There is an old Vulcan proverb...

"Only Nixon could go to China."

The older I get, the more fascinating I find Richard Nixon. A brilliant man, completely undone by hubris; and if you think certain of the more highly strung folks on the left are driven to frothing lunacy by Bush the Younger, well, the retro-60s moonbats of today can't hold a candle to the utterly bilious naked hatred that was heaped on Nixon by the original barking moonbats of the 1960s.

But never mind that. Two years ago, I wrote what's turning out to be one of my favorite pieces: The State of the Union. If you haven't read it before, you might enjoy taking a minute now to check it out. I am, as I've often said before, a method writer — I have to get in character to tell a story — but for this one, I wasn't just in character, after awhile my wife said I was channeling for Nixon, and would I please stop?

After I wrote this one, I was so pleased with it (which, believe me, does not happen often with my own work) that I briefly contemplated going on to write an entire utterly unpublishable novel, Nixon's Inferno. But when I recontacted Dick, he explained that, first off, he was in Elysium, not Hell; secondly, the book would never sell unless it depicted him as being much further down in the bolgias than he actually was; and third, that Mao's sizzling red-hot sepulchre reeked of rancid pork fried rice, and even Dick Nixon did not have a strong enough stomach to go back there again.

I contacted him again last year at about this time, and he did help me write a piece on the 2006 State of the Union address, but it was so unbearably sad that I chose never to publish it. Tonight though...

Yeah, I can feel his spectral presence. Dick Nixon is in the house. I don't know what I'm going to write tonight, or even if I'm going to write anything at all, but I know that Dick is back, and he definitely has a lot on his mind.

The channel is open...