Henry Kissinger saves me from a day at the bureaucracy

I had the day off today, so I decided to renew my license plates. When my number was called, I was informed that I needed to get an emissions test. The last time I got my license plates renewed I was living on the plains in rural Colorado, where the politicians do not require emissions testing. Now I am in the affluent suburb south of Denver, where no one wants to be politically incorrect.

Knowing that these operations were run by the government, which has no competition, I decided to stop by the house and get a book to read from my shelf full of books I had purchased at used book sales, but had never read. I picked Henry Kissinger's White House Years.

Sure enough, the lines at the emission testing station were around the block. I got so engrossed in reading Kissinger's book, that several times I neglected to move my car forward when the line was moving. Later, when I went across town to get my license, I was number 574 in line, I kid you not! The time went fast, as I read about how Kissinger was a loyal friend and admirer of Nelson Rockefeller, and was shocked when Nixon asked him to be his adviser.

Writing this book in 1979, Kissinger writes candidly about Rockefeller and Nixon. Some of his observations about the process of electing politicians are even more true today than they were in the 1970s:

A man who understands the complex essence of the nominating process, as Nixon did supremely, will inevitably defeat a candidate who seeks the goal by emphasizing substance.

Obama v. Romney anyone? One more:

The politics of manipulation may yet be the essence of modern American Presidential politics.