Obligatory Election Thought

In 1936, Mikhail Tomsky learned that he was about to be arrested for treason by the secret police of the USSR. He committed suicide. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, later claimed that "Tomsky's suicide was a plot, a premeditated act. Tomsky had arranged, not with one person but with several people, to commit suicide and therefore to strike a blow once again against the Central Committee."

In 2006, three detainees held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay hanged themselves in their cells. The camp commander, Rear Adm Harris, claimed that the suicides were carefully plotted: "[These men] have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe that this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

On this election day, as on all others, I am thankful that our apparatchiks are replaceable.