Picture the scene: It's early morning in Northern California. Two grim-faced men in suits knock on the door of a house, and a scholarly-looking man answers. In a matter of minutes, the men show the man golden badges of the U.S. Marshals Service, and he is loaded into a minivan in handcuffs. In less than a day, he is flown to the East Coast, transferred to a small government jet, and soon it is in the air, winging toward the Netherlands.

In a world where there is justice, this man's name is John Yoo, and he would be headed to the Hague, the seat of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

President Bush has sent his trade pact with Colombia to Capitol Hill, and suddenly Washington is not only ablaze with cherry blossoms but cluttered by chestnuts. Every old argument for the virtues of free trade is being recycled by the league of American editorialists, whose all-but-universal commitment to a failed policy will surely excite the wonder of future historians.

The amazing thing about the free-traders' arguments is that they never change. Today's free-trade commentaries make the same points as the pro-NAFTA editorials of 1993-94. Now, as then, bilateral trade is a win-win proposition for the peoples of both signatory nations. It raises living standards in developing nations. An educated American workforce has nothing to fear from competition.

Read these commentaries, and you'd think that the past 15 years hadn't happened.

"Many of our airlines were not performing proper maintanenance," Stewart explained, "and when Federal Aviation Administration inspectors tried to, I don't know, point that out, their own bosses at the FAA pointed something else out. When an FAA inspector took issue with Southwest Airline's safety record, the airline asked the FAA to remove the inspector, and the FAA did."

"When you think about it," commented Stewart, "when you fly, you are inspected quite thoroughly, whereas the plane itself is, perhaps, occasionally vacuumed. See, with this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it's a failure in the war on terror. But if the plane just blows up on its own, eh, it's the market self-regulating."