Alexander Hamilton

As a rule, I favor politicians and bureaucrats fighting duels. It keeps the worst people out of the field for fear of it, and it provides a bracing risk that can temper rhetoric. The last time I can remember one being discussed in explicit terms was in 2004, when Zell Miller expressed regret that dueling was no longer legal after a media nobody who had browbeaten a woman on his show got in his face about something.

There's a lot to be said for the institution, which I used to write about much more often. Once Saddam Hussein challenged George W. Bush to a duel to settle the Iraq War, which is literally Homeric. In retrospect I wish it had happened. It would have been far better than the war, whichever way it had gone. 

UPDATE: On the subject of Presidential duels, I recently read this story.

You would think that Andrew Jackson was giving you his undivided attention, and then you would glance over and notice that he had devoted the last several minutes to making a laborious sketch of an alligator.

“Mr. President!” you would gasp, indignantly.

“I have a bullet lodged inside my body,” he would say. “From killing a man in a duel. A better man than you.” He would resume drawing the alligator.

I don't know if that story is actually true: it's from the Washington Post, after all. But the alligator doodle is real.