The TV media were hard at work last week. Their fearless reporting was evident at the recent Democratic debate, when Obama was asked whether or not he supported the flag and Clinton’s claims about her Bosnia trip were examined.

They must have left the hardball questions for the next debate: “Sen. Clinton, what is your favorite color?” “Sen. Obama, do you support rainbows? If not, why do you hate America?”

Meanwhile, back in reality, President Bush recently told ABC news that he personally approved methods of interrogation long considered torture by the United States, not to mention the rest of the world.

“We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it,” Bush said to ABC about the decision to torture an al-Qaeda suspect.

The “legal opinions” were from Bush’s own lawyers, of course, such as Berkeley law professor John Yoo, a man who believes the president has the power to crush the testicles of a child in the name of national security.

Bush told ABC reporter Martha Raddatz that he and his national security staff — Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and the rest of the gang — all got together and personally approved the so-called “enhanced interrogation methods,” or what was commonly called “torture.”

Mistreatment of prisoners is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and the 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act, which, when passed unanimously by a Republican Congress, imposed harsh penalties for such breaches, including the death penalty if a prisoner were to die.

There will predictably be the moral relativists who compare our crimes to the atrocities committed by the other side, though Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter is quoted as saying, “I didn’t think the idea of the game was to become them. I thought it was to stay the United States … with our ideals and values.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has said violations of Geneva “are considered war crimes,” so it would be assumed that approving a violation of Geneva would also be a war crime.

The Democratic leadership has stated that none of this really matters because elections are approaching and obviously take precedent. Besides, if they actually tried upholding the Constitution and international treaty obligations, then “Fox News would have a field day,” as John Conyers, a ranking democratic congressman, said.

The rest of the world — not to mention 43 retired admirals and generals who recently petitioned Congress to uphold Geneva — actually take Geneva and the Convention seriously.

European judges and prosecutors are already speaking about indictments of administration principals for war crimes, according to international lawyer Philippe Sands. America’s tremendous power is what currently stands in the way of foreign legal intervention.

It’s going to be very interesting how things pan out in the coming months and years. As Attorney General John Ashcroft so dutifully understated, “History will not judge this kindly.”