Mr. President, I’m here to give you some advice.

I want to talk to you about this torture stuff. A couple of weeks ago, your administration released some memos that offered the legal justification for waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. I know this was not your decision. A court had ordered the release of those memos, and you didn’t want to spend time or energy fighting on behalf of the last administration. I understand that logic. I don’t completely agree with it, but I understand it.

With the release of those memos, some of your friends on the left started talking about hearings. Let’s see if laws were broken. Blah, blah, blah. The editorial page of The New York Times suggested Congress impeach federal Judge Jay Bybee, who wrote one of the memos when he was with the last administration. Some folks began daydreaming about seeing Dick Cheney in the docket.

I would love to see Dick Cheney in the docket, sir. The very thought gives me the chills. But at what cost? We are already a divided country, and if you let your friends on the left unleash some kind of cultural revolution, we would come apart. Don’t kid yourself that we could have hearings and trials and still take care of other business. Everything else would come to a stop.

Then there is the suggestion of a nonpartisan commission. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy is among the heavyweights pushing for that. “I know some people say, ‘Let’s turn the page.’ Frankly, I’d like to read the page before we turn it,” he said.

Why would he want to read the page? We already know what’s on it. We tortured people.

It’s not the first time we’ve done a bad thing. We killed the Indians and drove them off their land, right? A good part of our early economy was built around slavery. We grabbed big chunks of land from Mexico. We helped install the shah in Iran. We worked to nudge out the elected Salvador Allende in Chile. I could go on, but why?

One thing we’ve always been good about is turning the page. We can learn from our mistakes without wallowing in them.

Truth is, Mr. President, most of us don’t care that much about torture, anyway. Is it bad? Sure. Did we prosecute the Japanese for torture, which included waterboarding? Yes, we did. But really, if waterboarding had been the extent of the Japanese mistreatment of prisoners — think Bataan death march — I doubt we would have bothered.

Besides, people like me grew up reading about James Bond, Agent 007. That double O meant he had a license to kill. I know he was English, but President John F. Kennedy was a big fan. So it was as if the president were condoning Bond’s exploits. How can you condone killing and prosecute waterboarding?

Most of us are more concerned about the economy. What are we going to do about jobs? We don’t make anything here anymore. Also, we worry about the deficit. Also, the world situation. What’s happening in Pakistan? That country seems to be falling apart, and it’s got the bomb. That’s scary.

We want you to concentrate on all that stuff.

Naturally, there is a political side to this, too. I have always wondered what the national debate would have been like had George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani and the rest of them had gone to Vietnam, and John Kerry, Max Cleland, Wesley Clark, Jim Webb and Jack Murtha had been the ones with other priorities. Do you think maybe the Republicans would have waved the bloody flag?

In that same vein, I wonder how some of the people on the right would have acted had Al Gore been president on Sept. 11, 2001. Would they have come together behind Gore? Maybe. But what happens if the left is allowed to go ahead with hearings and impeachments and trials, and then the terrorists strike again?

The right will have you for lunch, sir.

So far, Mr. President, you have been nuanced about this. You talk about moving forward, but then you say you don’t want to prejudge the situation. Perhaps you think such a balancing act is appropriate. This is not a time to think like that. Nuanced to you is wishy-washy to us. This is a time for you to stand up and say, “No hearings, no commissions, no trials, no impeachments. We’re not torturing any more, but we’re moving forward.”