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 […]

Call for the Czar It took me a minute to recognize the dark, intense man with the deep voice in the middle of the table at the front of the room. I peered into the gloom. It was Frank Sesno, CNN Correspondent and Professor of Communications at George Mason University , and he moderated the […]

Applique I walked over to the Caucus Club from the Bus Station, headed for a Homeland Security luncheon with the outgoing Administrator of an Agency that had been extremely important until it was determined to be useless. It was the comfortable mid-Spring sort of day, cool, high clouds, and I had comfortable shoes on. It […]

Fine I am wrestling with what I might write this morning. There is material enough for several tales, tall and otherwise. Another enlisted woman was convicted  in the awful abuse scandal from the prison in Iraq , and it is a sign of the times that the most junior and the most senior of those punished […]