The Bureau Man, did the memories start flooding back. The family is saying that they let the cat out of the bag because their patriarch is a hero. The man who skulked around the parking garage chain-smoking Pall Mall cigarettes has been unmasked by his own hand. The man who guided the slow-motion fall of […]

Double Monday It could be a lot worse, though it is a double Monday, and I have a full-scope polygraph scheduled this week. It is a double Monday because all the things that should have happened yesterday will happen today, along with everything that was going to happen anyway. I don’t know if it is […]

Rolling Thunder “Vive la France ,” is all I can say this morning. Well over half the voting electorate turned down the opportunity to approve the new Constitution of the European Union. The nation that came up with the European Union has turned down the document that would codify it. It is not left to […]

Shelf Life Latin strongmen come in various shapes and sizes and with indefinite shelf-lives. I am tempted to make a comparison between the length of the regime with the height of the strongman- tall Castro versus squat Noriega, for example- but that would be misleading. There is much more to it, and I would be curious to […]

Bantam Despot Strong men come in many sizes and flavors. The strong man in Haiti in July of 1994 was a plucky little Creole Brigadier named Raoul Cedras. He was short of stature, but built like a bantamweight fighter. He had that in common with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, but he was a bit of a […]

National Holiday I almost was run over by one of those hulking SUVs on the Beltway yesterday, piloted by someone so remote where they sat at the wheel behind the smoked glass that they could be on Mars. That might be where our energy policy is beamed in from. The SUV honked, demanding me to […]

Caribbean Of course I was out of sorts. It was Monday. I rose to the alarm and limped to the kitchen to start the coffee. Then I fell back on the Murphey bed to listen to story time on the BBC. A rich plummy voice reads abridged stories for fifteen minutes each weekday morning, five […]

The Persian I don’t know where your Realtor is from, but mine is a Persian woman of subtlety and dark beauty. I have had good luck with people from Persia, going back a way. My rugs are beautiful, and many of then are because my friend Farzhan got them to my attention at a good […]

End of Days As you know, I am not a believer, or not a true one, anyway. I do have fierce convictions, or did. I had to check lately, examining my political philosophy over the role of the State in the preservation of life, and of the Constitution, which I view as secular, but holy, […]

Closure I had at least one thing in common with Saddam this morning. We both got up in our underwear. But we changed the calculus in our relations. He once owned a hundred palaces and now he has only one concrete box. As of this morning, I am ahead. I have two. It had rained […]