Food is there for the picking. To pass up this generosity would be a supreme act of ingratitude. So I head out this morning with my small bucket.

Along the dirt road there is a dilapidated stone wall. Blueberries and chokecherries, wildflowers and bushes have pushed their way around and under the remains, toppling what once marked the neat border of a seaside farm.

It is one of many such old walls that you stumble across here, souvenirs of the effort it took our 19th-century predecessors to cultivate a place where rocks were a more predictable crop than potatoes, and a more plentiful harvest than clams. The boulders, now accessorized with moss and displaced by thick tree roots, were once skillfully arranged. Now they linger as a landscape's memoir.

Coming upon these relics, I wonder again at the effort it took to make these walls, our New England monuments. When the farmers finished, did they step back, look at their immense work with satisfaction and say, "There. All done"? Was the wall their art or artifact? Was the border a legacy left to their heirs the way others leave books, pictures and to provide a permanent marker?

Permanence and transience are on my summer mind. A couple of weeks ago, Randy Pausch died at 47, having completed what many journalists are required to do in their first class: He wrote his own obituary. "The Last Lecture" became a YouTube sensation. As a book, it became a best-seller -- upbeat, touching, passionate. It was meant as a posthumous gift, a message in a bottle floated out to his three young children in hope that it would somehow help them cope with the loss of him. There. All done.

Not much earlier, Tim Russert also died, setting off days of televised mourning. In the untimely death of this vibrant, ebullient 58-year-old newsman, many of his baby-boomer peers saw the first foreshadowing of their own mortality. Since then, friends have asked with full recognition of their absurdity, how could Tim die before the election was over? How could he die in the middle of the story? As if we weren't all, always, in the middle of our own story.

But if transience is on my mind, if the luxury of summer comes with its own penumbra of loss, it's largely because there is a dying in my family. My Aunt Lorna is facing death with the trademark honesty and character that have marked her life and her approach to an unforgiving illness.

A few weeks ago, a new grandson arrived in the midst of her dying. She has already built a web of memories with her adored granddaughter. Now comes this little boy. A boy who will know her only through our stories. It was, she told me in one succinct word, bittersweet.

I roll that word around in my mind now as I step over boulders, drawn greedily from one bush to another. An island friend calls our land Bittersweet Farm. The nickname comes from the tenacious vine that arrived here long before we did and trespasses over our property with utter disregard for our borders, reaching out to strangle anything as immobile as a lilac or an apple tree.

I wage war with bittersweet the way the old island farmers waged war with stones. When I temporarily beat back the enemy, I too look with satisfaction, declaring victory -- "There. Done." -- and then smile at my own arrogance.

Like many writers, I use words to try and save the sand castle from the tide. Like many grandparents, I take pictures to lock the 5- and 6-year-olds in time. I step back from the keyboard or the camera and say, "There. Done." As if it were ever done.

What we learned last week, after the suicide death of Bruce E. Ivins, was disquieting enough without the twisted love angle. If you can believe the recent leaks from the FBI on its most important unsolved crime that killed five and sickened 17, immobilized the federal government and traumatized the nation, it was a clean-shaven, white, God-fearing Catholic guy who did it. Despite a government anxious to find yet another example of Islamic terrorism in the wake of 9-11, it quickly became clear to experts that the anthrax used in the only WMD attack on our nation was a sophisticated product traced to our own biological weapons labs. This is not surprising, because the United States has long been a leader in this field.

Our ostensible reason for developing the world's most sophisticated arsenal of deadly biological weapons is that the United States needs to learn how to prevent such attacks from deranged outsiders. Now we have yet another reminder that the enemy may be us, and that at least some of the folks who develop weapons like to find occasions to use them. In this case, the terrorist the FBI was about to charge with homicide was a nutcase who nonetheless received the highest security clearance to work on the most dangerous of weapons deep within our own military-industrial complex.

This is yet another disappointment for those writing the basic Bush administration narrative in which the terrorist is always some Islamo-fascist guy. That's the assigned role that Saddam Hussein failed at so miserably. Remember when New York Times reporter Judith Miller was breathlessly reporting every sighting of a rusting Iraqi RV as one of Hussein's biological weapons labs to justify the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9-11? Gosh, how the military-industrial complex must miss the Soviet Union, which could be trusted to match us in the high-tech game of dispensing mass death.

Of course our government, which has never disowned the right to build and use nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, has long insisted that we alone are to be trusted with the creation of those devilish devices. Others are judged either too irrational, evil or merely incompetent to be allowed WMD, whereas we alone, with the unique experience of having killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pose no threat. That others might not see it our way, particularly after recent incidents, such as the missing nukes that crossed the United States on that errant B-52 flight, or the anthrax attack allegedly conducted by one of our top bio-weapons scientists, is understandable.

The larger problem is that we no longer take the threat of WMD as seriously as we should. We focused on the nonexistent WMD in Iraq while ignoring the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to North Korea, Iran and Libya under the guidance of A.Q. Khan, father of that nation's popularly revered Islamic bomb. As former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir, the Bush administration only seized upon the WMD issue in Iraq because it was convenient: "The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. In my view, I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face that was put on it."

The public face of terrorism was a bearded Muslim armed with WMD. No wonder we were caught off guard when the only person to ever attack us with WMD turns out to be an active congregant at St. John the Evangelist Church and a highly trusted employee of the U.S. military.

The former straight talker, who could not help telling the truth, has found the voice of the demagogue within him. As Senator McCain seeks to exploit public anger over the price of gasoline, first with his dubious "gas tax holiday" and now with his campaign for offshore oil drilling, the thoughtful legislator who defied his own party on issues such as global warming and Alaskan oil leasing has been replaced by that much more familiar Congressional figure--a rented mouthpiece for the energy industry.

Not surprisingly, this new McCain is not quite as accessible to the press as the earlier version, partly because he resents the media attention devoted to his Democratic opponent and partly because he no longer is so eager to answer every question a reporter might pose. He prefers to listen to the cheers of eager boobs who believe him when he says, "We're not going to pay $4 dollars a gallon for gas because we are going to drill here and we are going to drill now!"

But should he ever stop yelling and start thinking again, there will be plenty of questions awaiting him, including these:

Senator, if you truly think we should be doing "all of the above" to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, why have you voted against every recent Congressional measure to encourage renewable energy sources?

If you still worry about the effects of climate change, then why do you now emphasize drilling for additional oil offshore rather than energy sources that don't create greenhouse gases? And why do you continue to talk about so-called "clean coal," which doesn't actually exist ?

Why do you say that offshore drilling will cut gasoline prices when the Energy Information Administration predicts that will not happen for a decade and will make little difference even then?

According to your best estimate, when will "drilling here and drilling now" reduce the price of gasoline in the United States? Please explain why you no longer believe in the data supplied by the EIA, which you asked to provide the economic analysis for the climate-change bill that you co-sponsored with Senator Joseph Lieberman.

When you assure audiences that drilling offshore will produce more oil within a matter of months, as you did in Bakersfield last week, are you relying on sources other than the U.S. Government's Energy Information Administration? Please identify the person or persons who told you that the oil industry can produce more petroleum within the next several months if we start offshore leasing today. Did you learn of that miraculous capacity from one of the many oil company lobbyists who have advised and raised money for your campaign?

When you said that there was no significant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico even during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, were you aware that at least seven million gallons were spilled as a result of Katrina? How much oil must leak from a damaged offshore rig or barge before you would consider the spillage to be "significant"?

By the way, where will all that new offshore drilling occur if the states of Florida and California continue to oppose offshore leasing, as their governors have vowed to do? Do you still support the right of those states to prevent drilling in their coastal waters, as you promised last year? Doesn't that promise conflict with your claim that offshore wells will produce enough new oil to lower gasoline prices?

How much do you plan to spend subsidizing the expansion of nuclear power plants, which are not economically viable at present? Why do you favor spending hundreds of billions on nuclear power subsidies while blocking federal support for clean, safe, renewable technologies such as wind, solar and biomass?

Republican candidate John McCain even appointed as his campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm, who went from being chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, where he sponsored disastrous legislation that empowered the banking bandits, to becoming one of them at UBS Warburg. Gramm was forced to resign from McCain's campaign only after he went public with his contempt for the financial concerns of ordinary Americans, calling them "whiners" and perpetrators of a so-called "mental recession."

But Gramm and the Republicans couldn't have done it without the support of leading Democrats. The most egregious of Gramm's legislative favors to the financiers took the form of legislation named in part after him -- the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which only became law when Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin prevailed upon President Clinton to sign the bill. The bill's immediate major effect was to legitimatize the long-sought merger between Citibank and insurance giant Travelers. Rubin's critical support for the bill was rewarded with an appointment, within days of its passage, to a top job at Citibank (later Citigroup) paying more than $15 million a year.

That is the same Rubin with whom Democratic candidate Barack Obama met, along with other influential advisers, on Tuesday to figure out what to do about the sorry state of our economy. But what in the world did he expect to learn from Rubin? And why did he appoint Rubin's protege, Jason Furman, who ran the Rubin-funded Hamilton Project, to be the Obama campaign's economic director? Hopefully, during their encounter Tuesday, Rubin offered himself as a contrite model of everything that the candidate of change needs to change.

After all, Goldman Sachs, where Rubin spent 25 years of his business career before entering the Clinton administration, has been one of the prime corporate villains in the financial shenanigans that led to the sub-prime mortgage scandal. As co-chairman of the firm, surely he had knowledge of the financial hanky-panky that would prove so disastrous down the road. Indeed, as treasury secretary, he favored an extension of the deregulation that enabled this explosion of banking avarice. Not surprisingly, the current treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, also previously headed Goldman.

When Rubin assumed a top position at Citibank after his stint at the Treasury, he was not above influencing his former employees in the government. In one notorious instance during the fall of 2001, when Enron was going down the tubes, Rubin telephoned a treasury under secretary and asked him to consider intervening with credit-rating agencies to hold off downgrading Enron's ratings. Some media accounts noted the possibility of a conflict of interest when the story was leaked, because Enron owed Citibank $750 million, which it could not pay if bankrupt.

Despite his skills and his vaunted position as Citibank's chairman, Rubin was not spared the disastrous consequences of Citibank's own wild financial manipulations that, if anything, even exceeded those of Enron. Tens of billions in bad mortgage and credit card debt placed the bank at the forefront of the current economic crisis, and so it is weird that Obama would now turn to Rubin for advice.

It's even weirder that the presumptive Democratic nominee would pick Rubin's man Furman as his campaign economic director at a time when cleaning up the mess left by the bankers is the highest priority. Furman hardly distinguished himself in that role in John Kerry's failed presidential campaign four years ago, with its muffled economic message that could not be blamed on the candidate's stiff style alone.

Based on briefings that Senator McCain says he received from "the oil producers," he said, "There are some instances [that] within a matter of months they could be getting additional oil. In some cases, it would be a matter of a year. In some cases it could take longer than that, depending on the location and whether you use existing rigs or you have to install new rigs, but there's abundant resources in the view of the people who are in the business that could be exploited within a period of months."

The prospect of significant new petroleum resources that could be available so soon would be excellent news--aside from the obvious impact of burning still more oil--if only what the senator said was true. But what he said actually made no sense whatsoever, as a statement about the future development of domestic oil, the alleged need to increase drilling off our coasts or the resources that such drilling might produce. So let's unpack that McCain statement (which was overshadowed by the news that his dermatologist had just removed a small lesion from the 71-year-old melanoma survivor's right cheek).

It may be true that "existing rigs" could produce additional barrels of domestic oil immediately, whether on land or in the ocean, as Senator McCain suggests. If so, he might want to ask his friends in the oil business why those rigs aren't producing more oil now, at prices above $140 a barrel. An existing rig by definition is a rig that is operating legally on property already leased for exploration--and can produce oil unencumbered by any environmental constraints on drilling. In case the senator doesn't understand, an existing rig is where someone has already drilled a well.

Where companies would have to install new rigs, the question is whether a lease already exists or whether the government would have to grant a new lease. New drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf would mean new leases that are now illegal.

But as the Associated Press reported last month, nearly 75 percent of the existing leases on federal lands held by petroleum companies are currently producing no oil. Those companies currently hold nearly 30 million acres dormant, according to the AP. Nobody in the federal government even knows whether any exploration has taken place over the past decade.

Perhaps Senator McCain should ask his friends in the industry why they aren't exploring or producing on the leases they already control. A truthful answer would be that those leases count as financial assets whether productive or not--and adding to them enhances an oil firm's bottom line.

The senator should also ask an oil company executive to step forward and explain how any new offshore oil lease can produce petroleum within the next few months or even a year. If that is possible, then the Department of Energy analysis of future domestic oil production is scandalously wrong. The department's Energy Information Agency released a study last year predicting that granting access to new offshore leases would not begin to produce any actual oil until around 2020, and would have no "significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030," if ever.

Nor are they math-phobic. Nor is there any "intrinsic" difference -- thank you, Larry Summers -- between the abilities of girls and boys to succeed in the numbers business. There's no reason at all for inequality. In fact, there's no longer inequality.

A new study of the math scores of 7 million students in 10 states shows that girls are now on a par with boys. How many years has it been since protesters stuck a sock in Barbie's mouth for complaining that "math class is tough"? Girls have gotten to parity the new-fashioned way. By taking more math classes.

This comes just in time for our young math whizzes to figure out a harder puzzle. There is another gender gap closing, this time in the workplace. After decades spent pursuing equality in wages and work, women have finally achieved it -- ta da -- in job loss.

A report shepherded through Congress by Rep. Carolyn Maloney shows that since the 2001 recession, women have lost jobs and withdrawn from the workplace at the same rate as men. More to the point, they've remained out for the same reasons as men: layoffs, downsizing, outsourcing and wage stagnation.

Needless to say, this is not the sort of equality we were looking for. But if there is any good news, it's that this report may finally, permanently, firmly debunk the idea that droves of women are "opting out" of the workplace for a very different reason: full-time motherhood.

The "opt-out revolution" has been one of the most tenacious story lines of the new century. It arrived full-born with the famous or infamous New York Times Magazine article of 2003 declaring: "Why don't women run the world? Maybe it's because they don't want to." The idea was that the best and brightest daughters of the women's movement were choosing home and hearth over "having it all."

Since then, economists ran the numbers that ran down the myth. There's no actual proof that motherhood causes women to drop out. On the contrary. Sociologists went to talk with opt-outers, who gave a far more complex picture of the day that work push came to child pull. But the little engine of the story kept chugging along on lifestyle pages and in conservative think tanks.

Mathematically speaking, it divided women, especially mothers, and turned the sisterhood into a firing squad.

This narrative didn't just survive because it fit traditional views about a woman's "real" place. It reflected the inner struggle of many mothers trying to balance work and home, boss and child, in the 24/7 work world. It even credited the second shift of caregiving as valuable work.

In hard times too it was easier to tell yourself and others that you'd opted out than been pushed out. It framed the whole debate in the language of choice, suggesting that women have a buffet of lifestyle tidbits for our delight -- work, home, both -- rather than a series of hard decisions.

The downside, the subtraction lesson, if you will, is that the "choice" frame makes it far too easy to reduce the problems of work and family to the lowest common denominator of one: one woman, one family, one personal decision. "If it's true that women don't want to work," says one economist, "think of all the problems that disappear overnight. We don't have to think about family leave or after-school or the day-to-day grind or the tough challenges of work and family."

Of course, when Tom Geoghegan told me this in a Chicago park two weeks ago, I almost snarfed my coffee through my nose. Solving major social problems typically demands more than six words. But as the longtime labor lawyer and author explained his idea to me on a muggy afternoon, it started making sense.

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.