My column is distributed by the Scripps Howard News Service with the result that many people around the country are left confused and bewildered ??? not to mention outraged and appalled. I get nothing out of this except strange e-mails from stranger places. Here is one I got this morning, in response to the column I wrote ostensibly about fireworks but really, in my sly way, about the Second Amendment:

I live in Lead, South Dakota, and today I read your column on fireworks.

I realize that you were striving to be sarcastic about the Supreme Court???s decision reaffirming the 2nd Amendment.

I know this must pain you but, unlike guns, fireworks, abortion, capital punishment for child rapists, and civilian courts for captured terrorists are not addressed in the Constitution.

I found this column to be one of the most absurd and sophomoric I have ever read.

I wrote back to this gentleman, as I do with everybody not on the List of Doom, and said that if it was true that this was one of the most absurd and sophomoric column he had ever read then I would have to congratulate him on living a sheltered life.

If I lived in Lead, I might too.

While I hold no hard feelings for critics in Lead or anywhere else, this note neatly explains why my brain needs a rest for a few days. I intend to stand up for America by taking numerous naps. In waking moments, beer and hotdogs will be heavily involved. Thus refreshed, I will return to blogging next week.

To all my readers, a Glorious Fourth.

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The New York Times had an extraordinarily dismaying story on its front page this morning:

It seems that military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay late in 2002 based an entire interrogation class on "coercive management techniques" -- more commonly known as torture -- that recycled a 1957 Air Force study of what the Chinese Communists did to Americans during the Korean War to obtain confessions. Of course, many of these confessions, having been extracted under duress, were false.

Unbelievable! When it comes to torture, we took our cue from the Reds and we couldn't even pick techniques that were reliable. If any more proof were required that the Bush administration's approach to the War on Terror has been incompetent and morally corrupt, here it is for all awake Americans to see. Unfortunately, the dark night of national snoring goes on.

While it is hard to decide whether to laugh or cry at this revelation that we have become no better than the Commies, I have to find a light side to it or go insane. So herewith, and with apologies to David Letterman, are 10 reasons why this news isn't as bad as it may seem:

1. While studies are permanently forgotten elsewhere in government, the Defense Department forgets nothing.

2. The military discovered that the menace we face is a worldwide conspiracy for world domination based in Moscow and Beijing.

3. Other old communist studies have not been tapped -- for example, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's 1957 report -- the "Customer Comes Last" -- was not used on detainees.

4. Recycling is being taken to new levels at the Pentagon.

5. The expression "capitalist running dogs" disoriented and confused hardened jihadists when used in interviews.

6. Some detainees confessed to being lackeys of the capitalist class, which at least was some new intelligence to go on.

7. The Gestapo's archives were not consulted.

8. The prisoners did not get fortune cookies that predicted six more weeks of sleep deprivation.

9. When interrogators got information, they did not feel for hungry for more one hour later.

10. Because much of the information learned by following the cold Commie playbook is bound to be false, we don't have to worry.

Forgive me for these tasteless observations but I believe "Smile Bravely Through Your Tears" is the official motto of the Bush administration.

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Having offered some concerns about Barack Obama, I must now do the same for Sen. John McCain. It's not just for equal time purposes, but also to correct any impression that I favor Sen. McCain -- as at least one reader mistakenly assumed.

No, it is one thing to candidly admit the dangers of an Obama candidacy; it's another to suggest a McCain presidency would be better. I like Sen. McCain -- for one thing, I like the fact that he's a Vietnam veteran and this may be the last chance to get one of us as president.

But I am for Barack Obama. Whatever he does in the way of spending and taxes, I think his election would reconfirm America as the land where anything is possible. The very idea that an African American with the middle name Hussein would be one of the presidential candidates in this election would have seemed absurd just two years ago.

History-making aside, Sen. McCain has his own problems. He is old, to be sure, but that bothers me less than what his age has done to his thinking. Some people are young old and some are old old. For this part, George W. Bush is old young, a frat boy with an outdated view of the world.

Mr. Bush's whole term of reference is the Cold War and before that the struggle against the Axis powers in World War II. With disastrous results, he has transposed all of that onto the War on Terror, which resembles neither (just because the terrorists have a Nazi-like indifference to life does not make them Nazis).

To that extent, John McCain is McBush. He has the same errant view of the world, which animates his foolish desire to stay bogged down in Iraq for goodness knows how long. In his old thinking, John McCain also does not appear smart. We have had seven and a half years of a president not being up to intellectual speed and that's enough.

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Sen. Barack Obama worries quite a few people for insane reasons .... he's a Muslim, he's a Marxist (perhaps one of those Marxist Muslims who have state-owned prayer mats), he doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. Believe any one of these things and it should be the law that your relatives can immediately commit you to an institution still specializing in electric shock therapy.

But there are some sane reasons that people should worry -- chief among them, he may be a caricature liberal when it comes to the economy. If he is, his dreams are likely to dig us further into the great pit of debt that currently has George W. Bush's name firmly affixed to it.

If Mr. Obama's instinct is merely to tax and spend like there's no tomorrow, he will last only four years if he becomes president and Democrats will find themselves in the wilderness again for much longer.

Of course, when you promise the world, you have to deliver a chunk of it, no matter what the cost. If he becomes president, he should limit himself to just one big ticket issue and focus on it -- fixing the health care system would be my choice. As for taxes, tax the big boys by all means, but don't go hog wild -- recognize that high taxes are ultimately destructive of the economy.

My maxim is moderation in all things -- which I know can be taken to excess. But when Mr. Obama comes to CMU tomorrow to discuss his views on economic competitiveness, I would like him to hew to the middle of the road. Let history confirm George Bush as the last of the big spenders.

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I have not been on my best blogging form this week, which has been a busy one for me. One reason was the heavier-than-usual reaction to my column about gay marriage that appeared in Wednesday's newspaper.

By my count, I got 38 e-mails and half a dozen phone calls. This isn't a huge outpouring when considering the circulation of the PG -- and compared with my colleague, Tony Norman, this is nothing. He only has to write "it was a nice day" and 20 people write to tell him that he has a way with words another 20 criticize him for saying the day was nice.

(Am I jealous? Yes.)

But I try to answer each and every e-mail I receive as a matter of courtesy, even when the messages are from Neanderthals. (They are a dying species; I feel the need to be kind to them.)

By the way, if you ever sent me an e-mail and I didn't reply, that means I didn't get it -- unless you are a known pest and have been put on my List of Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth because I refuse to correspond with chronic morons.

As it happens, the response to the column was overwhelmingly positive, which was very encouraging. My column is usually written on the premise that many a true word is spoken in jest but some readers just don't get the joke. In turn, they don't get the true word either. Though this is depressing, it underscores my theory that a sense of humor is always the most reliable indicator of intelligence.

On the opposition to gay marriage, I have a theory. Some people oppose gay marriage out of a sincere religious conviction, which I understand and respect (even as I differ with them). Some are in denial and act out in destructive ways -- J. Edgar Hoover, Sen. Larry Craig, he of the wide stance in bathroom stalls -- and this I understand and do not respect.

But some, I theorize, do it out of what I call the "clubhouse mentality." I do not respect this either.

Ever since the dawn of time, one group has looked down upon another. The hominids looked down on the Neanderthals, the Egyptians looked down on the Israelites, the British looked down on everyone (and still do).

In America, we have always seen it. The rich whites looked down on the poor whites, who looked down on the blacks, who looked down on who knows who? -- the Mexicans probably. I doubtless have left out a few groups who were looked down upon and did some looking down in turn.

All this is deplorable, of course, but I seek to describe the world as I find it. This instinct is obvious even in small children. They build little clubhouses and put up signs in a childish script saying the traditional "No girlz allowed."

When the boys grow up, some of them join private clubs where the same premise is brought to the full flower of adulthood. It's not just girlz, although at some clubs women are still discriminated against. In recent memory right here in Pittsburgh, not only were people of color excluded from some of the best clubs but Jews and Catholics as well. Vestiges of this ridiculous mind-set remain unto the present day.

Human beings, it seems, want to have exclusive lairs where they can be happy in the knowledge that not all of the human tribe can become members.

Which brings me back to membership in that exclusive club called marriage. To me, it seems illogical for straight people to think that a gay married couple down the road might undermine their own marriage.

But I have come to think that for some people, the old clubhouse mentality lurks on gay marriage as strongly as it does for a well-tailored old codger becoming florid at the thought of the wrong sort of people being admitted into the Duquesne Club.

Just a theory. If true, what can be done? All I can think of is to tell one jest at a time, so that the old world looks stupid in the light of the new.

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I have some good points if I say so myself -- and, really, who else is there to say so? -- and one of these good points is that I am not an attorney. So I cannot tell you with great authority whether the 5-4 decision in the Guantanamo detainees case last week is an example of activist justices gone crazy.

While I don't put any stock in the opinion of the court's right-wing troglodytes who conceive their job to be upholding any reactionary reading of the Constitution that mocks justice, there's a part of me that thinks it might be a stretch to grant habeas corpus rights to those alleged to be at war with the United States if they are imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

(I say "alleged" because while some detainees are doubtless terrorists, others are very likely to have been hapless characters guilty of nothing more than being at the wrong place at the wrong time and being sold out by villagers in Afghanistan for a reward).

But this I know: Guantanamo Bay has been a stain on America's very soul and the court did the nation a great favor in pulling back slightly on the reins of the wayward, galloping war horse that is the Bush administration.

Three times now the court has rebuffed the Bushies and their extraordinary theory of unbridled executive power. So whatever legal pirouettes were necessary to reach this latest decision, I say thank goodness for justices with a conscience.

The truth is that the Bush administration has been -- as they used to say back in the day -- cruisin' for a bruisin'. In their heavy handedness, they have made a hash of prosecuting the war on terror with their wild goose chase in Iraq and a fear-provoked assault on civil liberties at home.

I reckon they got the result they deserved.

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