It was a typically raucous recent evening at the Kirby household, reading the light, frothy and "seditious" Federalist Papers . In the very first essay, written by Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, I came across this sublimely sonorous axiom: "For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution."

Two-hundred-twenty years after that fecund giant wrote this particularly pithy passage, its incredible power naturally suddenly got me thinking about the direction I lean politically -- along with my idea of a good president, or leader in general.

Everyone has their own peculiar notion of a decent president. Some people like presidents who lower taxes and run up the largest federal budget deficit in history. Others confide all their trust in a president who holds human beings in prison indefinitely, without charge, torturing them in order to win, or keep the peace at any cost.

There also are those who truly adore a president who bugs his or her citizens' homes in the name of "freedom" without a warrant -- until it happens to them personally, of course. Then, strangely enough, it instantly becomes an unforgivable defamation of their sacred constitutional rights. Heh, imagine that.

I have one criterion for an OK president: Can I criticize him or her without being threatened with arrest; without brutality; without having an FBI van pull up outside my house; without being called unpatriotic, a traitor or a commie worm?

Most important of all, dearest to my heart: Can I disagree with presidential policies without alienating and losing friends in this lovely little place I've called home since 1977, since I was a toddler?

Hallelujah! I'm not going to have any of these multitudinous problems of the past eight years during the next four.

Nathan Kirby, Augusta