Peggy Noonan, Reagan's best speech writer, helped enable a presidency that I think will be considered - a hundred years from now - as a time of appalling social savagery.

Thing is, much as I dislike Noonan, she's a pretty smart woman, and sometimes has some good stuff to say - even if she's working for the farking WSJ . . .

It's hard for anyone who wasn't there to understand what 1968 was like. Even harder, perhaps, to understand what it was like to come of age in the late 60's. It was a time of enormous hope, unbelievable possibility, and crushing loss. I was seventeen the night Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I can still remember the pain of hearing that news. (And I was a white kid in the north, so my pain was as nothing compared to that of the folk who were really invested in him.) I remember where I was the morning I heard that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I remember the insanity of the 1968 democratic convention when Eugene McCarthy, the first politician to whom I gave my heart, was shoved aside so the machine could continue with Hubert Humphrey, a once great man who had been compromised by his loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, a once great man made insane by the trap of the Vietnam War.

I remember the hope, and I remember the loss. I remember the way dreams died at Kent State.

And my heart has been broken for forty years, mourning for the country that I love, and the dreams that I grew up with.

As a New Yorker, please let me apologize for the fact that my Senator, Charles Schumer, has agreed to vote for the confirmation of the current spineless creature being considered for Attorney General.

Here is the email I just sent him . . .