Right. Yes. Mitt Romney, if elected our president, “will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause and no one interest.” Nor should any candidate “become the spokesman for his faith.” Yes, naturally.

The extended therapy session informally known as the 2008 presidential campaign takes new twists, new turns. We might manage, by the time it’s over, 11 months hence, to figure out what we really want as a nation. Though one tends to doubt it. And if we do figure it out, we’ll almost surely change our minds.

I know, I know, “reading” is a righteousness issue: the kind that brings the well-meaning and high-minded to the table, causes them to pull off their spectacles and pass their palms across their foreheads at the imputation modern kids don’t want to do it.

So what’s to be thankful for this year? A few, things at least.

1. A kind of peace. Not peace itself, of course. That awaits the end of fighting all over the world, not just in bleeding, bomb-torn Iraq but also in the smaller places about which the media inform you only intermittently — Darfur, Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon and the like. Peace on Earth — the ideal — appears always to await circumstances humans seem incapable of affecting.

Curiously, it was the death of a committed Christian believer the other day that got me thinking about non-believers.

This has to be the Entitlement Age, because nobody I know of would call it the Age of Common Sense.

You take these two, I suppose you call them, ideals — entitlement to blessings and benefits on the one hand and shrewd appraisal of the way life works, and you find, I think, they match poorly, if at all.

I don’t see glee oozing from between every comma in David Kirkpatrick’s New York Times magazine article this past weekend on the “evangelical crackup.” He’s a good reporter, whose coverage of conservatives I regard as generally well balanced.

Living in 21st-century America is about — so I gather, from living there — leaving behind the awful memories of exploitative acts perpetrated by the old white male ruling caste and, from here on, incorporating into our lives and loves ... Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Barney Frank?

Memo to the president’s foes: It helps sometimes to have a president you hate. Think of the bad choices he can save you from, including those you urge on him. Consider the present guttural outcry — HOW DARE THIS CHILD-HATER VETO THE CHILDREN’S HEALTH INSURANCE BILL?

Vamos a ver, as we say down at Bo’s Hardware Store. According to an ABC News “Good Morning America” poll, two thirds of Americans don’t mind hearing Spanish spoken as a matter of course right here in the United States.

Mrs. Clinton wants us to be healthy -- depending, naturally, on how we define health.

Is it a matter just of knowing the federal government will get you in somewhere to do something for you when you need care of one sort or another? If so Mrs. Clinton may be your candidate. Her ideal is universal coverage: something for everybody, at an estimated cost of $110 billion a year.

So, in the end, Monday the Iranian wild man Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a dressing down from the man who had invited him -- in the name of free speech, you understand -- to speak at Columbia University.

I haven’t yet inquired of the most intelligent person I know, but I think she’d endorse a critical element in Alan Greenspan’s critique of the Republican party, as conveyed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

We’re a pragmatic lot, we Americans. Or would cautious be the word? Those who prefer clarity in public policy often seem doomed — with blessed exceptions like the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 — to witness no end of philosophical hemming, hawing, stammering and foot-dragging.

So, now (or just about now) — Fred Thompson, Republican candidate for president! As Jack Benny replied when the stickup man gave him the choice of his money or his life, “... I’m thinking.”

Umm-hmm. Yep. The Alberto Gonzales thing never was primarily about Alberto. Witness some of the edifying commentary that accompanies our first Hispanic attorney general on his way back to Texas.

We always get back to the same place, don’t we, whenever something goes wrong — the place known as How Can the Government Help?

With Rupert Murdoch having won his war for control of The Wall Street Journal, we can begin to reflect on the Meaning of It All.

The Democrats are poised to hurl America right over the cliff, to the rocks below.

Wait — I didn’t say they long to do such like, or that, in suicidal mood, they’d take the chance if they got it, assuming they win big in 2008. I think if they do win, much of the creepy teeth-baring and chest-pounding they presently go in for will likely just ... go away.

That Americans, after all these years of tearing their hair out and trying everything in the wide world else, still can’t iron out their racial predicaments tells us numerous things we need to understand.

Free speech — which means, to entirely too many self-styled liberals, “speech I agree with” — won a modest victory this week in the U.S. Supreme Court. A conservative majority of five reminded their four liberal brothers and sisters that the First Amendment to the Constitution encourages us to chatter on till kingdom come.

No one has the least idea how much money a corporate chief executive deserves to earn — is that the word, “earn”? — but if you don’t hear a campaign issue starting to crackle and sizzle, you just aren’t listening.