Logan Airport. Twenty after four. Brain is still a bit pickled from the weekend. No Cambridge bookstore I could find stocks Zola's The Belly of Paris. What's with that? I ended up picking up Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, and, eight pages in, it was an excellent choice. At some burger joint near Harvard Square, Elana looked up from the final pages of Liar's Poker to see me half-laughing, half-coughing.

The United gate is kind enough to broadcast football on a massive flatscreen; the Giants are unkind enough to get massacred by New Orleans, 30-7. Reggie Bush rushed for 126 yards, as you've probably read already. Merry Christmas. Now it's Cincinatti-Denver. I'm going to be in this terminal for hours. I get into Dulles -- ugh -- about 8:30 or so and intend to go straight to Red Room for some proper Jewish Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile, fashionable as it is to hate on John Kerry, sentiments like these vindicate all the residual Kerry-Edwards stickers on people's bumpers. Quite a clever Churchill quip at the end, as well. It would be facile to suggest that had he explained his changing war stance like this in 2004, he'd be president -- after all, in 2004, he wasn't prepared to endorse withdrawal, and neither was the public. And he's kidding himself if he thinks that a U.S. threat to leave can coerce Iraqi reconciliation. (That might have worked years ago, but not anymore.) But Kerry's flashes of statesmanship are impressive things.