The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs -- as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.

The Dems, today, need to be looking toward 2008 for a candidate. Southern, centrist, convincingly Christian, internationally respected, with a plan to disengage us from Iraq, after 20,00 dead troops and wholesale civil war; a visionary on how to stem a six year runaway inflation. If it weren't for that cigar, that might be Bill Clinton Redux. Absent him, it is certainly not John Edwards. Who can that man be?

We must look like a very, very backward nation.