At what point does it become clear that we no longer inhabit America?

A book called "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press) shouldn't promise uplift and spiritual renewal. I know. I wrote it.

Nearly 20 years after a Hasidic Jewish boy riding across the Brooklyn Bridge was killed by a Muslim fighting jihad, a British soldier was hacked to death and reportedly beheaded on the streets of London by Muslims fighting jihad.

Grief and politics don't mix. When raw, aching grief and the dirtiest kind of politics meet, a hot volcano of pain and outrage erupts that is unstoppable. But it is necessary. It is the only way things might ever be clean again.

"I want to ask a couple of questions about the February 17 Martyrs Brigade," said Rep. Blake Farenthold.

We have met the enemy and he is "self-radicalization." No, wait: We have met the enemy and he is the Internet. We have met the enemy and he is broadband video?

Let’s pick up where last week's column left off with that Saudi national in Boston – Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the 20-year-old “student” who was acting suspiciously enough after the Boston bombing to be “detained” under guard at the hospital and named a person of interest in the April 15 attack.

After the FBI rescheduled another postponed briefing on the Boston Marathon Massacre for 8 p.m. on Wednesday night -- and then canceled that one, too -- that was it. I was going to give the news circus a rest until morning.

More than 5,000 words into the New York Times Magazine report on everything ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and his wife, Huma Abedin, want you to know about Weiner’s “sexting” scandal that led him to resign from Congress in 2011, reporter Jonathan Van Meter pauses the story.

Get ready for the last straw.First, though, I'd like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a forbidden column

Talk is cheap, Gen. Petraeus. You may not agree. After all, your Washington, D.C., super lawyer, Bob Barnett, charges you something like $900 an hour for a kind of talk best described as reputation reconfiguration or image management, and that's not cheap.

I found myself in a group conversation that included one of the more instantly recognizable media figures -- someone who personifies the phrase"mainstream media." Since this isn't something that happens every day, why not make the best of it?

Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama went off his teleprompter and added a couple of sentences to the text of a speech about expanding the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps.

Republican Rand Paul took to the floor of the U.S. Senate this week to filibuster John Brennan's nomination to become head of the CIA. "I will speak as long as it takes," the junior senator from Kentucky said, "until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court."

One last question about newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Why?

Freshman Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is just the latest in a long series of public figures to be reviled for "McCarthyism" following his recent questioning of Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for secretary of defense. The response? Conservatives have rushed to defend their own against the charge. To understate the case, that's not enough. It's time to debunk McCarthyism itself.

I may be the only American who has seen both the "panic room" where Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard fled in 2010 as a Somali Muslim man hacked at the door with an ax, and the apartment house where this week Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, 70, was almost killed by an "Arab" - or "Pakistani" -looking man posing as a postman.

And so it came, the coup de grace. The final "barrier" to "opportunities" for women in combat is no more.

One day, I hope, Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings will stand as testament to the smoke-and-mirrors dangerousness of U.S. foreign policy, circa 2013 -- both as executed by the executive branch of government and as weakly grasped by the legislative branch.

Not one of the 23 executive orders that President Obama signed -- flanked by schoolchildren whom none of us want to see murdered and before an audience that included relatives of murdered schoolchildren -- would have prevented the massacre at Sandy Hook.