My parents somehow missed the whole "health food" craze – in which "whole grain" and "organic" are really code words for expensive and tasteless. In between some home-cooked meals, there were plenty of Cheetos and Yodels, and lots of kisses (both the real and the Hershey kind). We drank Diet Cokes and not a single shot of carrot juice was consumed (or mentioned) all week. Again, amazingly, we survived.

The sun shone every day we were there, yet not a single drop of sunscreen was applied. I had forgotten to bring it. What, you say, you allowed the natural rays of the sun to hit your boys? Call child services immediately! It reminded me of my carefree days at summer camp in the early 70s, when the sun hit your face and it just felt good, as it has for billions of people for tens of thousands of years, BSS – Before Sun Screen.

The kids played, stayed up too late, and bathed when they needed it, not as part of a rigid regimen. Yes, they survived.

I know, I know: car seats are safer (certainly for infants), and multigrain food is probably healthier – but at what cost? Don’t we have taste buds for a reason? I want my kids to LOVE the taste of food!

Visiting the old homestead reminded me of a time when kids were allowed to just be kids. When a strict time limit on TV watching was nonexistent. When we were taught math and science in school, not self-esteem, and where education trumped indoctrination.

It was good to see joy, rather than the anxiety that is routinely instilled in our children by a culture (and media) that emphasize all the bad news and minimize all the good, life-affirming news. It was good to be in an environment where common sense, and not pop-psych theories, ruled. It was good to be reminded of a time when "Mommy and Me" meant a mother and her child doing everyday things that brought them closer and not attending a “class” designed to teach every mother and child how to think, speak and behave.

It was good to remember a time when cigarette smoke might have been annoying, but it wasn't all the rage (quite literally) or the most important thing on the planet. It was good to remember a time when kids ate candy because it tasted good and it’s what kids do. And it was good for my kids to see that the hyper-hysteria that is the stuff of today's world is not the real world but only – unfortunately – their world.

In a country where half the people are more concerned with global warming than global fascism, I know it will be hard for my kids to have the same less-regulated experience I had growing up. At least Jujyfruits haven’t been targeted yet!

But as history tells us, not finding fugitives - even in the most highly publicized cases and with the full force of government investigative agencies on their trail - should be expected.

In 1934, Adolf Eichmann was appointed to the Jewish section of the SS, the security and military organization of Germany's Nazi party, quickly becoming a chief architect of "the final solution," and ultimately taking great pride in the death of six-million, mainly European Jews. He escaped the Nuremberg trials and the "Avengers," a group that tracked down and brought over a thousand Nazis to justice. By 1945, with former Nazis helping him to move to Argentina, all trace of Eichmann had vanished. It was not until May 11, 1960, that Israeli authorities, led by the Mossad, captured Eichmann, and it was not until 1961 that a court in Israel condemned the war criminal to death by hanging. It took fifteen years to capture and bring to justice one of the most heinous criminals in human history.

In 1986, Sweden's Prime Minister, Olof Palme, was walking home from a Stockholm movie theater with his wife - in the middle of a bustling western city, not in a mountainous region in the remotest part of the world - when a lone gunmen shot and killed him. Twenty years have passed and no one has been charged with the crime.

In 1995, Bosnian Serb nationalist Radovan Karadzic was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague for war crimes and genocide. In spite of a $5 million reward offered for information leading to his capture, he has still roamed free for the last almost-12 years.

During the 1996 Olympics, Eric Rudolph detonated a bomb that killed one person and injured 111. Two years later, "the Olympic park bomber" made the FBI's Most Wanted List, with a million-dollar bounty on his head. Again, it took the "best and the brightest" crime fighters seven years to find Rudolph, hiding in an American mountain range - and not the caves and hills of South Waziristan.

In 1916, the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa attacked the 13th U.S. Cavalry in Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 people. In response, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched General John J. Pershing, with 6,000 men under his command (plus several divisions of Army and national Guard troops), to capture Villa. Pershing never found the fugitive and the search was eventually called off. Villa was assassinated seven years later.

In 1978, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, sent through the mail the first of several deadly bombs. For the next 20 years, he continued his rampage of terror and murder. Although the target of the most expensive manhunt in the FBI's history, the former academic eluded capture for two decades before being apprehended in Lincoln, Montana.

Surely Democrats know these stories - that apprehending the worst villains of our times is often impossibly difficult and almost always a lengthy, complicated process. Yet they ignore these facts in favor of politicizing America's inability, as yet, to "get" bin Laden, thus - indefensibly - weakening America's Commander-in-Chief in a time of war.

The difficulty in apprehending Osama bin Laden is not unusual. As the above examples attest to, capturing killers is difficult enough when they're on our soil. When they're ten thousand miles away, hiding in dank caves and surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of armed, hard-core Taliban militia forming concentric defensive rings protecting them, in the toughest terrain on earth -- it's that much harder.