Generally speaking, the more people tell you how tough they are, the harder they're working to convince themselves. George W. Bush is no exception. The president's authoritarian impulses, on display during an amazingly petulant Rose Garden press conference, so clearly derive from his own fundamental weakness of mind and character that it's become increasingly embarrassing to watch him perform. The more strenuously Bush struggles to hide his Inner Punk, the more clearly it emerges.

Consider his childish response to NBC News' David Gregory's question about the administration's pre-election efforts to legalize torture. Bush's testy attitude toward the tall newsman he calls "Stretch" goes back a long way. After Gregory, covering a joint press conference in Paris in 2002, asked President Jacques Chirac a question in French, Bush sneered, "the guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental." Last week he mockingly told Gregory, "You're looking beautiful, Dave."

Gregory's challenging questions seemingly set Bush's teeth on edge. "Mr. President," he asked "critics of your proposed bill on interrogation rules (ask) ... If a CIA officer, paramilitary or special operations soldier from the United States were captured in Iran or North Korea and they were roughed up and those governments said, 'Well, they were interrogated in accordance with our interpretation of the Geneva Conventions,' and then they were put on trial and they were convicted based on secret evidence that they were not able to see, how would you react to that as commander in chief?"

Bush ducked the question. "My reaction is that if the nations such as those you name adopted the standards within the Detainee Detention Act," he said "the world would be better ... We're trying to clarify law. We're trying to set high standards, not ambiguous standards. And let me just repeat: We can debate this issue all we want, but the practical matter is, if our professionals don't have clear standards in the law, the program is not going to go forward."

Bush repeated the threat several times. Either Congress grants him police state powers, or it'll be tantamount to surrender in the "war on terror." Among the unambiguous high standards the White House apparently has in mind are subjecting suspects to nakedness, threats of violence against their families, sleep deprivation, hypothermia (dousing them with icy water) and simulated drowning.

Bush also proposes setting up military tribunals in defiance of two recent Supreme Court decisions defining terror suspects' legal rights: courts that would admit hearsay and evidence gathered by torture, where individuals could be sentenced to death without being allowed to see or rebut evidence presented against them. In short, the kinds of courts that gave Stalinism a bad name. Heaven help the poor Afghan or Yemeni whose name sounds like somebody in Al Qaeda, or whose neighbor covets his wife or camel.

Asked about former Secretary of State Colin Powell's concern that legalizing torture would cause other countries to doubt the moral basis of U.S. policy, Bush grew downright apoplectic. "It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective," he blustered.

Of course nobody, least of all Powell, made that comparison. But then Bush has no interest in legality. This entire degrading farce is about two things: His own country club tough-guy act, and an election year appeal to the instincts of the GOP "base" whose knowledge of the outside world is confined to two-dimensional TV melodramas and whose concept of citizenship is basically tribal.

Beard? Turban? String 'em up!

To the kinds of voters whose passions the White House needs to arouse between now and November, for Powell or anybody else to invoke what Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" is tantamount to treason. Or, for that matter, to David Gregory's ability to speak French. Who cares what foreigners or "pointy-headed intellectuals" think? An obsession with striking virile poses has preoccupied a substantial proportion of the electorate ever since the Confederacy lost the Civil War.

How large a proportion we may be about to learn. The original purpose of this entire pointless exercise -- even as presently constituted, the Supreme Court won't jettison due process, nor condone "cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by the Constitution -- was to concoct an election year bill Republicans could rubber-stamp and Democrats would resist, laying their patriotism open to question.

But the principled resistance of military men like Powell and McCain, as well as of Southern Senators like Virginia's John Warner and South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, has done more than complicate White House arithmetic.

It's also altered the symbolism, threatening to expose torture for what it is: a bully's tool for generating neither truth nor justice but fear, unworthy of a free people.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.