This is the time of year I always think about patriotism--I mean what it actually means, rather than what some have decided, for their own reasons, that it means.

Put in the simplest of terms, patriotism is love of one's country and its ideals.

It is not devotion to a party or leader. As former president Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his essay "Lincoln and Free Speech" in Metropolitan Magazine's May 1918 issue, "Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him in so far as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth--whether about the president or about anyone else--save in the rare cases where this would make known to the enemy information of military value which would otherwise be unknown to him."

In that essay, Roosevelt took President Woodrow Wilson to task for his actions in office. He expanded on that in his book "The Great Adventure": "The simple truth is that never in our history........

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