The reality of government is that it is never as good as we'd like it to be, or as bad as we usually think it is. This is abundantly clear and a kind of recurring theme in the new memoir by Tom Ridge, former Governor of Pennsylvania and the first Secretary of Homeland Security. In The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...And How We Can Be Safe Again he comes across as an honorable man, trying to do an impossible job, amidst a nest of Bush administration vipers. There are so many questions and areas we did not have time to cover, but it's a reasonable overview of his tenure. My conversation with Tom Ridge:
