Past paper, part 1

The apartment reorganizing that Flo and I have been undertaking is turning up lots of paper ephemera, some of which I'd forgotten I even owned.

I'm going to be sharing some of it with you here in the weeks to come.

Here's the first offering, a foldout postcard from the General Cigar Hall of Magic at the 1964-65 World's Fair:

What strikes me as odd about this postcard is how strongly it's aimed at kids. I mean, sheesh, the tube against the hand trick? Is this hat taller or wider? That's Weekly Reader or Highlights-level material.

Not that I'm knocking those publications, mind you. But honestly, was that the way to appeal to cigar smokers in the mid-1960s?

Unless back then, as is so often the case now, tobacco companies were trying to rope in new smokers at an early age. It's just hard to imagine a kid who was nine or ten years old in 1964 opting to take his first puff not from a pilfered Marlboro, but off a White Owl stogie. Cough cough!

Cheney comes clean on Iraq ... in 1994

This has been all over the net, so you may well have seen it elsewhere.

But just in case you haven't, I'm posting it here. Every living American should watch this video. It's chilling, really, to see Dick Cheney prove that he knew the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised from the jump.

Listen the various points he makes in this video. They were all as true on the day we invaded Iraq as they were when he spoke these words in 1994.

Shame on him, and shame on all of us for letting these thugs get away with this in our name:

Of course, Cheney wasn't alone. I've often shared the following passage from George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft's 1998 book, "A World Transformed," but it, too, bears revisiting:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles...."

"Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

Again, shame on all of us.

In case you missed it...

If you missed my brief appearance on Fox Across America, you can hear it here in streaming audio.

I always cringe when I hear myself on the radio or television after the fact, but this one went reasonably well, I think.

You be the judge.