Thursday, April 08, 2004
Freudian Slip
So here's the thing about Condi Rice's testimony. Her opening statement and many of her answers were not at a particularly high level of complexity, and she didn't really try to get too involved in subtleties. But, see, subtleties are the whole ballgame--the details, the things that really matter. The things that most people don't pay attention to. If you are Mr. or Mrs. Swing Voter, you probably think she did fine.
I notice that the White House is blaming "minority extremist elements" for the upsurge in resistance in Iraq this week. But that's not what NPR's Anne Garrels reported from Baghdad this morning. To hear her tell it, Iraqis who have not supported the insurgency heretofore are supporting it now. Coalition forces from other countries have been forced to retreat from cities they have occupied for weeks or months. More ominously, there's speculation that Shi'ites and Sunnis, who have hated each other's guts for over a thousand years, may be starting to make common cause against the occupation. If that happens, a good question for the Bush Administration might be this: Does the name "Custer" mean anything to you?
And finally . . . I just tried my local library's online catalog to find the book by Thomas P.M. Barnett I mentioned in this morning's post, which is called The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. It's on order, but what's most interesting is that the library shows it as being part of the fiction collection. Insert rimshot here.
So here's the thing about Condi Rice's testimony. Her opening statement and many of her answers were not at a particularly high level of complexity, and she didn't really try to get too involved in subtleties. But, see, subtleties are the whole ballgame--the details, the things that really matter. The things that most people don't pay attention to. If you are Mr. or Mrs. Swing Voter, you probably think she did fine.
I notice that the White House is blaming "minority extremist elements" for the upsurge in resistance in Iraq this week. But that's not what NPR's Anne Garrels reported from Baghdad this morning. To hear her tell it, Iraqis who have not supported the insurgency heretofore are supporting it now. Coalition forces from other countries have been forced to retreat from cities they have occupied for weeks or months. More ominously, there's speculation that Shi'ites and Sunnis, who have hated each other's guts for over a thousand years, may be starting to make common cause against the occupation. If that happens, a good question for the Bush Administration might be this: Does the name "Custer" mean anything to you?
And finally . . . I just tried my local library's online catalog to find the book by Thomas P.M. Barnett I mentioned in this morning's post, which is called The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. It's on order, but what's most interesting is that the library shows it as being part of the fiction collection. Insert rimshot here.
