Goodness from The Economist

Obama's secret vice:

But as habits go, Mr Obama's smoking is less annoying than John Kerry's poetry-writing and less odd than George Bush's obsessive brush-clearing.

A falling star:

Ms Rice was given a chance to redeem her reputation when she was made secretary of state in the second Bush term. Mr Bush signalled that he wanted a different foreign-policy approach from his first, which Mr Armitage once characterised as “Look, fucker, you do what we want.”