Snow has just hit Washington (this was written at 9:30 a.m.) — and my plane to Miami was the last to get out before Dulles temporarily grounded flights. Good luck to those who will freeze today and tomorrow at the Inaugural festivities.

I am at Dulles Airport right now, leaving for Miami in a few minutes. I will be down there with France’s Trade Minister and the French Ambassador to the U.S. and a few hundred others interested in French-American economic and political affairs.

I am writing an article today, so regrettably don’t have time to post much. However, I have been inundated with emails and bits of advice and encouragement about something I noted in one of my comments regarding building a credible and compelling alternative to neoconservative foreign policy thinking.

I am supposed to be cranking on a review of Anatol Lieven’s America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, and actually I am. However, I couldn’t resist picking up a galley copy of Eric Liu‘s new book, Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Purpose in Life.

This notion of a “sex bomb” was conceived of by a U.S. military that apparently thought that gays in the military was so horrific that compelling gay behavior among the enemy might be a war-winning idea. The Clinton administration apparently canned the idea, and I don’t think it has come back during the Bush administration….

Sidney Blumenthal, who not only attended last Thursday’s luncheon with Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski but helped give it a bit of zest with this article on Scowcroft being shoved outside the door of Bush administration insiders just days before the meeting, wrote this in today’s Guardian.

At the event I hosted a week ago today, Mort Kondracke was among the approximately 45 guests. Mort is an open-minded ‘radical centrist/moderate independent’ columnist who thinks, like I do, that blind faith by many to anachronistic perspectives as well as ‘inertia’ explain government policy better than most any other set of drivers.

I think everyone on both sides (if there are only two) of the debate that unfolded on David Frum’s and my blogs yesterday regarding the appropriate use and meaning of the words, ‘incipient’ and ‘imminent’ will find this editorial in the Manchester Union Leader something to laugh about.

David Frum responds to yesterday’s post on Brent Scowcroft and a possible Iraqi civil war with a supercilious and I think incorrect commentary on the fine differences between the words ‘incipient’ and ‘imminent’. I’ll let the linguists out there be the judge of who has the better part of that lexical exercise.

George Gedda of the Associated Press has written this interesting article today that refers to the comments made by Brent Scowcroft at last Thursday’s New America Foundation lunch meeting. A bit of an excerpt: At age 79, Brent Scowcroft doesn’t have much to lose if he speaks his mind.