“The world is a dangerous place to live - not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

I’ve been watching the HBO series John Adams, an enthralling telling of the beginning of our Nation. As portrayed in this wonderfully detailed series, our birthright is one forged in the fires of rebellion against injustice and fueled by the belief in the rights of the common man.

John Adams defended the British soldiers charged with murder in The Boston Massacre not because he supported the British, but because he believed in The Law. His support for the colonies’ break from Great Britain was steeped in British usurpation of the colonist’s rights under The Law.

While I, like most who watch this series, still feel a quickening heartbeat as the Continental Congress declares our “Independency,” I also watch it with a fear that we have lost too much of that for which those men staked their lives. I feel a deep sadness over how far we have fallen from our moral pinnacle and am afraid to look down at how much further we might fall.

Our present government’s reading of The Constitution has resulted in the practice of a legal doctrine that says anything and everything the President authorizes in the fight against terror, regardless of what The Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say, is all right. That includes torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

And it is not just the Executive who is guilty. Congress has gone along by giving in to the Bush Administration at virtually every turn with little more than a whimper of resistance. Nor is there much support on Capitol Hill for holding those in political office who have abused The Law accountable.

This mind-set has given us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret “black sites” prisons.

By abandoning the Rule of Law, the United States, as the lone remaining superpower, has become on the world stage the hated playground bully. We are the strongest, but no one likes us; we curry favor from those who are weaker because they are afraid of us; we steal lunch money from the school geeks who have no way to fight back; our compassion for those less fortunate has become a platitude we like to mouth while we sucker punch anyone who disagrees with us.

When the constraints of the law are removed and the men and women at the pinnacle of power are no longer held accountable, terrible things happen -

You end up with untried, uncharged detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month.

You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death.

You have human beings sexually humiliated and driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation

And you have the common man, the one for whose rights our forefathers wintered at Valley Forge, being water-boarded.

In her book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, Jane Mayer writes that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the noted late historian, believed “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.” Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world - ever.”

The beliefs that drove the founding of our Nation, as told in John Adams, and the premises upon which our present government chooses to act are so disparate, so incongruous that it is almost impossible to comprehend how far down the ladder of moral certitude we have slipped. To much of the world, we have become everything the colonists hated about British tyranny and in doing so, we have abdicated any claim we ever laid to moral leadership.

Perhaps we should replace “May God Bless America” with “May God Have Mercy On Her Soul,” for we certainly are no longer deserving of God’s blessing.