Susan G., over on Daily Kos, waxes indignant over the president’s imaginary transgressions, strikes a pose of death-defying resolve, and formally spurns the protection of her own government.

Mr. Bush, I’ve decided the price is too high for my conscience. If Gitmo – and the torture and denial of due process accompanying it – is a necessary part of protecting me, I hereby officially release you from the obligation. I’m opting out of this protection racket you’ve set up. Think of me as just one less tile on the human shield you’ve created, using the safety and fear of American citizens to hide behind while you seize more power.

After years of soul-searching, I’ve decided to take my chances in a risky and unpredictable world – one from which your administration can’t fully insulate me anyway, even with the best of intentions – than to live my life duct-taped and “safe” in a wire-tapped American closet where I’m not free to tell you I think you’re a nincompoop and a danger to humankind…

Stop trying to terrorize me with Islamic boogeymen…

Unlike an apparent majority of American voters, I don’t think membership in our national cult of exceptionalism has automatically exempted me from personal death. The fact that I was born on a certain continent in a certain era does not automatically signal to me that nothing bad – especially dying – will befall me.

I can live with the fact that someday I will die, no matter how many of my “freedoms” you take away. Please, direct your future energies toward protecting those who think denial of death and bargaining away the raucous, electrically vivid and unpredictable present moment is a wonderful way to live a life. Count me out…

no matter how many rights you take away from me, you can’t protect me from my biggest fear: You.

Exactly of what rights Mr. Bush may have deprived this lady is unclear. Certainly her right to indulge in adolescent displays of self importance appears untouched. Her right to throw around wild accusations seems completely intact. And her fuzzy-thinking privileges appear inviolate.

If the lady has any genuine complaints, they ought to be directed at the Left, of whose pathological culture of ersatz self-righteousness and perpetual indignation she is obviously a disastrous product.

Edward Everett Hale, during another time when many Americans were indulging in public expressions of disloyalty (1863), published his famous story The Man Without a Country. I wonder if Susan G. has ever read it.