Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) toast at former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 90th birthday party “had the room buzzing,” the Daily Beast reports.

“McCain, shot down as a bomber pilot over North Vietnam on October 26, 1967, was brutally treated by his captors. He was tortured, beaten incessantly, his arms rebroken in the notorious Hanoi Hilton. Part of the McCain legend has always been how he declined an offer of early release rather than jump ahead of his fellow prisoners on account of his father’s impending promotion to admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific fleet. On Monday night, for the first time, he told of a role played by Henry Kissinger.”

A must-read out next week: Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence by Joseph J. Ellis.

Coming ahead of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination: Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek.

Also forthcoming: The Kennedy Half-Century by Larry J. Sabato and Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that President Obama would not be president if it weren’t for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law, The Hill reports.

Said King: “It’s clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn’t be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty act.”

“King is a leading GOP critic of efforts to pass an immigration reform bill, and has often said on the House floor that Republicans are overreacting to the 2012 election, which some Republicans saw as a sign that the GOP needs to get behind a reform bill.”

Carl Cannon: “Richard Milhous Nixon was thin-skinned, felt persecuted by the opposition party, had a penchant for classifying political adversaries — and journalists — as ‘enemies,’ and tried to control his image so fiercely that, ultimately, zealous aides committed illegal acts to further his re-election.”

“But even before that had happened — and before Nixon himself began directing a coverup — truth had become a casualty of his administration. This is the parallel between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama.”

“No evidence has been unearthed connecting Obama, or anyone under his direction, to illicit activities. But the absence of criminality isn’t the only test here. Nixon’s ‘enemies,’ at least in his mind, also included vast swaths of the Fourth Estate. That apparently is how the current president operates, too.”

Newt Gingrich told NPR his GOP colleagues should worry “about the risk of appearing to be too eager as they dig into the scandals now dogging the Obama administration.”

Said Gingrich: “I think we overreached in ’98 — how’s that for a quote you can use?”

He added: “They need to be calm and factual. For example, a [House] subcommittee … should invite every single tea party, conservative, patriot group that was messed over by the IRS — every single one of them — to come in and testify, so that they build this deadening record of how many different people were having their rights abused by this administration.”

“I find the comparison — that whoever is making the analysis is challenged in their understanding of history.”

— Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, quoted by the Boston Globe, on comparing the current Obama scandals to Watergate.

Joe Klein: “Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used
the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever
wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case,
he now is.”

The Guardian reports that David Stein and his organization, Republican Party Animals, “drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talkshows. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein’s cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.”

“There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998.”

“Cole’s brazen reinvention as a social networker and political pundit deceived a roll-call of conservative politicians, filmmakers, journalists and broadcasters who had no clue about his past.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Chicago Tribune she isn’t sure the high court should have taken the Bush v. Gore case that decided the 2000 presidential election.

Said O’Connor: “It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue. Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.'”

The case “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation.”

She added: “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”

“She was the one who set the stage for Adolf Hitler. She didn’t copy him, he copied her. Planned Parenthood — it’s unbelievable how evil they were in the early days.”

— Pat Robertson, on The 700 Club, saying Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a model for Hitler.

Two weeks after Boston bombings, President Obama will have to walk a line between heartfelt and funny at this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Former Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz writes in the Daily Beast about how the the Oklahoma City Federal Building tragedy kept President Clinton from delivering a very funny speech.

Here’s the speech he never gave at the 1995 dinner.

I had the great honor to know Hugo Young, a well-known British author and columnist for The Guardian. He wrote an amazing epitaph for Margaret Thatcher just days before he died in 2003. It’s finally being published today.

DNAinfo has photos of the demolition that began this week on the apartment building where President Ronald Reagan lived as a child.

“The University of Chicago bought the building in 2004 as part of a decadelong effort to buy all residential property immediately north of the hospital… Preservationists had tried to save the building, but were unable to persuade city or university officials that the gas-lit apartment where Reagan lived from ages 2 to 3 was historically significant.”

Retronaut: President Abraham Lincoln unknowingly carried a secret message in his pocket watch.

After a quick review, Daniel Drezner was able to find at least two major misleading statements in every State of the Union address in the past decade.

Coming soon: The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy by Michael J. Gerhardt

Dan Amira: “It’s unclear whether Christie would be the heaviest president in
American history, but he would certainly share one of the top two spots
with William Howard Taft, who served as our 27th president from 1909 to
1913. And though that was a long time ago, in a much different era,
there may be a thing or two that Christie can learn from Taft’s
experience.”