Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.

Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength.

Never, ever deal with terrorists. Hunt them down and, more important, mercilessly punish those states and groups that fund, arm, support, or simply allow their territories to be used by the terrorists with impunity.

One of the great problems with Americans is that - being a decent people - they assume that everyone else is equally decent.

Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.

The federal government neither has the power to site transmission lines, nor do we build them. That's done, as people know, in their own communities. The siting decisions and the permitting is done at the local level, or by state governments if it's interstate in nature. And federal government - this is one area we have no authority.

Our founding fathers made no mistake when they included the right to peaceably assemble among the first tenets of democracy.

Neither these statesmen nor their constituents sought in any way to use the Government for the interest of themselves or their section, or for the injury of a single member of the Confederacy.