Founders befuddled. (Up front: news and opinion from independent minds).

The wraith of Thomas Jefferson appeared February 7, 2002, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. Looking glum throughout the prandial affair, Jefferson later e-mailed John Adams. Sadly, his message (below) bounced.

Dear Sir:

I accede to your superior powers of prognostication. Science did not, as I had predicted, liberate the minds of men from rank superstition and ecclesiastical imposition. In 2002, I find, to my chagrin, priestly dogma infects the highest levels of American government. The president, one George W. Bush, doubles as priest-in-chief of a Holy American Empire.

At a "prayer breakfast" attended by foreign dignitaries, congressmen, and prominent clerics, Mr. Bush urged the populace to turn to prayer amidst a national crisis precipitated by an enclave of Mohammedan saboteurs. Not turn to reason, I say, but to prayer! Recent events had put him, he said, "on bended knee."

Might you think, sir, he was petitioning a despot swayed by servility? Does the Potentate favor the most obsequious grovelers? Is the Creator, who endowed us with intelligence, freedom, and liberty, actuated by vanity rather than justice?

The priest-president extolled faith. He asseverated that faith strengthens, faith abides, faith surmounts every obstacle. Unfortunately, he didn't clarify the efficient mechanism by which faith effects its preternatural wonders. I opined, sir, that faith works in tandem with groveling.

Faith seems to jostle the fiscal policy. "Faith," Mr. Bush averred, "shows one the way to self-giving, to love our neighbors as we would want to be loved."

Mr. Bush purports to admire Jesus Christ. One would therefore expect Mr. Bush to conform schemes of taxation to Jesuine ethics. The historical Jesus, sifted from the mythic figure of triune humbuggery, threatened mammon with eternal damnation. He unremittingly contemned Dives. The Galilean, sir, as you know, was a paladin for the poor, the destitute, the downtrodden.

Does our people's president, then, clog patricians with leaden taxation? "Indeed, he must," you say. "He would otherwise be impugned as deficient in rectitude." Well, sir, hear and perpend: Mr. Bush proposes a $2 trillion tax cut, 43 percent of which goes to the wealthiest 1 percent of the populace!

And yet, sir, so has the popular mind prostituted itself to mummeries of piety, Mr. Bush passes for a humble and sincere Christian!

With kindly regards and best wishes, as ever your humble ... etc.,

Thomas Jefferson

Gary Sloan is a freelance writer from Ruston, Louisiana.