Thomas Jefferson collected old books and French wines, Warren Harding collected poker buddies, and FDR collected stamps. Harry S Truman collected sheet music and played the piano. Once he played it at the National Press Club, with Lauren Bacall draped across the upright with a helping of cheesecake. Bess, the first lady, was not amused.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, the wise man observed, but nobody wants to die. It's not a puzzlement. Everybody wants kind and gentle in our politics, but nobody wants to risk losing an election. That's not such a puzzlement, either.
No. 41 deserves all the warm, kind words he's getting, but they don't quite capture the man I got to know at the end of his presidency. The man in full emerged when the shadows began to lengthen, as they inevitably will for us all, and as the good days began to ebb.
We're suddenly awash in so many crises capable of ending civilization as we know it that there's barely enough hysteria to go around. A worldwide hysteria shortage. Who knew?
Nobody is as insignificant in the Washington pecking order as a freshman member of Congress just off the turnip truck and into a maelstrom of ignorance and uncertainty all about him. One member of a freshman class of not so long ago recalls arriving at Reagan National Airport, finding his way through the terminal maze to curbside, and hailing a taxi.
Britain and the envious Europeans are discovering that breaking up is hard to do, particularly when the Europeans want to keep the house, the car, the bank account and give up only the kids. The particulars of the deal were written by the British themselves, so you might not understand why any of them wouldn't like it.
Americans are an impatient lot. Given a choice between corrupt and incompetent, we're likely to choose corrupt. Both corrupt and incompetent is rarely popular.
The snowflake disease is catching. Donald Trump, of all people, tried to teach a couple of White House reporters a little needed manners this week and you might have thought he had repealed the First Amendment with an executive order.
Just as soon as they get the dead carried out we can dispense with the last rites and continue the election that counts most. Ready or not, like it or not, the 2020 presidential election campaign begins this morning.
We're about to see whether James Carville, the dark genius of Bill Clinton's presidential campaigns, knew what he was talking about when he posted the famous warning to the Clinton campaigners in the war room of campaign headquarters in Little Rock: "The economy, stupid."
Mr. Dooley wouldn't understand our politics at all. Someone asked Finley Peter Dunne's mythical Chicago bartender-cum-philosopher where he was going in such a hurry with a pair of brass knuckles.
The Washington bombers seem to be a curious collection of political partisans, music critics and aspiring killers.
The infamous October Surprise, without which we can't hold a November election, are soon upon us, and right on schedule there's a real one. Almost no one saw this one coming.
Nobody in the West really understands the Arab mind. Killing a political adversary is understandable, though heartily to be disapproved of. But cutting up the corpse with a surgical saw, and doing it without first waiting for the poor guy to die, is beyond the Western, Judeo-Christian pale.
There's no law saying how much Indian blood a body has to have to have to qualify as an Indian, but it's surely more than Elizabeth Warren's blood-o-meter registers. Donald Trump is clearly entitled to keep his checkbook in his pocket. He doesn't want to be an Indian giver, but he doesn't want to be a sucker for a pretty face, either.
Certain female journalists, dispensing with the ancient newsroom tradition of keeping keep cool when the going gets hot, had confessed that listening to Christine Blasey Ford made them want to cry. But not everyone, and not anymore.
Politics is fun, but not when you're losing. Then it hurts. When Adlai Stevenson lost his first race for president in 1952, he said it "hurts too much to laugh and I'm too old to cry." But it didn't hurt too much to not try again (and lose again).
Great reputations are difficult to make, requiring time and dedication, and they are reputations easily destroyed, sometimes in a moment of careless passion, sometimes with a word not spoken.
Nothing recedes like success, and Christine Blasey Ford's accusations that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial sexual monster when they were teenagers, taken by Democrats as a Gospel account a week ago, have begun to fray at the edges.
Dianne Feinstein is not exactly the Wicked Witch of the West, though she is from the Left Coast and does a convincing imitation of Cruella de Vil, who tormented all those innocent puppies in Walt Disney's "101 Dalmatians." Alas, this is real life.
