The household has been delightfully distracted for five days while the perfect mother-out-of-law visited us this past week. It was also a healthy diversion from a virtually full-time obsession with, well, that damn elephant in the parlor.

Peter Freundlich thinks "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" should not be the models for American foreign policy.

Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.