2. I’m a big fan of “The Closing of the American Mind.” Read it, in fact studied it, while in the Navy right after college. I was embarrassed and inspired to try to go back and fix all those holes in my education. I was at the time, fresh from Harvard, exactly what Bloom was talking about - my esteemed teachers instructed me only read the skimmings, the late-19th century Germans and beyond, rather than reading what those Germans read.

3. I’ll tell you something even worse - talk about Orwellian - in China, the Communists changed the written language so much that you can read Mao, but not what Mao read. Fanatic Islam will play itself out, with more or less damage to the world depending on our will to resist, but those Chinese “Communists” will last longer.

2. As an historian, you conflate Confederate and Union casualties in your tendentious comparison to the Iraq War. Would it not then be reasonable to count casualties on both sides of the current conflict, since we are talking abouth human beings, afterall.

3. Your idea that America may have a superior form of government is a claim that can be made fairly. However, your claim that America has a superior “culture” is quite frightening. It is reminiscent of how others–people you would not wish to be associated with–have claimed that their “Kultur” was superior to those of other people they looked down upon. However, why make this point at all since it is clearly something you do not believe. You spend the bulk of your time decrying modern American culture as something you find again, “troubling” and “morally confused.”

4. Your claims about Al Quran are simply preposterous and your identification of Islam with the current threat by terrorist fundamentalists is also “deeply troubling” and “morally confused.” No further comment.

5. Mr. Salluto’s commentary cannot be characterized as “angry,” “bitter” or a “screed.” This is simply inaccurate use of language. You might say his remarks are “depressing” or “saddening” to you, but a “screed” requires ire and not the “quiet humility” that Mr. Salluto requests. Bitterness and anger usually don’t connect with a “day of atonement” either. Nothing in Mr. Salluto’s quoted remarks is the least bit seditious, in either Abraham Lincoln’s time or our own, and the only way you could possibly infer “seditious sentiment” is by citing the things that you claim Mr. Salluto has left out of his article. This concept of Mr. Salluto’s sedition, then, seems to be a fantasy that you have concocted from what you believe are telling absences in Mr. Salluto’s writing.

6. To a man with a hammer all problems look like a nail. Failing to see the distinctions between an attack by a sovereign government (Japan) and an attack by a group of 18 terrorists, who may or may not be associated with certain governments, is an extraordinary historical error. If such distinctions are not made, one could use your calculations to make war on Michigan (500 casualties in Oklahoma are 1/4 of Pearl Harbor and so therefore requires 1/4 the response of World War II on that poor northern state).