As it goes with these things, every day there is another drip. Which becomes a trickle, then a stream, and soon enough a flood. Maybe even a whole monsoon season. Scandals tend to multiply. It's not that some folks suddenly go bad, as an old boy once told me, it's that they're suddenly found out.

Our president is one cool customer, careful to stay a little distant from his Scandal of the Day, sidestepping any embarrassing questions rather than confronting them, analyzing his critics rather than answering them, looking down on the political circus even as he stars in it. And he does it all so smoothly.

"We're not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I'm sure."

Now we know. Or at least we know more than we did about what happened at Benghazi, and, even more telling, what happened afterward. And there's doubtless more to come. With each congressional hearing, with each appearance by another whistleblower, the picture becomes more complete.

The bloody war-by-proxy continues in Syria. It pits the embattled, increasingly desperate but still determined and far from defeated dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad against a disorganized amalgam of rebels, aka the Free Syrian Army.

Whenever this president can't answer a direct question about some failure of American security, or at least can't answer it satisfactorily, he goes into his riff about the need to ... close the brig at Guantanamo.

Kermit Gosnell. If you don't recognize the name, that's understandable. His trial in Philadelphia -- on multiple counts of murder -- has been covered extensively by the local papers.

This week's news from Iraq isn't good, though when has it ever been? Well, maybe during those exceptional times when Washington was paying close attention and American troops were being given the support and leeway to do their job right.

A cancer is eating away at a once Grand Old Party, and if the party doesn't wake up and take precautions, it may wind up only a shadow of its better self -- a hollowed-out refuge for haters and paranoids and the kind of ideological parasites that can reduce a major party to a minor one.

"I just see a huge trainwreck coming down." That's not a quote from one of our old editorials or from any of the other critics of what has become known as Obamacare. It's a quote from one of its key backers, one of its designers, one of its advocates and defenders. It's a quote from Max Baucus, senior senator from Montana and Democratic stalwart on the Senate Finance Committee.

I just see a huge trainwreck coming down." That's not a quote from one of our old editorials or from any of the other critics of what has become known as Obamacare. It's a quote from one of its key backers, one of its designers, one of its advocates and defenders. It's a quote from Max Baucus, senior senator from Montana and Democratic stalwart on the Senate Finance Committee.

The president of the United States, being a gentleman and a man, paid a compliment to California's attorney general -- Kamala Harris -- when both of them appeared at a Democratic fundraiser in that state. Indeed, he paid her several compliments when he addressed the crowd.

Before the final chamber music concert of the season at the Clinton Library here in Little Rock, there was a celebratory reception. It should have been a gala evening, but it was the night after the bomb blasts at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and a pall still hung in the air. Like the dust and smoke on Boylston Street the day before.

Thanks for the memories, specifically the biographical sketch of Bill Mauldin, the great but never assuming cartoonist for Stars and Stripes during the World War, Act

There was something familiar, eerily familiar, about the stories that a reporter named Robert Huber recounted in his piece for Philadelphia magazine called "Being White in Philly." They were largely stories from white folks who lived in or near largely black neighborhoods and didn't feel free to speak their minds lest their neighbors accuse them of being racist.

It's an annual ritual yet always different. Like spring itself. Like the first taste of matzah at the Passover seder. It marks renewal. It brings past memories and future hope together in the pure, unblemished present. Like a blank page waiting to be imprinted.

Books will be, and already have been, devoted to the changes Margaret Thatcher wrought not only in Britain but in the world. She was a revolutionary leader, or would counterrevolutionary be the better term?

The editors at the Associated Press made news themselves last week when they announced that their stylebook would no longer approve the use of the phrase Illegal Immigrant to describe illegal immigrants. To borrow some newspeak from George Orwell's classic dystopia, "1984," down the memory hole the phrase must go. For it makes the folks at AP feel doubleplusungood when they see badspeak.

He was the fat one, Gene Siskel was the other one. That's how lots of us thought of them when they teamed up to review the movies and bicker with each other, though not necessarily in that order, back in the long ago ... when was it, the otherwise undistinguished Seventies?

I'd say it is a rare if not miraculous gift to be able to rewind history and see so clearly what would have happened if we hadn't stopped Saddam Hussein's continued attacks and depredations.