It was an ordinary speech, until the president dropped a bomb: he would be retiring for medical reasons.

The air was soft and warm, and fraught with that peculiar sweetness which tells that the serynga (our English orange-flower) has expanded, and that the lilacs are in full blossom.

Just a few days before McNamara died, Politico uncovered a particularly graphic example involving The Post: an invitation to lobbyists to shell out $25,000 to $250,000 to sponsor off-the-record, nonconfrontational salons where they could mix with what a promotional flier called the right people and alter the debate.

It surely had winterkilled all the soft-grained wheat that had been planted.