Mirabile dictu! Fully 28 profs and former profs from the Harvard Law School have taken a stand for freedom and for the rule of law. They are on the side of the Constitution and simple fairness. As Ivy Leaguers go, their stand took courage.

WASHINGTON — I have been vindicated! For years I have been comparing the Clinton family to the family of Warren Gamaliel Harding, our 29th president and a president of dark memory at least to most liberal historians. For me, Warren was sheer slapstick, as to some degree his modern-day equivalent was, Bill Clinton. And forget not their gruesome wives.

I began my historical comparisons in the 1996 bestselling book, "Boy Clinton: The Political Biography." For years, I punctuated my syndicated column with references to the two families. Then in my 2007 book, "The Clinton Crack-Up," I clinched the comparison in a reminder of how that Little Rock monstrosity, the Clinton Library, compared so favorably with the Harding Memorial in Warren's hometown, Marion, Ohio. But now, you ask, how am I vindicated? Well, America's historical memory is not very strong. Comparing Bill with a 1920s president to a modern American audience was not easy. Yet, by month's end it will be much easier. In fact, the comparison will be inescapable.

When asked on left-leaning MSNBC why President Barack Obama refrained from describing the Boston bombings as a "terrorist attack" David Axelrod, Obama's longtime political advisor, readily saw a political opportunity. The blood had not yet been washed away from the streets. We had yet to count up the casualties. Yet Axelrod saw a political opening, an opportunity to advance one or another of his pet political issues. So he said, "I'm sure what was going through the president's mind is — we really don't know who did this — it was tax day." Yes, tax day!

This is not the response of a normal mind. A normal mind would not, given the promiscuity of public bombings in the Middle East and now another bombing here in America, think it was provoked by "tax day." Conceivably the bombs in Boston were the work of small-government libertarians or of Tea Partiers. They could even be the work of vegetarians, but that was not the question. Axelrod was asked why the president was not describing the bombings as a terrorist attack. It certainly looked more like the work of terrorists — either left-wing lunatics or right-wing lunatics — than tax protesters.

I am indebted to Amity Shlaes for gently correcting a joke of mine that dates back to July 8, 1972. On that date in the New York Times, I joshed that President Calvin Coolidge "probably spent more time napping than any president in the nation's history" and therefore was a successful president. My joke was a play on an earlier joke by H. L. Mencken, and now Shlaes has corrected both of us. She has written a very impressive biography titled simply "Coolidge," wherein she never mentions Cal's naps but rather what made him the most successful president of the 1920s. He reversed the economic insolvency of President Woodrow Wilson, and set the economy on the road to growth, a road made rocky by Cal's successor, President Herbert Hoover, and rockier still by Hoover's successor, Franklin Roosevelt.

Though one would not know it today, Coolidge was the most successful president of the 1920s. Vice President Coolidge came to the presidency on the death of President Warren G. Harding in August 1923 and won the presidency outright in 1924 with 54 percent of the vote over the Democrat, John W. Davis, who had 28.8 percent of the vote, and the Progressive, Robert M. La Follette, who won just 16.6 percent of the vote. Moreover, Coolidge had won every race he ever contested from his first run for city councilman in 1898 to the governorship of Massachusetts in 1918, usually by astoundingly large margins. His combination of civility, effectiveness, standing by the law and, as president, tax cuts, budget balancing, and growth, was wildly popular with American voters, as was his singular asset, taciturnity.

I wonder, as we begin 2013 and look forward to four more years of this insufferable poseur in the White House, where Sandra Fluke might be. Miss Fluke is the lady who made birth control a matter of national security, in particular her own personal supply of pills and God knows what else. Prior to her appearance on the national scene I always thought it was a male?s responsibility to supply condoms, as the occasion warranted. Yet Miss Fluke enlightened me. Actually she never told us what she used these items for. I suppose I am jumping to conclusions. She might be an artiste, and they may be part of her palette. There are all sorts of things birth control devices can be used for. At any rate, she brought birth control to the fore in American presidential elections at least four decades after they became a fixture in America. In that respect she made history.

Prior to Miss Fluke's public campaign for birth control, those who follow national politics had believed that elections revolved around the economy. But in 2012 we had an economy in a feeble condition. After four years in the White House, President Barack Obama presided over the weakest recovery from a recession on record. He had given Keynesian economics a bad name, even with many Keynesians. He had enlarged the federal government to almost 25 percent of GDP, from its traditional size of 18 or 19 percent. He was running deficits of a trillion dollars a year and promised them for years to come.

Jeffrey Hillman is a man who shambles the streets of New York City looking quite unkempt, drab, and hopeless. He panhandles sometimes and mutters to himself. Frankly, he looks a wreck and apparently is often in need of a pair of shoes. On cold winter nights he gets them.

One cold November night, Officer Lawrence DePrimo spotted Hillman seated shoeless on the pavement of Times Square, and the young policeman left his post, went into a store nearby, and bought Hillman a pair of shoes costing $100. He even helped Hillman put them on. A tourist snapped a picture of DePrimo doing this, and the picture appeared on Facebook. It went viral, and was seen around the world — a young New York City cop, putting shoes on a beggar.

This election is not turning out the way President Barack Obama had expected. Perhaps that is why he has looked so uncomfortable in his three debates with the suddenly debonair Governor Mitt Romney. Possibly President Obama had expected something more from the former governor of Massachusetts, the former CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, the former head of Bain Capital — and, incidentally, is not Bain Capital assuming the same demonic role in this contest between Obama and Romney as Halliburton industries once played in the campaigns of Bush-Cheney? It is, I suppose, an asset that in all their years of adult life neither Obama nor Joe Biden have ever suffered any exposure to the dark doings of private-sector employment, none whatsoever. It is a dispensation that has kept them pure, almost virginal.

The president in his high-minded innocence aspired to something more in this presidential race, something higher. I think he wanted to experience the clash and bang of Great Ideas in these debates. First, he would propose his view of a healthy prosperous America with budgets balanced and deficits receding. Then the challenger would admit to his view of the world. Romney would manfully step forward and envision the endless breadlines that his economic policies would engender. There would be the Hoovervilles, the soup kitchens, the scenes of little children, their noses running, huddled waiting in Dickensian stupefaction for their parents to return from the pollution-belching factories, perhaps with a loaf of bread for their starving families, PERHAPS NOT. Meanwhile, zoom, zoom, the millionaires and billionaires motor by in their Bentleys and Rolls Royces, and Priuses.

Autumn in New York — that sound like the title of a song! In fact, it sounds like the first line of a song, and so it is. Autumn is a lovely time of year in many places, but for me my favorite place at this time of year is New York City. As the song goes, it seems "so inviting." And one of the great events marking autumn in New York is the Columbus Day Parade. It reminds us of what a great melting pot it has been, and, one hopes, it always will be.

Christopher Columbus opened the New World to European migration in 1492. He prefigured the spirit of America with his daring, his sense of duty and his piety. Samuel Eliot Morison, in the second volume of his two-volume history, "The European Discovery of America," portrayed Columbus as a truly heroic figure, an exemplary captain of the ocean waves, to introduce us all to the admirable adventure that America has proved to be. 68 years ago, the Italian-Americans in New York City's Columbus Citizens Foundation gave Columbus a fitting memorial in the Columbus Day Parade, and this year on October 8, once again all Americans can come out to honor him and share in the glory that is the American melting pot.

How little we know about holy Islam! When those poor wretches who were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib were pictured for all the world to see naked with underpants on their heads, we were told that the naked male Islamic body must never be seen in public. Yet we have been seeing naked male Islamic bodies for years — often with their hands tied behind their backs and their heads chopped off. Their assailants were devotees of Islam, often very zealous. Few Westerners committed these atrocities, and if they were caught, they were punished. Then too we were told that mosques were revered places of worship by Islam, and they must not be subject to attack or used in acts of violence. Alas, for years, mosques have been blown up. Their inhabitants have been gunned down, even impaled on sharp blades. These were not the acts of unbelievers or of warriors from the Godless West. Rather, they were the acts of the faithful, often members of the same sect or tribe.

Just this weekend in Libya — now freshly liberated from Moammar Gadhafi, his body perforce treated roughly — ancient and venerated shrines of the majority Sufi persuasion were destroyed. In Tripoli at the crack of dawn on Saturday, the centuries-old Sidi Al-Sha'ab shrine was flattened by bulldozers. Two separate government security forces idly stood by. The day before in the city of Zlitan, Libya's most revered Sufi mosque was vandalized, and an adjoining library had its priceless collection of theological treatises torched. The attackers were fellow Libyans. No Westerner was in sight.