Tom Daschle, the U.S. Senate's top Democrat, probably cooks a perfect soft-boiled egg. He knows just how high to turn up the heat, and just when to cut it.

For a month, Daschle made formal objections to President Bush's drive to start a war with Iraq. Then, when it came to a vote, he dropped them, like a Good American, and gift-wrapped the President's bipartisan support.

If the invasion goes well, Daschle can say he rallied 'round the flag. If it goes poorly, he can say, we warned you. It's the kind of democracy you can expect from statesmen who look no higher than the next election. And Daschle's sound-byte, when -- surprise, surprise -- he decided to back the President, was the basis for the afternoon paper's banner headline in my town. "Because I believe it is important for America to speak with one voice at this critical moment -- I will vote to give the president the authority he needs," Daschle said.

"One voice." The mainstream media stories I read and saw were all about closing the ranks, getting on America's team. It was a textbook lesson in Chomsky's "manufactured consent."

Yet the news reporting was sandwiched around quotes, excerpts from speeches on the floor of Congress, that seemed at times to be the words of madmen.

There was Sen. John McCain, saying Saddam Hussein is a "threat to every nation that claims membership in the civilized world by virtue of its respect for law and fundamental human values."

OK, so Saddam's a bastard (albeit, until not too long ago, our bastard). So, America should prove its membership in the club of "law and fundamental human values" by starting a war with another nation, snubbing international legal organizations, and bombing the slaves of Iraq because we don't like their master.

There was GOP whip Rep. Tom De Lay, digging right into the rhetoric of Dec. 8, 1941: "The question we face today is not whether to go to war, for war was thrust upon us. Our only choice is between victory or defeat."

Yes, with Iraqi paratroopers dropping over Dallas, war has truly been thrust upon us. Nobody, in any of the "one voice" articles I read that quoted De Lay, pointed out that Iraq has not attacked America, has not declared war on America, has not even asked the international community to clear the path for it to rain bombs down on America.

America speaks with one voice? If this is the voice, it's not a very observant one.

Democratic Rep. Dick Gephardt, the minority leader, invoked Sept. 11. "If you're worried about terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction or their components from countries, the first candidate you worry about is Iraq."

No it isn't. Start with Pakistan, or some of the former Soviet republics. As a Missourian, Gephardt does a piss-poor job of showing me. He makes no attempt to genuinely connect Iraq and al-Qaida.

Republicans, of course, are even more emphatic than Gephardt in asserting a connection, and even less interested in proving it. Dick Armey, majority leader in the House, plowed on about Saddam's "ongoing working relationship with a myriad of evil terrorist organization."

De Lay called Saddam "the world's leading purveyor and practitioner of terror." By the time De Lay finished, he'd left not an inch of space between Saddam and the Sept. 11 killers. "We'll defend our country by defeating terrorists wherever they may flee around the world," he shouted over the rattle of his sabre.

And, in what he evidently thought was a ringing conclusion, De Lay urged his fellow legislators to "put faith in freedom and raise your voices and send this message to the world: The forces of freedom are on the march, and terrorists will find no safe harbor in this world."

According to those who have followed the situation, Bin Laden and Saddam don't break bread on any level, which is logical because Osama seeks a return to a medieval Islamic community of the faithful, and Iraq is a modern strong-arm secular state that ruthlessly represses every Islamist or fundamentalist movement that crops up in its borders, as it would any group that could threaten Saddam's monopoly on power.

Yet U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, endlessly hint at a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. What's frightening is to think that they may be diverting resources of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, in a bid to prove what isn't true, for a political purpose. The certainty that, somehow, Saddam must have been behind Sept. 11 is the domestic equivalent of the insane belief in many Muslim lands that, somehow, it was all the work of the Jews.

Who knew that Saddam was such a bad guy? Not Dick Gephardt. "In 1991," he said, "no one knew the extent to which Saddam Hussein would sacrifice the needs of his people in order to sustain his hold on power." But Baghdad's 1988 genocide of its own ethnic Kurdish population was no secret. Saddam's troops had orders to kill every adult Kurdish male in northern Iraq, and they may have succeeded to the tune of more than 100,000. Some 60 villages were attacked with chemical weapons, in incidents well documented by international human rights and physicians' groups.

So far from being concerned, in those days, about Iraq's chemical arsenal, the Reagan administration secretly supplied Iraqi generals with bomb-damage assessments and information on Iranian troop deployments. Soon after the Kurdish attack, Washington signed off on the export to Iraq of virus cultures and a $1 billion contract to design and build a petrochemical plant that would make mustard gas.

Gephardt's feigned surprise is almost as transparent as Armey's sudden pathos for the poor suffering Iraqis: "The atrocities are beyond belief, beyond tolerance. And those poor people in Iraq live with each day, afraid to leave their home, afraid to speak at their own dinner table, frightened for their children that might be tortured in order to punish the parent's careless moment." For a guy who's been in Congress since well before the Kurdish atrocities, Armey, too, seems to be a bit slow to get in touch with his anger.

Armey said he "struggled" with the "hurdle" of whether a pre-emptive strike would be "compliant with the character of our great nation." But evidently it was a hurdle he was determined to get over. And when he couldn't, he decided it didn't exist. "It all gets involved with this question of pre-emptive strike," he said. "First of all, it is not a pre-emptive strike." Because, like De Lay said, we're already at war!

Saddam, Armey explained, "has consistently been in violation of his own commitments to the world for 11 years." That means he's declared war, see. I just hope nobody's keeping track of America's "commitments to the world."

As for working within the United Nations and the wisdom of building multinational coalitions, that's just so much sissy talk, as far as Sen. Phil Gramm is concerned: "I reject that. And I reject it because when we're talking about American lives, when we're talking about the security of our nation and the lives of our people, I am not willing to delegate the responsibility of protecting them to the U.N."

Gephardt waffled that issue, pointing out correctly that, "Completely bypassing the U.N. would set a dangerous precedent that would undoubtedly be used by other countries in the future to our and the world's detriment." Yet he went on to support a resolution that pleads with the President to play by the rules, while giving him permission not to.

Gephardt perhaps summed up his position with unintended irony when he said, "Exhausting all efforts at the U.N. is essential."

Armey's speech also drifted toward the Christian Right's morbid fixation with Israel: "And nations such as Israel, not exclusively Israel but right now, in the world, today, at a level of danger that is unparalleled by any other nation of the world, Israel struggles for its freedom, its safety and its dignity and it is in imminent, immediate danger by a strike from Saddam Hussein. And that represents a responsibility we have not only to what role we have played in the world, not only to our heroes who have acted it out in sacrifice, but to the character of this nation that we cherish and protect."

By the time Armey got this far into the rambling, it wasn't clear whether "this nation that we cherish and protect" meant Israel or America. In fact, he makes no distinction. "I've said as clearly as I can, to me an attack on Israel is an attack on America." It's a scary hint of how often U.S. foreign policy is driven by kooky Christian "End Times" fixations. Conservative American Christians fiercely support Israel, in large part so that all the Jews can go back there and 144,000 of them get converted to Christianity while the rest are slaughtered by the anti-Christ. That will usher in the Second Coming. No wonder, as the AP recently reported, "Many Israelis have mixed feelings about the support of the Evangelicals."

Even the opponents of the resolution often talked like idiots. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, urged a "no" vote because, if we start a war, our soldiers might get hurt (imagine that). And to make matters worse, our pension funds might take a hit. "The markets do not like war," she said. "They do not like the uncertainty of war."

But leave it to my own Rep. Joe Pitts to point out the next target in the war on terror: those '60s peaceniks. He's even got the ghost of John Lennon at his side. "Years ago, when I was a world away fighting to contain the scourge of Communism in Southeast Asia, a movement grew up here at home to protest what we were doing," he said before the vote. "Late in the war, one of the anthems of that movement was a song by John Lennon called 'Give Peace a Chance.' Now, we’re not here to debate the Vietnam War. But we are discussing war and peace. Peace is a precious thing, and we should defend it and even fight for it. And we have given peace a chance, for 11 long years."

He didn't study those '60s anti-war protesters closely enough, I guess. If he had, he would have seen the signs that said, "Fighting for peace is like f---ing for virginity."

So America is ready to rush off, with "one voice," to a new war, when it still has a ton of unfinished business in Afghanistan. A year ago, we were led off to war against Islamist terror groups, and they're still are not beaten -- whether al-Qaida or those who shake hands with them. They're likely behind the revolting carnage in Bali, the bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, the attacks on Christians and Westerners in Pakistan, plots to attack U.S. or British warships in the Straits of Gibraltar, and the elaborate plan to hit western targets throughout Singapore.

The Congressional debate was a sham. The final scene of it was a contest to see who could call Saddam a "terrorist" more times than anyone else, without being able to prove it at all. It was all done with a skillful eye to marketing for the next election and no regard -- Sen. Robert Byrd excepted -- for whether history will regard this as the moment America gave up the pretense of being part of the world, instead of the boss of it.