Category: long story short

  • Bush testifies without Cheney present

    “I have thought from the beginning that this case was a ticking time bomb,” writes MARK (in Mark A. R. Kleiman: Valerie Plame: A chat with the Prez): Having interviewed Dick Cheney some time ago, yesterday Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor working on the Valerie Plame affair, spent an hour and ten minutes with the…

  • I pledge alliegance to my respective country…

    This was a Reuters headline today: Serb Vote Halts Feared Slide Back to Nationalism The AP story led with: A reformist politician defeated a nationalist ally of Slobodan Milosevic… I wonder, seriously wonder, what in the world we Americans do think about nationalism. Do we think that we are nationalistic? If so, do we take…

  • The Detainee Documents

    The statements on detainee treatment released by the Bush administration yesterday carefully keep all the options of torture and Geneva violations open. From today’s NYT (All italics are mine.) “[A] senior Justice Department official said the document [the already infamous 8/02 Justice Department memo] was ‘overbroad and irrelevant’ and was unnecessary because no one in…

  • Too Deep for Me

    I was listening to a review of this new kid’s movie, and I don’t get why there’s a law that a rowboat will not harm a human being!

  • Cheney’s Shootdown Orders

    When Cheney issued the shootdown orders on 9/11, he said Bush had “signed off on the concept.” Apparently Bush told him not to issue the order right away, when he got off the phone. It was more like: “Shoot down the planes, but only if someone asks.”

  • Why I [heart] the Poor Man

    Despite the occasional charming spelling lapse, Andrew Northrup writes with the crisp biting wit of a Mencken or Swift. For example: Men of Principle No blockquote. Best read in toto. Another reason why bloggers rule and pundits drool: Northrup doesn’t have any access to power to worry about, just his eyes and his ears and…