| Sunday, July 03, 2005 |
| Sunday best |
The BBC has a great story about Napoleon Bonaparte's struggle to learn English while in exile, "so he could read what the London papers were writing about him."
Just in time for the Fourth, WaPo does variations on the Pledge of Allegiance, including inviting writers and other assorted thoughtful types to write their own updates. Most of them are pretty cynical, but loved this one (overall, Peggy Noonan got the sentiment right, I think):
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America - red and blue - and to the Republic for which it stands, despite all the extremely preposterous people in it.
- Christopher Buckley, humor writer Meanwhile, back in the political fray, John Meacham of Newsweek posts a plea to religious Americans to help find an accord on the things that matter to all of us. If only that were likely to happen in the hyper-political state we're in, and given the stakes facing us in the Supreme Court battles to come...
Karl Rove's lawyer says his client is not the CIA name-leaker, but that he did talk to Time's Matthew Cooper during the critical week in 2003 when the name was dropped to Robert Novak and others... we'll see how that shakes out, but it does confirm the O'Donnel story to the extent that Rove's name appears in the notes Time turned over to investigators, making you wonder whether Rove was involved in moving the information around, if not in initially putting Plame on front street...
Over at the Times, Anne Kornblut reports on the dearth of flag lapel pins walking around Washington these days, and Frank Rich says Spielberg outdid President Bush when it comes to scaring the bejeezus out of Americans over 9/11:
Decide for yourself if "War of the Worlds" is more terrifying than "Jaws." Either way, it's scarier than the president's speech. Yet the discrepancy between Mr. Spielberg's ability to whip up fear and Mr. Bush's inability isn't merely a matter of aesthetics. On Independence Day 2005, this terror gap is an ideal barometer for gauging the waning political power of a lame-duck president waging what increasingly looks like a lame-duck war.
As we saw on Tuesday night, doomsday isn't the surefire hit it used to be for Mr. Bush. Now that the rhetorical arsenal of W.M.D.'s and mushroom clouds is bare, he had little choice but to bring back that oldie but goodie, 9/11, as the specter of the doom that awaits us if we don't stay the course - his course - in Iraq. By the fifth time he did so, it was hard not to think of that legendary National Lampoon cover:
"If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog."
Planned or not, the sepulchral silence of Mr. Bush's military audience was the perfect dazed response to what was literally a summer rerun. The president gave almost the identical televised address, albeit with four fewer 9/11 references, at the Army War College in Pennsylvania in May 2004. It's so tired that this time around even the normally sympathetic Drudge site gave higher billing to reviews of "War of the Worlds." Fewer TV viewers tuned in than for any prime-time speech in Mr. Bush's presidency. A good thing too, since so much of what he said was, as usual, at odds with reality. The president pledged to "prevent Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban" a full week after Newsweek and The New York Times reported on a new C.I.A. assessment that the war may be turning Iraq into an even more effective magnet and training ground for Islamic militants than Afghanistan was for Al Qaeda in the 1980's and 90's.
Here's one you probably won't read in the mainstream press: Bank Leumi reportedly wrote off more than NIS 600,000 (about $139,000) in debt owed by Israeli P.M. Ariel Sharon and his family back in 1996. It's interesting to see just how much scandal Sharon has been able to survive, maybe because his chief rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, has so many scandals of his own?
And at NRO, Rich Lowry attempts to dampen-down the Abramoff money train scandal by blaming the Indians for the corruption.
And from the Times of London comes the argument that for all the hype about the G8 summit, much of it created by Live8, the membership of the Group of Eight is "all wrong" given the shifting axis of economic power in the world, and that such summits may be in their final throes, as Dick Cheney would say (but real last throes in this case, not the Iraqi insurgent kind...) |
posted by JReid @ 2:40 PM   |
|
|
|
|
