How many liberals does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, but it really gets screwed.

Sadly, this dry heave of a joke achieves the same level of sophistication as much of what passes for American political discourse. As we all know, through tactical genius the right has managed to turn the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” into the ultimate empty signifiers; they are now no more than rhetorical cudgels wielded by partisan politicians.

Eric Alterman’s Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America is a spirited attempt to undo the damage, to reclaim and redeem the concept of liberalism. Mr. Alterman thinks the remedy for the dizzying level of confusion and obfuscation attached to liberalism is actually quite simple—though exceedingly difficult to apply.

WE'VE BEEN TRICKED, he tells us. The policy positions advocated by the Democratic Party (in this book a virtual synonym for “liberals”) are not in fact the pet projects of a condescending elite; those policies actually represent the intentions and interests of a “supermajority” of the American electorate. Americans, says Mr. Alterman, are liberals—and any responsible public opinion poll conducted in the past 20 years proves it.

The alignment of Democratic and popular opinion has occurred for several reasons, including a migration of political positions: Democrats and liberals have moved rightward while the majority of Americans have moved leftward.

This substantive political connection is rarely articulated, however, due to the fact that “political pundits have treated as a truism” that liberalism is a credo of, among many other things, nasty, God-hating, baby-killing, smut-loving, elitist anti-American wimps. After providing a quick summary of the historical roots of liberalism, Mr. Alterman shifts into rebuttal mode, launching a series of responses to the typical assumptions about liberals. For instance, Mr. Alterman devotes a chapter to responding to such questions as: “Why Do Liberals Hate Patriotism?”; “Why Are Liberals So Damn Elitist?”; “Why Do Liberals Always Blame America First?”; and “But Why Are Liberals So Nasty?”

In good “I’m rubber and you’re glue” polemical fashion, Mr. Alterman’s strategy in these chapters is less to respond to these questions as to show how these accusations are more legitimately levied at the conservative accusers. He’s at his best when he focuses on matters of fact, like the chapter on everyone’s favorite ghoul: the smut-loving liberal pervert.

I generally enjoy the succulent irony of a hypocrite conservative extolling his virtue, but the example trotted out here is a little too freakish: Mr. Alterman caps his well-reasoned claim for the laxity of conservative morality by quoting from I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s loathsome novel, The Apprentice, in which the author floridly describes a 10-year-old girl locked in a cage with a sexually aggressive bear. It made me realize that for the past eight years we’ve been in the hands not only of chauvinist warmongers but a crew with wildly distempered minds.

Mr. Alterman is similarly convincing, though with far less salacious supporting material, when he discusses why liberals “deny” that the United States was created as a Christian nation. As he writes, “The evangelicals [during the founding of the republic] stood with Jefferson and Madison … to prevent the establishment of official churches because they deeply believed in the separation of the spiritual and the secular, as the latter could only corrupt the former.” Mr. Alterman uses this well-documented fact to turn the accusation on its head and attack fundamentalists for distorting the religious foundation of the country. “The fact is,” he writes, “contemporary conservative Christians could hardly be less in sympathy with the political sentiments of America’s founders if they converted to cannibalism.”

Mr. Alterman falters when he turns to more insoluble issues like abortion. Why We’re Liberal recites the typical liberal party line, which is fine as far as it goes, but won’t convince a skeptic. This leads me to one of the book’s critical misunderstandings: As Drew Westen reminded us in The Political Brain (2007), the most essential political decisions are not based on rational calculation.

“The good,” wrote the decidedly nonliberal Aristotle, “is that at which all things aim.” But defining the good, particularly when it comes to the most divisive issues in American public life, presents tremendous difficulties. When faced with these more thorny issues—and, in fact, when bolstering his primary thesis about the liberal inclination of America in 2008—Mr. Alterman deploys a barrage of polls, statistics and liberal logic to prove his point. But the good was never decided on the basis of a percentage; people’s sense of virtue is rarely engaged by a poll.

One last problem: A somewhat smug tone, however logical and humane the content, won’t help to change people’s minds.

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

“I was disappointed,” the Nebraska Republican said. “It was not the right decision in my opinion.”

Compared to much of the vitriol that has been hurled the President’s way on this subject, Mr. Hagel’s remark may have sounded tepid. But by the standards of the G.O.P. establishment, it is something approaching seditious.

Of course, we learned late last week that there exists a pronounced disconnect between the Beltway G.O.P. establishment that has so feverishly championed Mr. Libby’s cause and the sentiments of the party’s masses, 47 percent of whom (according to an ARG poll) disagree with the President’s commutation. And on the matter of a potential full presidential pardon for Scooter, the same poll found 70 percent of Republicans in opposition.

In other words, within his own party Mr. Hagel is hardly alone in his view – not that you’d ever get that impression listening to the GOP’s top presidential contenders, who have dutifully read from the establishment’s script, which casts Scooter Libby as the victim of a political prosecution.

And a similar disconnect exists, it seems, on the far weightier question of Iraq. The front-of-the-pack G.O.P. presidential candidates have happily parroted White House rhetoric that intimately links Iraq to the “war on terror.” At the same time, a recent poll of Iowa Republicans found that nearly 60 percent of that state’s G.O.P. base favored a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within the next six months. On this issue too, Mr. Hagel – who has been ostracized by the White House and G.O.P. opposition for his war opposition – has many kindred spirits in the grass-roots.

“The President,” Mr. Hagel declared today, “missed a tremendous opportunity when he did not use the (Iraq Study Group’s) recommendations late last year as the basis for a bipartisan solution.” You won’t hear such a statement from Rudy, Mitt, Fred or John, but it will surely find resonance with the growing number of Republican realists now awakening to their party’s ominously depressed condition heading into the ’08 election.

Mr. Hagel, as he always is in these settings, was quizzed by guest host David Gregory about his interest in the White House contest, and as always he offered no concrete utterances, promising a decision “in the next couple of months” and not foreclosing any of his conceivable options (running for President as a Republican, running as an independent, running for Vice-President on an independent Bloomberg-led ticket, or even running for re-election to the Senate).

Because of his Iraq outspokenness – without blinking, he argued today that the war was built on an “edifice of distortion” – and because of his dawdling, few believe Mr. Hagel has a realistic shot at the G.O.P. nomination, or that he’s even that interested in pursuing it. Far more likely, it seems, is a run as Mike Bloomberg’s Number Two, should the New York mayor enter the race next year. Mr. Hagel has played footsy with that very idea before, musing about how American it would be for a “New York boy and a Nebraska boy to be teamed up leading this nation.”

“Right now, I have no plans to switch parties or to seek the presidency as an independent,” Mr. Hagel said today, hardly pooh-poohing the Bloomberg-Hagel concept, since “right now” Mr. Bloomberg has no plans to run for President.

It is very tempting, since Republicans seem now to be coming to appreciate Mr. Hagel’s wisdom on Iraq (and other controversies, like the Libby affair), to reconsider his prospects for the G.O.P. nomination. But the challenge remains prohibitive: Even if Mr. Hagel has significant intra-party company in his apostasies, he’s also been branded a traitor to the G.O.P., a charge that is particularly damning among the hard core elements of the party and significant components of its interest group base, who collectively hold great sway in the nominating process. Their opposition creates an impenetrable brick wall for Mr. Hagel, as it did for John McCain in 2000.

But in his NBC appearance today, Mr. Hagel showed that he is pretty much alone among Republicans in speaking a language that non-G.O.P. diehards – the voters who will ultimately decide who the next President of the United States is – can understand and appreciate. Where the G.O.P. front-runners awkwardly (painfully, really) step around anything that might be taken as a criticism of President Bush and his policies, Mr. Hagel is blunt and direct in confronting the administration’s increasingly obvious failures.

Progress in Iraq is “going backwards,” he said, while also stating that “we can’t continue to put our people in the middle of a civil war and think this is going to get any better” and that the war has “done so much to undermine our own interests and influence in the Middle East.”

None of this is particularly revolutionary. Surely the 70 percent or so of Americans who want their troops out of Iraq agree with all of those points. But what do those 70 percent of Americans hear when they listen to Messrs. McCain, Giuliani, Romney, and even (Fred) Thompson?

The G.O.P. is flirting with an epic electoral wipeout in 2008. National polls that match a generic, unnamed Democrat against an unnamed Republican universally show the Democrats winning handily. A similar poll last week in Virginia, a state that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964, gave the generic Democrat a 14-point advantage. And a separate ARG survey last week found that 45 percent of the public wants impeachment proceedings for Mr. Bush – with 54 percent favoring the same for Dick Cheney. And look closer. Among independents, the disdain for the reigning G.O.P. is even worse: They favor Bush impeachment proceedings by a 20-point margin, and by 80-19 percent oppose the President’s commutation of Libby’s sentence.

Even in good times, it is a severe challenge for a party to retain the White House for three consecutive terms, and the evidence available now indicates a degree of exasperation with Mr. Bush and his signature war that makes the prospect of G.O.P. victory in ’08 simply bleak. Among prominent Republicans, only Mr. Hagel represents a complete and total break from a style of leadership that has fallen into such disfavor.

Today, he was offered the chance to clarify a months-old statement, in which he seemed to suggest Congress might ultimately be justified in seeking Mr. Bush’s impeachment. Remarkably, Mr. Hagel refused to shoot down the idea (despite repeated questioning), saying only that “I don’t see any effort to do that today.” That is precisely the kind of talk that kills any Hagel-as-GOP-nominee chatter, and yet it places him precisely in the mainstream of mass public opinion. More important, by entertaining the idea of impeachment, Mr. Hagel communicates a powerful message to the independent-minded masses that he understands and shares their outrage over their country’s condition – something the announced G.O.P. candidates, in their frenzy to appease the party base, are ignoring at their own peril.

Pushed by NBC’s Wimbledon coverage into the 8:00 A.M. timeslot on a mid-summer Sunday morning, Mr. Hagel’s appearance likely marked “Meet the Press’s” lowest-rated telecast of the year. But any Republicans who were in front of their tubes may well have been watching the only official in their party who can win the White House in 2008.

Even for an administration that has made a robust cottage industry out of politicizing the law, Mr. Bush’s fiat was a stunning move. Commutations come with quite explicit guidelines of their own – promulgated by the department of Justice back in the days before it became a Rove-branded house of patronage and prosecutions to solidify G.O.P. tactics of voter suppression.

“Requests for commutation generally are not accepted unless and until a person has begun serving that sentence,” the now-inconvenient manual for U.S. attorneys stipulates. It goes on to describe commutation as “an extraordinary remedy that is rarely granted.” Among the grounds it recognizes for a potentially legitimate commutation are “disparity or undue severity of sentence, critical illness or old age, and meritorious service rendered by the government to the petitioner, e.g., cooperation with investigative or prosecutive efforts that has not been adequately rewarded by other official action.”

Mr. Libby plainly falls under no such category. The term that judge Reggie Walton, a Republican appointee, meted out actually was on the low end of the scale for federal sentencing guidelines given the serious nature of the underlying crime in Mr. Libby’s obstruction conviction. (Glib Beltway pundits who have likened Libby’s dual conviction for perjury and obstruction to Bill Clinton’s House impeachment on the same charges tend to overlook that obstruction sentences closely track the severity of the offense that obstructers have sought to conceal. Needless to say, now that Mr. Libby’s trial has established once and for all that Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. agent he helped to out, retained her undercover status, the underlying offense is far greater here than in a duly adjudicated civil sexual harassment suit.)

What’s more, Mr. Libby’s own defense team argued strenuously in its sentencing hearings for Judge Walton to employ a more lenient sentence based on his government service, and failed; the judge replied, quite sensibly, that servants of the government should be held to a higher standard of truth-telling before a court of law, not a laxer one. For Mr. Bush now to hand down the Libby commutation on the very slender claim that Judge Walton’s sentence was excessive is to subvert—yet again—the independent rule of law with the blunt, unaccountable instrument of executive privilege, something, it need hardly be added, that he isn’t so readily up to doing for the many Americans moldering in jail cells under draconian drug interdiction and “Three Strikes” penalties.

Mr. Bush’s order is also remarkable for the many legal authorities it omitted from the process—again, in flagrant defiance of precedent in commutation cases. “There are procedures for this,” says Bruce Ackerman, Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University. “The key question here is the rule of law. And the rule of law is not exhausted by the president’s prerogative to issue pardons. I’m not questioning the constitutional prerogative of the president to issue pardons. But it is not the job of the president of the United States to simply exercise his power without the rigorous consultation of other authorities, and without following the procedures in place for these decisions.”

Mr. Ackerman also notes that the Libby commutation is of a piece with prior Bush White House exercises of executive fiat. Take the brutal interrogation of detainees in the war on terrorism. “To say that Geneva conventions don’t apply is one thing,” he argues. “To say it without actually going through the procedures is something else altogether.”

But as the Libby affront again shows, this presidency is nothing if not something else altogether—and as Mr. Ackerman notes, its procedural excesses are now harming the very reach of executive power it seeks relentlessly to extend.

“The fundamental problem with this administration is that it’s discrediting presidential power,” he says. “the fact that the president didn’t consult with the Justice Department on this, this sort of personalization of power—the idea that the president just decides what he wants to decide—this is all bad,” he says.

Mr. Ackerman’s lawyerly understatement here is itself rather telling—students of constitutional law have exasperatingly few reference points for this new nether realm of executive power. Which is probably why University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson cites the republic’s most forceful original dissenters from untrammeled executive powers—the so-called anti-Federalist opponents who opposed the Constitution’s ratification by the states.

“The people who opposed the Constitution were described as paranoids and men of little faith,” he says. “But a surprising number of them, including luminaries like George Mason, took what looked like a quasi-paranoid, conspiratorial view of the president’s pardoning power, arguing that a president could be involved in what they called a ‘treasonous cabal’ and would pardon one of his confederates after the fact. Now I obviously don’t think Libby was guilty of treason, and this is a commutation rather than a pardon. But lo and behold, it comes just as an appeals court refused to overturn or reduce his sentence. There’s no question but that this was designed to keep someone involved in an executive branch cabal from going to jail.”

Mr. Levinson also cautions that he “can’t really in good faith oppose the pardon power. But at the same time, it is important to realize it can be abused. I think this is a much, much more serious abuse of that power than Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, which I assume was tawdry. . . . Even if you agree to stipulate that the Libby sentence was excessive, the alternative isn’t zero.”
Nor are liberals the only legal thinkers taking vigorous issue with the commutation.

Bruce Fein, a former deputy assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan who now practices international and constitutional law with Bruce Fein and Associates and the Lichfield Group, argues that “impeachable offenses—and that’s what Libby did here—are not worthy of clemency.” Bush’s Libby dictat “again shows how Bush flouts his own promises and statements. Back when the Plame lead happened, he said ‘Anybody in my White House who’s going to be found complicit in leaking will be fired.’ And Karl Rove is right there staring him in the face the whole time. Then when the sentence came down, he said ‘I’ll let the appeals process be exhausted.' Well, when the appeals process didn’t produce the results he wanted, he decides to override it. It’s a flouting of the law. You may recall that I condemned President Clinton for perjuring himself in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Its seems to me, how can you have someone lie repeatedly and then simply exonerate him?”

Ditching the Libby sentence “makes a mockery of the conservative case to have impeached Clinton, and it makes a mockery of the whole rule of law.”

Has the pattern of abuse reached the point that Mr. Fein—who has already called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney—would support similar proceedings against the president? “Has Bush committed impeachable offenses at this moment? Yes. Will Congress have the political will and bravery to begin impeach him? No. In part it’s because they themselves don’t want to be held to higher standards. They think, ‘Well, I do this sort of thing all the time.’ ”

Though on the narrow question of the Libby commutation, Congress is largely hamstrung. The broad constitutional pardoning powers granted to the executive also leave Congress and the judiciary little maneuvering room, save to issue statements blasting the commutation and to convene public hearings on the matter—as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. is reportedly preparing to do.

And as is often the case in such moments of legal paralysis, citizens can only find meager consolation in the law of historical irony.

The first public pitch to grant a pre-emptive commutation to the felon Mr. Libby came courtesy of a Washington Post op-ed penned by William G. Otis, a former US attorney in Virginia’s Eastern district who also served as a legal counsel to George H.W. Bush and an informal campaign adviser to Mr. Bush the younger in 2000. He is now an adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law.

UPDATE: A Senate staffer confirms to me that Bush has commuted Libby's sentence.

UPDATE 2: It's up on Drudge and the AP wire now. Bush left the $250,000 fine intact.

UPDATE 3: In a statement, Bush says that "I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive."