Tuesday, December 1, 2009 — Any hour now, our Commander in Chief will deliver a stirring call to further sacrifice in Afghanistan. Because victory is just around the corner … or just a little further down the tunnel.

Forty some-odd years ago, the editor of This Olde Rag would be called upon from time to time to fill in for the Vietnamese guard of a medical lab in Saigon, who had the habit of disappearing from his post whenever a free-range chicken would wander, clucking, past his little bunker.

But surely that’s all irrelevant now.