike the thousands of detainees kidnapped by the US since 9/11, arraigned and placed on trial.

Because the torture ordered by Bush and his cabinet directly resulted in death, they must additionally be charged with several counts of murder. Fifteen US soldiers have been charged with the murders of two detainees at the US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan in 2002. They were following orders issued by their Commander-in-Chief and his Principals.