... even when it comes to listening to himself talk. Here's part of Dobbs' entertaining rant against the Washington Post's Ezra Klein:

Trotsky

Robert Service

Harvard University Press, $35

When Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin, in 1940, the American novelist James T. Farrell took to the pages of Partisan Review to memorialize him. “The life of Leon Trotsky is one of the great tragic dramas of modern history,” Farrell’s obituary began, and it only gets more idolatrous from there. “Pitting his brain and will against the despotic rulers of a great empire, fully conscious of the power, the resources, the cunning and cruelty of his enemy, Trotsky had one weapon at his command--his ideas. His courage never faltered; his will never broke.”

To the Editor:

Although I could have done without the "pathological," believe it or not, a part of me is glad that, in her review of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Anne Applebaum refers to "Navasky's pathological inability to believe that there really were Soviet spies in America." The reason: It gives me a second shot at correcting an egregious New Republicerror.

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev

(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)

Joe Sobran, a syndicated columnist who was himself accused of anti-Semitism a few years ago, offers this perspective on the Pat Buchanan flap: "Jewish claims are being cut down to size in various ways. It's coded by a lot of Jews as anti-Semitism. I don't think it is. It's more like counter-Semitism.''