I believe that we who live by writing or speaking in public have to be able to take it as well as dish it out. You'll find nothing overly personal in my responses to you. But let me give you a few hints about public discourse.

1. "Pulling rank."

Acting like you know best because you've been around longer is an invitation to be referred to - in this case affectionately - as a geezer. And you are acting the curmudgeonly role to the hilt. Oh, yes, you've seen it all, you know it all, you've slept with a machine gun and dealt drugs to feed hungry children from the log cabin where you were born and built with your own bare hands. Fine. Calling me a pipsqueak - I liked that one, really, because it makes me feel young - simply confirms it for the crowd. Once you pull rank (as you did with your grandfatherly "I've been around for 30 years" script) you should always expect the geezer comment or something like it.

And remind yourself of where you are: In Mexico, if you're fat you are affectionately called "gordo." Thin, "flaco." Dark skinned, "negro." Light-skinned, "guero." Young or small, "chico." And if you are a senior citizen you are "viejito" which is something akin to "geezer." So don't pull that US-style politically-correct "oh, I'm such a victim" stuff with me. Not here. It cuts against your valued role as a voice of, ahem, experience.

2. "Making stuff up."

I think that educated people who can read and write and who have modems and computers have a privilege that brings responsibility to be impeccably honest. When we call ourselves journalists, the responsibility is even greater. You are absolutely right that my fangs come out when I see privileged, educated people making stuff up instead of doing research that takes five minutes with a Google search. I consider it lazy and yes I think you are being lazy in this discussion. My contempt is not for you but for your laziness. If you were one of my students you'd get a firm lecture about it. But you're not (see above under "geezers"), are you? No.

You want to know how to cause Al to purr like a kitten instead of bite like a snake? Don't make stuff up. That's how. You should know better than to invent positions and put them in someone else's mouth, especially when (in my case, or that of the Other Campaign) all the evidence of what people really say is a few clicks of the keypad away (see above reference to "sloth").

3. Say what you mean.

If this is really about your resentments about other things (my not promoting your book, or your funny misconceptions about my standard of living and support among "celebrity liberal foundations" - paging Salma Hayek! - or that I paid more attention to a fallen friend than to you), then don't use a discussion with public consequences about something else as your pretext to vent that resentment.

Actually, I don't think that this is about any of those things. I think it is about your fear of where this country is headed now that the electoral system has revealed itself, 18 years after the historic fraud, as still fraudulent. The IFE may be about to close the door on electoral change in Mexico, just as the Supreme Court in the United States did six years ago. Fine. Express your fears. Yes, it will be far more consequential than getting your photo taken in the presence of Al Giordano by undercover agents (my advice, should that ever happen to you, do what I do: smile for the cameras and make sure they see and hear that you are having a better time than them). Them's the breaks of 500 years of injustice.

You're obviously terrified about what could happen once the public realizes it has been cynically played with another phony "election," and thus the denial ("there is no crisis, dammit!"). But your beef is legitimately with those who fixed the game, not with those of us who expose it. In a paraphrasing of that immortal gringo philosopher Forrest Gump: Geezer is as geezer does.