I think the world has got fanatics all wrong. The world has both too broad and too narrow a concept of fanaticism. We generally think of fanatics as wild-eyed zealots and bomb-throwing radicals, people who are more inclined to destroy than reform. But the term is often broadened to include non-violent people of principle who attach themselves to one cause above all others because they believe it is, by its very nature, of primary importance. Many who are adamant about the right to life, for example, make it their practice to avoid voting for any candidate who favors “abortion rights,” regardless of how good they might consider that candidate to be on other issues. For this they are frequently derided as “single-issue voters.”

Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas has written a “Grieving at Christmas” meditation on the pain and suffering of those who have lost loved ones in one or more of the wars our nation has been fighting over the past decade. The sense of loss weighs most heavily at Christmas time, he notes, when an empty chair at a family gathering might be a grim reminder of one who is not there because his life was cut short by a bullet or a bomb in a city or on a battlefield half a world away. It may be “the most wonderful time of the year” for many, perhaps most of us, “but for those whose fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers or children have died in Iraq and Afghanistan there is a void this Christmas, and Christmases to come, that can never be filled,” Thomas wrote. “It is the same in every war.”

The pro-Gingrich New Hampshire Union Leader/Sunday News published an editorial attack on Ron Paul Sunday, calling “Renegade Ron” a “gadfly, not a contender” in  New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Perhaps it's a sign the editorial board is worried that the Texas congressman, who has moved into first place in the latest Iowa poll, may overtake Gingrich in New Hampshire as well.

They arrive now with monotonous regularity. Another day, another announcement by a New Hampshire politician of his or her endorsement of Mitt Romney for President. Former Governor John Sununu. Former Governor and U.S. Senator Judd Gregg. Senator Kelly Ayotte. Umpteen members of the New Hampshire House and Senate. Romney's the one. A businessman. A leader. The one who will create what all America wants — jobs, jobs, jobs! Overseas, seas, seas. Yet the Romney record suggests he'll be creating the jobs overseas, seas, seas, and that's what we'll be hearing from the Obama camp from here to reelection.

On Monday, November 21, I was chatting with a longtime acquaintance about the anniversary that would fall the next day, on November 22. On that date 48 years ago, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by ... well, there's the rub. For skeptics, the official version of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin still rings hollow.

Millions no doubt have read or heard the Hans Christian Andersen tale of how some alleged weavers of long ago convinced their emperor that the new clothes they were selling him were made of such fine and rare material that only the stupid and incompetent could fail to see the exquisite threads. The emperor, not wishing to be exposed as either stupid or incompetent, bought the story and the invisible “clothes.” He wore nothing else as he went though the streets in a grand parade, hearing nothing but praise from his subjects on the excellence of his royal attire. Until one simple, unschooled child broke the spell by crying out the simple, unadorned truth: The emperor was wearing no clothes at all.

It's amazing that most of the presidential candidates manage to find time to run for president when they're so busy running for national superintendent of schools. Republican candidates typically tell us in one breath they want to get the federal government out of education and in the next that they have some really swell ideas for educational reform they'd like to implement (impose?) once they're in charge of the federal government.

Do we really understand what courts are for in America? I mean, do even really smart, educated people like (I realize I’m going out on a limb here) lawyers and people with prestigious titles like “U.S. Senator” in front of their names really understand and appreciate the role of the courts? Or does it all get run over and crushed by the pressure of politics?

Asked about newspaper publishers who opposed his presidential candidacy in 1952, Adlai Stevenson was prepared with a characteristically witty rejoinder:

"Their job is to separate the wheat from the chaff and then print the chaff, " the Illinois Democrat said.

Another Memorial Day has arrived and I again have it in mind to finally get to the end of a book I have begun reading several times but never finished. It is David Halberstam's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of how our nation got bogged down in what might be called the Q (for Quagmire) War — World War 'Nam in Southeast Asia. Before I had reached the Goldwater days of my youth, I didn't even know there was a Southeast Asia. I was hardly aware of Asia at all. But once I learned our fellow Americans were fighting Communist aggression there, the righteousness of the war appeared self-evident. In the words of a song that became a hit in the 1960s, the young men of my generation heard the sound of "Distant Drums."