Keep trying

Jeffrey Goldberg is evidently insisting — with the dubious aid of Eli Lake and evidence to the contrary — that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda once had a “potentially meaningful relationship.” By the same token, I should note that I once had a “potentially meaningful relationship” with Kristi Yamaguchi, whom I sat next to on a 45-minute flight from Roanoke to Pittsburgh in December 1994. We chatted politely for several minutes before she realized that we shared nothing in common. She’d never read The Genealogy of Morals (which I was staring at to blunt my aerophobia), and I’d never read whatever she happened to be carrying; she slept, and I spent the next half hour wondering who’d feed my cats when our plane left a small crater on the side of a mountain. Every knowledgeable expert agrees that we never met again. However, I would like to believe that our relationship “was more like the relationship between rival Colombian cocaine cartels,” and — notwithstanding her later support for Mitt Romney — I would be much obliged if a handful of true believers would continue to argue that we were quite happy during the years we spent together.