Miracle...................................

     And greater love hath no man than this:  that of the Washington Male for the Washington Male.  A really pure Washington Male can be wrong about everything he does and says for decades without harboring a single twinge of self-doubt.  (Robert McNamara was probably the platonic ideal here.  You would think that a man who had given the world the Edsel, flexible response, and the war in Vietnam would stop to consider whether he was really  cut out for executive work.  But no, on the World Bank and to building the debt crisis.)  Earlier this year, the playwright Anna Deavere Smith spent a couple of months in Washington observing the locals.  The thing that amazed her, she told me, was her discovery of the habit the Washington Male has, when reaching for a particular bon mot, of literally quoting himself.  "You will be seated next to some man at a dinner party - a reporter, usually - and he will turn to you, and say, 'As I said on Brinkley yesterday,'  and then he will, honestly, repeat word for word what he did say on Brinkley yesterday," she marveled.  "It's the most astonishing thing."  There are women in Washington who have been listening to this sort of stuff every night for thirty years.  It's a miracle the homicide rate is as low as it is.
-Michael Kelly, as excerpted from his essay, A Plea for Diversity, from his collected writings