I've been taking more and more little breaks, and it helps. Of course, you might remember that the conversation almost ground to a halt when you went to Europe... ;)

Not that you're responsible for what happens to us.

It amazes me, the stuff you coax out of the Net, and the speed at which you do it. My hat is off to you, in professional admiration, as someone who personally answers something in the neighborhood of 30 multipart reference questions a day. I would give my eyeteeth to learn how to do the things you do.

You know I read a lot of your links. Not all of them, true. Sometimes I disagree with your interpretations of the documents you link to, but I know I haven't got the energy to hack away at it. I also know you deserve a response in kind when you have put so much effort into a reply. So it slides, because I'd rather say nothing than respond badly. Also, I have to do things like help a homeschool mom develop a unit on journalism for her co-op and stuff, which can take a while. Return again to my willingness to part with my eyeteeth.

And there's the 25 3rd-graders who all need to find 100+ page autobiographies on their reading level for a unit assignment. I swear, there is an Afterlife for teachers in which they get to do their own homework assignments using only the resources available to their students... But I digress...

It might be more fun for us all if we talked more about our personal lives and less about politics, if only for a little while. Personally, I'm loathe to do so because I've seen how fast an innocuous statement about one's life can get turned into a political, um, discussion, and I don't want to put my guard down for that reason. Another thing I admire about you is that you don't care about that, and you'll talk about your life.

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What I saw when I looked at the video:

Something which has truly wounded me as an American, and that I have seen before.

We as a nation are supposed to stand for the people's freedom to choose. Yet our diplomatic hobby for the last half-century has been toppling other peoples' governments because their politics don't serve our strategic interests, and propping up brutal dictators and oligarchs because their politics help us out. Administrations of both parties have done this, and it has somehow come back to bite us in the butt, yet we don't learn. We make things convenient for ourselves, and wind up making the world more violent than it needed to be.

It's not our fault that al Qaeda has executed many murderous terrorist actions around the world. It is our fault that we have sullied our own name and called our own principles into question by standing for justice and self-determination while hiring assassins and deposing elected leaders we don't like. We have not been responsible for al Qaeda's crimes, but we are responsible for helping to create the moral abyss from which they emerged. The manipulative power politics played out backstage, while "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is being sung for the insulated American people and our increasingly cynical foreign associates, has contributed to the hate that feeds the criminals and to the fear felt by the ordinary citizens in nations where they and other terrorists strike at will. Which face will America show to them today?

I am mortified, grieving, and more than a little angry myself. If we are going to be SOBs, let's be honest SOBs, and quit wrapping ourselves in the Declaration and the New Testament. Paymasters of assassins are not worthy of such lofty words.

I know some of you are thinking that that's just the price of preserving freedom. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I believe the words. I believe that, if you say them, they are more than theater: they become a bond. I believe that people who are so jealous of their own freedom can't be careless with the freedom of others without blackening our own hearts.

I'm an idealist in a nation whose cornerstone is idealist, but whose foundation is pure brilliant pragmatism. I'd like to see both parts of that national character lived, and lived gracefully, not just mumbled.