Convergence I nearly coughed up my cornflakes when I heard the latest on the Canadian terror cell, the one that was going to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The righteous young men were arraigned yesterday, and the Commonwealth attorney said that they had intended to kidnap the Canadian Prime Minister and behead him. In […]

Point of No Return It is the anniversary of the The Day that the Allies went across the Channel and opened the second front against Hitler. Mr. Churchill was nervous about the prospects for success. If this gamble failed, it would set back the war effort for years. It was a point of no return […]

Union The Dutch trashed the new constitution even more thoroughly than the French did. Over sixty-one percent of them voted against the European Constitution. Commentators on that side of the Atlantic claim this is the most significant event since the end of the Cold War. It means all sorts of things, I imagine, including deep-rooted […]

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 […]