I think our conversation would be abortive for other, definitional reasons:

"We'd be talking about two utterly different versions of reality; you'd argue for yours and I'd argue for mine."

No, I think you mean two different opinions. We weren't watching The Matrix, we were watching a political spectacle, an attempt at exculpation and apologia by a candidate for president. Solipsism and condescension were not my "boundaries," they were my conclusions.

"In your terms, it would be like trying to understand where a person like Meir Kahane came from, and then we might be able better to understand why Kahane believed what he believed. The action of attempting to understand another person is different from agreeing with that person. It's an action some would call compassion."

Do some belong to your or my "reality"? I wouldn't call it that; I'd call it an attempt to understand a vile human being and what may have contributed to his vileness, an act that strikes me as one of fairly routine intellectual curiosity. Compassion would be not to automatically attribute his motives and thoughts to the people he purports to represent because I, too, know how hard it is to face down sham representatives who make my own people look bad.

What recent speech by a political candidate of any party in this country has resonated for you the way this one resonated for me (put me in the James Fallows camp, in case you were wondering: "This was as good a job as anyone could have done in these circumstances, and as impressive and intelligent a speech as I have heard in a very long time")?

None has, I'm sorry to say. I might go further and add that none attempting to serve as an ebb-tide that would wash away the polluting effects of religion in political discourse will likely ever do.