Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

If you're famous enough, the rules don't apply.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.

We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.