Thursday morning roundup

A year ago--or perhaps now, had the election gone the other way--this would have had me long for a bygone era. Of intelligence and wit in foreign affairs, not of Nixon or the Cold War.

Speaking of the Cold War, Gail Collins maintains that we're still prepared for it:

Of course, the F-22 had been totally outmoded since the collapse of the Soviet empire. We’ve been through two wars without ever finding any use for it. We’ve already got 187 of them sitting around, available should the Soviet Union reconstitute itself tomorrow and send its pilots into our airspace for a stealthy dogfight.