have your "fewer freedoms"? My dear Commander in Chief, this political experiment of ours is fragile. It's still fragile. NOT so much because of our external enemies ... instead BECAUSE of national insecurities and doubts. We keep trying to export democracy when we don't really know what "true democracy" means ourselves in practice ... although we are a great laboratory: Civil Rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Lesser Recession, the Cold War, Reagan, Clinton, Iraq 1 & 2, Great Recession. Now. The forecast for the foreseeable future: "Gridlock with occasional signs of intelligence." Every Sunday I pray to a secular god: that the federal government in America gets its wits back. That we survive our clowns. Reading history has been my lifelong pastime and psychiatrist's couch: trust me, every era in Washington suffers its clowns. Washington and the nation did. Lincoln and the nation did. Obama and the nation are.