It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts which was the way we did before 9/11 and then looking at 9/11 and saying 'This is not a criminal act ' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan kill 3 000 Americans blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.

The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow 'Operation Re-elect Bush' doesn't seem to be popular.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan where he seems only to want to turn tail.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration especially in the Pentagon where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war with disastrous results.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shook our nation to the core. Americans were deeply frightened sad and angry and they rallied around a President who at the time showed impressive certitude and calm.

I certainly know that this relationship could not have continued the way it did when I was at the Pentagon and the president was obviously at the White House without Betty.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

Here at home when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again and rekindle an American spirit of community.

In the Pentagon Papers case the government asserted in the Supreme Court that the publication of the material was a threat to national security. It turned out it was not a threat to U.S. security. But even if it had been that doesn't mean that it couldn't be published.

The vast amount of waste and sheer stupidity in government - from the Pentagon to the Food and Drug Administration - could fill committee agendas for years.

I think it makes people in the Pentagon kind of nervous to know that chemical agents and environmental factors could cause so much damage in terms of what may happen in the future.

Maybe that first gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident just a combination of deluded 'supply side' tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits when done correctly did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.