A silly TV commercial has reinvigorated my belief in the basic goodness of America.

I don’t mean to imply that I have seriously considered, even briefly, whether the great affection for my native country which I have long nurtured might be misplaced.

And yet the litany of her alleged sins, the citations of which bombard us so often and from so many directions and with such apparent malice, sometimes wears on even the most devoted of her suitors.

The matter, it seems to me, is not whether America is perfect.

It isn’t, by which I mean we aren’t.

We give billions of dollars to countries ravaged by hurricanes and earthquakes and famines, yet our ledger must also acknowledge Abu Ghraib.

On the balance, though, I’m as confident as ever that our foreign accounts are written in black ink rather than red.

The charges leveled against America that occasionally trouble me, though, are those that purport to chronicle misdeeds our government has committed within its borders, and against its own citizens.

Even the most faithful of patriots, it seems to me, can read only so many articles about federal agencies tapping telephones before they feel the frigid wind of totalitarianism, and goosebumps bead their skin.

Maybe, we think, there’s something to all this besides the empty bluster of partisan pandering.

But then a 15-second spot comes on the television and embraces viewers with the warm and reassuring hands of that brand of political parody that can exist only in the healthiest of democracies.

This happened to me the other night while I was watching a History Channel documentary about ice cream.

The pitchman on the commercial was peddling one of those digital devices that record TV programs. (The main lure of these machines, as I understand it, is they let you skip the commercials. Which is sort of a curious feature to tout in a commercial.)

The ad’s humorous hook is that the spokesman’s voice is a near-perfect mimic of President Bush’s. The actor lampoons the president’s well-documented verbal gaffes he mentions, for instance, the device’s ability to andquot;recordicateandquot; your favorite programs. (He might have said andquot;recordificateandquot; I was laughing and so I’m not sure I heard the andquot;wordandquot; correctly.)

The true comic gem in the commercial, though, is when the spokesman shows a sly, knowing grin and explains that andquot;pause,andquot; which he mispronounces with an exaggerated, ridiculous accent, is a French word that means andquot;stop.andquot;

That line really tickled me.

But after I stopped chortling I got to thinking about what I had just watched. I compared this with the notion, which seems to me to be widespread nowadays, that the gigantic entity that is the American government is fed up with freedom and is holding a lit Zippo a couple inches below the Bill of Rights.

Even though my eyes were still a trifle blurry from the tears of my laughter, I could see with unblemished clarity how absurd that very notion is.

I guess I just can’t detect the thud of approaching jackboots when I can turn on a TV channel that’s available in 95 million American homes and see someone who earns his paycheck implying that the president is an imbecile the very man who dispatches the cretins who any day now will snatch from you the last vestiges of the freedoms you cherish. And peel that Obama sticker from your bumper besides.

Nor can I believe that any despot who was despicable enough to inspire actual fear would let some TV huckster ridicule him that way. And in prime time, no less.

I watched the rest of the ice cream show with a lighter heart (but a heavier stomach I put away a bowl of Dreyer’s in the meantime, which seemed necessary). I even learned what the ice cream companies mean by andquot;slow churned.andquot;

The America that I love is no longer youthful, but it’s just as hale as ever, its bones solid and its vision not dimmed by two and a third centuries.

Those most noble of ideas which forged this nation in the crucibles of Lexington and Gettysburg will remain inviolable and absolute, I believe, so long as we can all let loose the carefree belly laugh of a child even when the source of our mirth is that one person we chose to represent us.

I was still smiling when I switched off the TV and went to bed. And why shouldn’t I smile? It’s no crime to make fun of a president. Not an American president anyway.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.