It’s a shame that the Armed services hearing scheduled for Thursday is going to be closed to the public, because it promises to be a good one.

Defense Undersecretary for Policy Eric Edelman, now known for his feud with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), will provide a briefing on “drawdown planning for U.S. forces in Iraq.”

Depending on Clinton’s campaign schedule, the hearing could be the first time for the two to share a space since letters and comments started flying two weeks ago. That’s when Edelman argued that discussion of withdrawal “reinforces enemy propaganda.” Clinton responded that he had questioned her patriotism, after which Defense Secretary Robert Gates tried to convince everyone to make nice again.

This time, though, Gates won’t be there. Which brings us to our request:

Helen Thomas: If only you got to pick the rumors about you

Longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas is miffed at Garry Trudeau after he portrayed her as one tough broad in his Doonesbury cartoon strip last week.

But it’s not because he depicted the dean of the White House press corps telling self-important TV correspondent Roland Hedley to “Get the hell out of my face” when he brought two visitors to meet her in the White House briefing room.

No, it was because Hedley told the visitors the “legendary UPI reporter [has] been here since the Truman administration! Some say she was Truman’s lover.”

Truman’s lover? Puh-lease. Thomas likes to think she could do better than that.

“I wish he’d said I was Jack Kennedy’s lover,” said Thomas, who began covering the White House when President Kennedy took office in January, 1961.

Thomas, who will celebrate her 87th birthday next month, left UPI in 2000 and now writes a syndicated column for Hearst Newspapers.

The Chron’s bean counters happy to bid Hines farewell

Houston Chronicle readers may be disappointed that they’ll no longer be seeing Cragg Hines’s byline, as they have for the past 35 years, but the newspaper’s finance department may not be.

That’s because the paper’s first fulltime Washington columnist, who retired Friday, was renowned for gargantuan expense reports that matched his stature and reputation as a gourmand.

When the Chronicle’s editor, Jeff Cohen, joked at a Friday night farewell party for Hines at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel about the size of his expenses, Hines said he refrained from saying he had learned the art of writing expense accounts from the New York Times’s legendary Johnny Apple — only because Apple’s widow, Betsey, was among the guests.

Fittingly, Hines decided to retire after having lunch in June with some friends at the famed Taillevant restaurant in Paris. “I’d been thinking about retiring when we had this heavenly lunch,” he said. “I had lobster risotto with a hint of curry, drop-dead delicious, and my friends were all American, all younger and all retired, and I said why not me?”

Hines, who arrived in Washington during the week of the Watergate burglary in June, 1972, celebrated his 35th year with the Chronicle on June 12, a week before his 62nd birthday. “Sixty-two is the perfect age to retire,” he said.

Hines has several book projects in mind, including an historical novel based on the life of a 19th-century ancestor who
was a bigamist.

As for the two Texas presidents he has covered, Hines clearly favors the first President Bush. “His son is a huge disappointment,” he said. “My readers say, ‘Why do I hate him?’ I don’t hate him, I just can’t imagine why he’s been so ineffably bad.”

Arlen Specter’s ace pitching is not enough to overcome the office of Bob Casey at the bat

The office of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) finally defeated fellow Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum in the state softball showdown last year, just in time for Santorum to lose his job.

Now, the fear for Specter’s office is that the old curse has gotten new life with freshman Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who defeated Santorum in the election last year. Casey’s office took down Specter’s office at a friendly July 25 softball game on the National Mall.

Despite an early lead by Specter’s team, the final score was 12–11, junior senator over senior senator.

“We crushed them,” Casey spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff joked.

Despite the troubling return to loserville for Specter’s office, the sideline gossip focused on how impressed staffers were with Specter’s pitching skills.

His office would not comment on the matter, but most of them were in a sufficiently good mood after the game to for a bipartisan celebration with Casey’s staff at a nearby bar.

House GOP summer reading is not exactly beach ready

Reps. Zack Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) sent out a joint “dear colleague” letter to their caucus last week with a helpful summer reading list.
We don’t want to give away the endings for the six tomes that made the list, but here’s a hint: Don’t expect them to lighten your mood.

The list is largely focused on the history of conflict in the Middle East, and includes Walid Phares’s “Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America” and Dore Gold’s “The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West and the Future of the Holy City.”

Wamp, who said he tends to read about 200 pages per flight, hasn’t been able to carve out the time to read any lighter fare. McCotter, however, did add one novel to the list: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The General in his Labyrinth.”

That book tells the story of a once-revered South American politician, whose power and popularity have both dried up.
McCotter’s office did not respond to questions about whether the novel’s hero reminded him of anyone we might know.

Albert Eisele contributed to this page.