Let’s see. George W. Bush makes a big speech about how America promotes democracy throughout the world. How do the Democrats respond? By pointing out that our Founding Fathers purposely set us up with a Republic, while strongly warning against direct “democracy” as nothing but “mob rule,” likely to vote the constitutional rights of minorities out of existence at the first opportunity?

Of course not.

Do Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi -- sitting there stiff-backed, our modern equivalents of Herman and Lily Munster -- calmly acknowledge, “OK, if Mr. Bush can figure out a way to promote participatory government in the Mideast, we’ll admit that’s a good idea and we’ll do what we can to support him, even if we think massive bombardment and invasion under false pretenses should not be our preferred opening gambit.

“But let’s be honest about this: It was a Republican administration that sent in Major Smedley Butler and the U.S. Marines to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, forcing the legislature in Managua to sign a peace treaty in English as American warships loomed offshore, a treaty giving us the right to run the Nicaraguan railroads under the laws of the state of Maine.

“It was a Republican administration that overthrew the popular government of Mohammed Mossadegh, the “weeping mullah,” in Iran in 1953, re-installing the Pahlavi shahs, whose secret police surely ranked them among the most repressive despots in recent history.

“Let’s not even get started on the regime-change assassinations we backed in places like Chile and Vietnam, as little as 30 and 40 years ago. And if we’re so in favor of democracy and self-determination, why is President Bush making nice with KGB assassin Boris Putin, when just last week we read that Russian special forces had murdered Aslan Maskhadov, the last elected president of independent Chechnya -- ‘the only one with whom a peaceful agreement could have been made,’ according to Alexander Cherkasov of the rights group Memorial -- in a bunker in north-central Chechnya?

“Chechens don’t even speak the same language as the Russians, who have repeatedly re-conquered them by force for a hundred and fifty years. Why are we opposed to the righteous cause of Chechen independence? Just because they’re Muslims?

“If we’re really going to change our stripes now, a good start might be to acknowledge to our own people the things we did that caused our government to be so widely feared, hated and distrusted, out there in the world at large.”

Do the Democrats say any of this? Not in public, they don’t. And why? Because they’re complicit. The Democrats have signed on to the old way of doing things; Bill Clinton set out on many a foreign lark (albeit far less effectively, being the distracted dilettante he was.) They have no principled alternative plan or world-view to offer; they don’t want to blow the whistle on those kinds of CIA abuses and cripple their own ability to draw on precisely these same kinds of options the next time they’re in power.

Loyal opposition? The only thing the modern Democratic party can find to “oppose” are such irrelevant cosmetic features as the churchgoing habits and adopted Texas drawls of the ancient Connecticut banking family known for more than a century as the Prescott Bush clan, while shrieking about “tax cuts for the rich,” when this other set of elite millionaires who haven’t done their own grocery shopping in decades secretly define any private-sector slob who works hard enough to own a house as “rich.”

The only guy they could find to run against Bush was another, less adept Yalie poseur from Skull & Bones, and the only “agenda” they have to offer is to require us to ban smoking, use helmets and seatbelts, sort our garbage into different colored baskets, hand over our foreign policy to Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, and cripple our economy by signing onto the Kyoto Treaty scam (“Chinese smog? Bring it on!”) and blocking economic development anywhere in this country under the rubric of “smart growth” and protecting any “geographically distinct population” of scraggly weed or bug their babbling ecofreak subsidiaries can locate.

Oh, and -- of course -- ever higher taxes.

Some “alternative.”

### Las Vegas police Lt. Steve Franks is concerned about the midnight smash-and-grab theft of 1,700 blank Nevada drivers licenses from the DMV office on Donovan Way in Las Vegas March 7 -- along with a digital camera and all the other paraphernalia necessary to turn them into realistic IDs -- asserting last week the purloined documents could easily be used to pass through airport security checkpoints, etc.

Kind of like the way all those Arab hijackers got through our security checkpoints by showing their fake IDs, three-and-a-half years ago?

The thieves were sauntering around inside this highly secure government facility for an estimated 20 minutes -- long enough to have pizza delivered, if they’d thought of it.

And this follows the conviction last year of a Nevada DMV clerk who took $300,000 in bribes to sell unauthorized licenses and IDs to some 1,000 illegal aliens -- that they know of.

So, do we have this straight? a) All that billion -dollar “check-your-ID” crap at the airport has improved our safety and security not one iota, instead accomplishing nothing but creating jobs for thousands of new blue-gloved butt-gropers-in-training while further conditioning the American populace to be ready to show our “government-issued photo ID” on demand, any time, anywhere, and ...

b) The “driver’s license” is nothing of the sort (since otherwise the one you got when you were 18 would still be good, even if it featured no photo, the same as your original high school diploma), but rather constitutes the federally mandated 9-digit “internal passport and travel document” which Franklin Roosevelt solemnly promised our Social Security numbers would never be turned into, since those numbers would “never be used for purposes of identification, instead remaining confidential between the new Social Security Administration and any American who chooses to volunteer to participate in the old-age retirement program”?

Just checking.