You're not--like me--a carefree TPM blogger.

You're the Prez or PM of a nation.

An enemy has in its possession the bodies of 2 of your nation's soldiers who were kidnapped several years ago in a cross-border raid.

Your nation has under incarceration several convicts whom  your enemy wants returned.

One of those prisoners committed the following crime in 1979:  He entered by force the home of a civilian in your country; he shot dead the "man" of the house in front of his 4-year-old daughter; as the daughter cried in terror, the prisoner seized her, put her head against a rock in the garden outside and crushed her skull against it with the butt of his rifle, killing her; during the course of this attack, the wife and mother of the victims hid in another room with her 2-year-old child; trying to keep the child silent, the mother smothered her own child to death.

Do you make the deal?

This is not a fictional account; this decision had to be made by real people within the last few days.

The inane posts and blogs here at TPM, so trivial in content, and frequently so distant from what the world is really like for national leaders,  prompted me to write this.

MyBlog: http://ProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com