By L.P. LUPO

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The capacity to interrogate members of al Qaeda is not about discovering their plots.

It is about “who we are as a people.”

Building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border is not about keeping out illegal aliens.

It is about “who we are as a people.”

A federal identity card is not about helping grandmothers board airplanes or stopping voter fraud.

It is about “who we are as a people.”

Whoever we are as a people, I have had it with the “who-we-are-as-a-people” people; their hackneyed phrase resulted in 62,400 finds on google.

“Who we are as a people” has become an all-purpose trump card for every potential solution to a problem. After each solution is offered, debated, countered and rejected, it all comes back to “who we are as a people.”

Why don’t the “who-we-are-as-a-people” people admit that they don’t think the problem is a problem or that they actually like the problem, or if they see it as a problem, they don’t want it solved while George Bush occupies the White House? That way we can avoid the drawn-out debate, which ends in the “who-we-are-as-a-people” veto.

Exchanging anything more than cocktail-party banter with captured enemy combatants amounts to torture. And all such pseudo-torture is not “who we are as a people.” Immigration control? It is not “who we are as a people.” National ID’s for voting and boarding airplanes? It is not “who we are as a people.”

Bush’s supposedly inappropriate reference to Islamic-fascism is not “who we are as a people.”

Yet the same people get offended if anyone suggests it is absurd to call Bush a fascist. You see, calling President Bush names is “who we are as a people.”

Some of the “who-we-are-as-a-people” people are those who buy into the moveon.org/Noam Chomsky/Hugo Chavez view of America.

They imagine America to be an imperialistic police state, while maintaining the “who-we-are-as-a-people” fallacy of boomer white women in embroidered jean skirts and old white guys with pony tails singing, “We are the World.”

The “who-we-are-as-a-people” people not only misrepresent who we are as a people but misrepresent us in the political sense.

It is the “who-we-are-as-a-people” people who have lost the last three elections.

So let’s give the cheap slogan a break. Let’s argue proposals on their merits and let’s figure out the mid-term elections on issues and candidates, not on caustic agit-prop or dewy-eyed misrepresentations of “who we are as a people.”