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John Dean

John Dean has lived a charmed life. His rise from an educationally unprepossessing background and a brief and dubious legal career to the office of White House Counsel (1970-1973) was such an extreme example of the Peter Principle that it should have been renamed the...

Nixon and “The Kennedy Promise”

In a recent post I related an anecdote featuring the late Anglo-American journalist Henry Fairlie and referred to the collection of his essays, Bite The Hand That Feeds You, edited by Newsweek's Jeremy McCarter and published by Yale University Press this month. Here...

Laughing Matters

On Wednesday night's broadcast of the Colbert Report from Camp Victory in Baghdad, Steven Colbert interviewed  Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.  The Deputy PM's academic training was in the UK; he spent some time in Washington as spokesman for the Patriotic...

The Hard Irony of High Expectations

Here's a troubling and intriguing story that might otherwise have been buried on the back pages, little noticed, and soon forgotten. But these are the still the early days of an administration that both claims and proclaims the moral high ground, so this apparently...

Leaderless

There has been a great deal of talk that the GOP lacks a "main person" who speaks for it. (Google the words "leaderless" and "Republican" and you get more than 30,000 hits.) Whatever the party's troubles, the lack of a "main person" is not one of them. The United...

Caesar Salad With A Kaiser Roll

Lebisch: Rabbi! May I ask you a question?Rabbi: Certainly, Lebisch! Lebisch: Is there a proper blessing... for the Tsar? Rabbi: A blessing for the Tsar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us! Why is it that so many Americans are enamored of...