Zeyad offers clarifications, good wishes and links to new Iraqi additions to the blogosphere. What's remarkable is the interest and familiarity many of these blogging Iraqis have with the works and philosophies of America's Founding Fathers. At the end of a previous post, Zeyad quotes Alexander Hamilton. An author of one of Zeyad's recommended weblogs praises Thomas Paine. Consider the ease with which these few Iraqis treat passages that far too many Americans - highly educated Americans - would consider esoteric and opaque, phraseologically and philosophically obsolete. (No slang? No ironic qualifier to round off the statement? Absolutist beliefs? Shame!)

The regret is, then, that American political discourse loses much by skipping over its fundamental documents to more accessible, modern thought. But we should be both impressed and heartened to see that the young men and women of a free Iraq are so attracted to the speeches, treatises and biographies that drew up our country's blueprint.