A characteristically absurd exercise is about to unfold for less than 24 hours at Annapolis, Maryland, where Americans, Israelis and Palestinians are gathering on Tuesday to make believe that they want peace. Characteristically absurd, because look at the players: An American president who’s done less than all his predecessors to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and more than all his predecessors, going back to British colonials, to plunder the prospects of peace and Arab redress in the rest of the Middle East; an Israeli prime minister whose corruption and sleaze are rivaled only by his unpopularity, which is more dismal than Bush’s; and a Palestinian president who has no Palestinians to rule, Palestinians having decided once again to fulfill Israeli fantasies and play the self-destruction card.

When the Founding Fathers looked for a model that reflected the abuses they objected to—in short what they intended to forbid by their new Constitution and Bill of Rights—they turned to an English institution, the Court of Star Chamber. It was a state security court with ancient roots which flourished under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. The Star Chamber court operated in secrecy, was not bothered by the picky evidentiary rules that emerged in other courts, and did not believe that those appearing before it on state security charges had many rights—certainly not the right to counsel, nor even the right to conduct a defense. It relied very heavily on torture to extract the evidence it sought to convict, usually a confession—though rarely, of course, a confession with any validity, since the application of the rack would quickly get the subject to say whatever was desired, truthful or not.

If you're a conservative you basically have two choices - lie or lose. 'Cause if you tell the truth, no one in his or her right mind would buy the garbage you're peddling.

The list of lies is endless, but my personal favorite is the one about how conservatism is the ideology of freedom, and specifically freedom from an overweening, intrusive, liberty-stealing, nanny-state government.

Massive, devastating air strikes, a full dose of "shock and awe" with hundreds of bunker-busting bombs slicing through concrete at more than a dozen nuclear sites across Iran is no longer just the idle musing of military planners and über-hawks.

Now is the time. Write (an actual letter, not email) to your favorite presidential candidate and declare that you are a single-issue voter. Swear that, if he or she agrees to sign the following Pledge, your vote is assured. If not, promise to stay home or vote for someone else.

"I, ______________, hereby solemnly pledge that my first act upon assuming the office of President shall be to sign an American Renewal Act of 2009, which shall declare all laws, regulations, executive orders, treaties and actions undertaken by the federal government during the illegitimate and unlawful administration of George W. Bush to be null, void and without effect."

Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new -- a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.

But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from "primates" and thinks America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. To top it off, Huckabee also left behind a record of ethical missteps in the swamp of Arkansas politics that make Whitewater seem like a jaywalking ticket.