I have never heard of anyone who was a "model person" in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects; nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all.

The drug problem is in the United States, not in Mexico. It's a demand problem and that is to be dealt with here, and it is not being dealt with. It's been shown over and over that prevention and treatment are far more cost effective than police action, out-of-country action, border control, and so on.

When Nazi emissaries came to the United States, they were welcomed at Harvard.

Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.

Actually, the phrase "national security" is barely used until the 1930s. And there's a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power - Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere - so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for "defense."

For those of us who got into good colleges or the professions, did we stand up to that high school history teacher who told us some ridiculous lie about American history and say, "That's a ridiculous lie. You're an idiot"? No. We said, "All right, I'll keep quiet, and I'll write it in the exam and I'll think, yes, he's an idiot." And it's easy to say and believe things that improve your self-image and your career and that are in other ways beneficial to yourselves.

An unstated but crucial premise is that the "responsible men" achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path.