My absence from the blogging over the past week was caused by quite a bit of travel (there's more coming this week, but only within Europe) which took me to Washington DC. The Latham hotel in Georgetown was a bit disappointing in all. It certainly does not measure up to its pretention of a full-service luxury hotel. Then again, at the rate I got I suppose I can't complain too much. On the other hand, the restaurant in the hotel is absolutely excellent. It's Michel Richard's Citronelle which offers great ambience, good service and exquisite food. The food was in fact so good that even stuff I usually don't like tasted good. I had the Tuna Napoleon as the first course, which was amazingly light and melty on the tongue. The main course was the venison special with port sauce and a puree of chestnuts. Normally, I would not have even touched the latter, but the first course convinced to be braver. The best parts were the wine and dessert. They have a great wine list (including a 1961 Cheval Blanc at $4,000 a bottle), but I settled for a less bank-breaking Carruades. Dessert was the famous chocolate bar. Excellent small bars of crispy chocolate in a sweet hazelnut sauce. Fantastic.

Anyway, so much for the food. One thing that struck me was the composition of out-of-state license plates. For some reason, I saw a lot of cars with Alabama and Tennessee plates. I thought it might have been the influx of staffers for newly elected senators and representatives, but that leaves unexplained why there were no Minnesota plated-cars. Very peculiar. Of the Maryland-plated cars, I saw a great many with Ehrlich bumper stickers, while the Townsend stickers were much rarer. This points to much higher mobilization among Ehrlich voters, or perhaps they're just more disposed to putting bumper stickers on in the first place. I am sure somebody must have done a study on bumper sticker frequency as a predictor of election results. Since nobody's using it, I guess it's not a very good predictor. And what to make of the Giant Parking Chickens of Dulles?

I can recommend the Spy Museum if you have a few hours to spare in DC. It has a nice collection of actual spying gear from many countries around the world. Button-hole cameras, various bugs and surveillance mechanisms are explained. I found the actual stories that go with the devices most interesting. The various attempts at bugging the US and Soviet embassies in Moscow and Washington respectively are explained in some detail. Some other items such as suicide capsules highlight the dangers of undercover work.

The Spy Museum also has exhibits on well-known traitors and the consequences of their treason. There's Mitrokhin, a KGB agent who for years copied files at the office and stored them at home. When he defected to Britain, he took 300,000 files with him, which obviously was a great help to us. I have no sympathy who betrayed our side though. In the Cold War, there was a clear moral choice to be made between good and evil, right and wrong. The difference between the two opposing systems was clear and obvious. Many of the ideologically-motivated traitors were the kinds of people who saw themselves as the avant-garde of enlightened opinion. The kinds of cultured intellectuals who saw the superior ways of communist dictatorship that the capitalist-democracy-supporting sheeple simply were too stupid to understand. The kind of people who were so smart that they managed to convince themselves to believe incredibly stupid things. That's how the Soviets got the secret of the bomb.

Examples of the archetype exist in today's war too. The big difference is that there is no centralized enemy, but a more diffuse set of loosely cooperating enemies, which are not well equipped to mount a massive intelligence operation against us. But I am sure that it's not for lack of trying, or for lack of useful idiot volunteers who despise the capitalist liberal democratic system. I suppose there are fewer useful idiots who actually want our enemies to establish an Islamofascist theocracy; however, their dislike of the west blinds them to the evil that is now arrayed against us.

We won't know how many of those who profess their disdain for western civilization will actually end up actively helping the enemy for a while yet. But I am certain there are present-day Rosenbergs and Fusches lurking somewhere to be tapped. And one wonders: how can people be so stupid?