I guess 3,500 classified documents would be too many to stuff into your clothing if you were a high-ranking government official and wanted to take them home for leisure reading. Perhaps that explains why this week one of the State Department's most knowledgeable experts on China, Donald W. Keyser, a Foreign Service officer with three decades of experience, was sentenced to a year in the hoosegow after these documents were found in his Fairfax County residence. Keyser claimed he had just been "careless." Without the comic touch of stuffing the documents into one's clothing, being "careless" with classified materials is apparently a serious offense. So off to the hoosegow Keyser will go.
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In these last months of Fidel Castro's moribundity, there is delicious irony in the film clip of him that is repeatedly shown on cable television. Wearing a clownishly incongruous jogging suit, the fabled maestro of revolution and progress is filmed shuffling metronomically, gray and feeble, blank-faced and apparently going no place. Maybe he is on a treadmill that we cannot see. Maybe he is merely picking up his tired feet and putting them back down with no forward motion. Possibly this whole idiotic scene is a fabrication created by our CIA. Well, if so, it is a job well done. There is poetry here.
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While reviewing national security documents from the Clinton administration in preparation for his appearance before the 9/11 Commission hearings, former National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger was observed stuffing papers in his socks by employees at the National Archives. Soon he was accused of taking these documents -- memos, draft documents, e-mails, that sort of thing -- from the Archives in breech of the law, and he was duly charged. All of this took place a couple of years ago, and those of us who had followed the Clinton high jinks with more diligence than the rest of the press had a good laugh. Once again we were vindicated and the rest of the press went into another episode of disappointment. As throughout the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton saga had been caught flagrante delicto -- and let me add flagrante hilarious. Berger really did pack the documents in his socks.
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The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.
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