Washington has one industry, politics. News is its by-product. In the month of August, the politicians go on vacation, the White House and the Houses of Congress close shop. Tourists line up for White House tickets and scalpers try to charge them money for what is free.
The heat is unbearable. Last weekend it broke a 60-year record.
President Clinton, his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea, went to Block Island, off the New York coast, and to Martha's Vineyard, off Massachusetts, for his 51st birthday, which he spent with friends, not identified otherwise. We'll learn who they are in time, for those who care. And he went sailing with Ted Kennedy and his family in Massachusetts Bay.
The President's personal message to fellow-citizens, reported in the Washington Post, was: "I feel very blessed and I'm very fortunate to be here, and as far as I know I'm in good health and the country's doing well."
He went jogging, the first time he has done so since injuring his knee in Florida five months ago. Chelsea jogged with him. And of course, so did his Secret Service detail.
If he reads newspapers at his holiday retreats, and no doubt he does, Mr Clinton has learned, via Irving Kristol's "The Emerging American Imperium" in Monday's Wall Street Journal, that the US is ready to take over the world.
Mr Kristol uses the term "imperium" for "empire" because it "describes this mixture of dependency and autonomy". It is less offensive to American ears than "empire", in view of the origins of the US.
The EU is a US political dependency, he claims. "The meaning of NATO today is that the US has provided the nations of Europe with a unilateral guarantee of their existing borders against aggression. This is what these nations want above all."
They also want to retain the welfare state, according to Mr Kristol. He says their military expenditures continue to decline, and are made ever more reluctantly.
"The state of military preparedness is pitiable, the will to use power utterly lacking - witness the case of Bosnia, where Europe refused to act until the US took the lead," he writes.
"The very spirit of patriotism is a faint shadow of its former self. Which is why Europe is resigned to be a quasi-autonomous protectorate of the US. For the moment, Washington is not demanding Europe's quasi-automatic support of US foreign policy. But pressure toward this end will become irresistible. . ."
The European Union he describes as "a larger version of Sweden - and who goes to Sweden to find the keys that will unlock the future? Latin America, everhostile to `Yankee imperialism' . . . is coming to recognise the legitimacy of US leadership."
In South-East Asia, the people "are far less frightened by the prospect of a relatively lighthanded American `imperium' than by the prospect of Chinese domination, which has always been of the heavy-handed variety."
He concludes: "The world has never seen an `imperium' of this kind, and it is hard to know what to make of it. In its favour, it lacks the brute coercion that characterised European imperialism. "But it also lacks the authentic missionary spirit of that older imperialism, which aimed to establish the rule of law while spreading Christianity. (Our missionaries live in Hollywood.)"
It offers the world "a growth economy, a `consumerist' society, popular elections and a dominant secular hedonistic ethos."
Mr Kristol is not saying it's all good, but clearly in his view it's the wave of the future. A strange doctrine for a one-time Communist - of the Leon Trotsky persuasion - at New York's City College in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As a founder of Neo-Conservatism, which was influential in the Reagan administration, Mr Kristol and colleagues were a force on the far right of the political spectrum.
Mr Kristol edits the Public In- terest. His co-editor is Nathan Glazier. He publishes but does not edit the National Interest. Its advisory board includes Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Henry Kissinger.
Dr Kissinger was a target of the neo-conservatives for his policy of detente with the Soviet Union. John B. Judis in Foreign Affairs two years ago accused the NeoConservatives of derailing detente in 1974 when they set quotas for Soviet emigration and backed a trade amendment denying Moscow "most-favoured nation" status - normal trade - which Dr Kissinger had negotiated.
The political muscle of Senator Henry Jackson, a right-wing Democrat with presidential ambitions, got it through the Senate. But he died before he could make his run for President.