Texas holdem submitted the following:

“I lay it down as a fact that if everyone knew what others say of them there would not be four friends in the world.”

I have cleaned up my act on that. I used to make a lot of people very suspicious of me. When I was in a bad mood I would say something nasty about someone I knew. I finally realized that the people I was talking to had seen me being very friendly to those people to their face, so they wondered what I was saying about THEM behind their backs.

Unless I have to warn somebody about someone else, my rule is never to say anything about anybody that I don’t want them to hear, criticism included.

To my surprise this was very easy. I thought it would take a lot of discipline, but it didn’t.

By the same token I almost never write anything in an email that I wouldn’t let the world read.

We used to have a saying on Capitol Hill and in the Administration, “Never write anything down that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post.”

That was especially true of conservatives.

It was a rule not a law so we had to violate it sometimes. But we did so very seldom and we used a shredder.

I think my learning not to say what I do not want people to hear also came from my experience as an interrogator. I found that if you let a person talk and you know how to listen, he will tell you everything about himself.

So I learned to listen to myself from the outside.

I not only read each comment a half a dozen times, I also go back and see if there are any new comments on the old articles.

We tried to start a talk page for WhitakerOnline but it fizzled out. Most of those tries do.

Then I thought about introducing a comments page each week, but that would mean I would have to edit it. That’s touchy, as anybody who has done any editing knows.

So the comments here represent the first time I have had a two-way exchange with you.

Writing without anybody commenting on it is like talking to yourself. Hell, it IS talking to yourself! I have explained to people that a writer has to be nuts. A writer is somebody who sits at a computer and talks to himself for hours at a time.

He talks to himself by writing it, but that doesn’t make it any more sane.

Anyway if you put something in the comments I will definitely see it, no matter how far back it goes.

I just answered two of the older ones.