Background Check How time flies. It was only a year ago that Saddam was found in his spider hole. He has been questioned regularly ever since, just like a government worker or a Defense contractor. If you haven’t had a polygraph lately, you ought to try one. Like It is a marvelously clarifying experience. You […]

Air Raid Pearl It is sixty-three years and a world away now, the great surprise. I used to think about it a lot when we were young sailors in the Great Patriotic War against the Commies. In that year we were assigned to the staff of the Theater Anti-submarine Warfare Commander, a three star Admiral […]

Cable TV It is an ambiguous day. It doesn’t know if it is going to rain or not outside. I listened to the sound of explosions from Jiddah, in the great empty nation of Saudi Arabia. The American consulate was hit by two explosions. They can’t keep it straight as to whether the facility was […]

Tommy Thompson, consummate politician from Wisconsin, rider of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and the Department of Health and Human Services, is calling it quits. He is going home after forty years of government service. He was elected to the state legislature when he was 24; he was governor for 14 years, and a Cabinet Secretary for a […]

I had a great seat for the remarks by the Senior Government Official at the Unacknowledged Location. I could say more, of course, but those were the ground rules from Walter Pincus, the grizzled reporter from the Washington Post whose beat is the Intelligence Community. He was the moderator, and had the seat on the […]

Apocalypse Tomorrow The world is going to end, and it is going to be in seventy-two years. The signs are all around us, if you know how to look at it. I scribbled furiously in my notebook. The professor from Rice University was quite articulate about it. He did not use the Christian calendar. He […]

Exurbs No cried an alert Reader. ”Don’t try to explain the stupid Intelligence Bill again! You are not on the Hill working the issue, and there is nuance that you are going to miss. And besides, a Socotra piece about ”How a Bill Becomes Law” will just drive everyone face-first into their Cheerios. They hate that. […]

I was listening intently to the news this morning, looking at the speaker of the battered boom-box like the RCA dog. I purchased it at the Eighth Army Headquarters Post Exchange in Seoul, Korea, in 1980. All my other stuff had been stolen in transit from Japan. The radio lived in my garage for years, […]

There is paper flying here in brisk winds of fall here in the city of marble. The old newspapers and memoranda are blowing across the river with the prevailing winds from the Pentagon to the foot of Capital Hill. One bit of paper has the signature of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff […]

Mickey Mantle’s Birthday The panhandlers were pushy on 11th Street, doing that passive-aggressive thing with a little more urgency. It took me a buck to get past the old African-American woman on the bench in front of the building. The hood of her sweatshirt was drawn tight around her face and her jaw jutted like […]