Archive
Rehabilitating War Criminals
We sure love our war criminal presidents, don’t we? Or at least we love rehabilitating them after they spend a few years in purgatory.
Let’s talk a bit about Nixon. The 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi were criminal enough, but have a look at this article by Bob Parry last month (hat tip, Charles Pierce), in which we learn of Nixon’s successful efforts to derail Johnson’s negotiations with the North Vietnamese in 1968 that could have ended the war. Moreover, Parry suggests, Nixon’s desire to hide the evidence of this lay behind the Watergate break-in of 1972.
Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.
The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.
We now know that was because President Johnson, who privately had called Nixon’s Vietnam actions “treason,” had ordered the file removed from the White House by his national security aide Walt Rostow.
Treason indeed. As Charles Pierce comments:
There were 22,000 more Americans who died in Vietnam after Nixon sabotaged the peace talks in order to win an election. That’s 44,000 more American parents. That’s thousands and thousands more American children. That’s god alone knows how many more men, women, and children in Southeast Asia, all of whom died, very likely unnecessarily, because of Richard Nixon’s treasonous ambitions.
By the time of Nixon’s death in 1994, the rehabilitation was complete. We learn in the NYT obit that at the opening of his presidential library in 1990, he was “hailed as a statesman and a peacemaker.”
And now it’s time for the opening of yet another presidential library, which served as the occasion of more rehabilitation. Last week, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum (pictured above) opened in Dallas on the campus of SMU. Here’s a sight to stir your heart:
The jacket worn by President George W. Bush to serve a turkey dinner during his secret Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in 2003.
[From the presidential library website]
Bush did more than prolong a war. He lied us into one, helped along by a host of government officials and an accommodating press. No point reviewing the familiar details. Oh, and he introduced torture as government policy, this being confirmed (if it needed confirmation) by a report two weeks ago.
A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.
The sweeping, 600-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”
[snip]
The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.
Yet, the opening of the Bush library offered an occasion to reassess Bush and place him in a positive light, which his fellow presidents were only too happy to do.
On this day, they collectively wrapped their arms around a fellow member of the club.
“We know President Bush the man,” Mr. Obama said. “To know the man is to like the man. Because he’s comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is. He doesn’t put on any pretenses. He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is a good man.”
Mr. Obama, whose first presidential campaign was built on opposition to the Iraq war, praised Mr. Bush for his bullhorn-in-the-rubble fortitude after Sept. 11 and said his predecessor fought for what he thought was best for his country. He linked his own effort to overhaul the immigration system to Mr. Bush’s.
“If we do that, it will be in large part thanks to the hard work of President George W. Bush,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Clinton, who has become close to the Bush family, offered warm words and recounted how he and Mr. Bush used to talk politics while his successor was in office. Referring to the library behind him, he joked, “Dear God, I hope there’s no record of those conversations in this vast and beautiful building.” Hillary Rodham Clinton, sitting onstage with the other presidents and first ladies, laughed robustly.
Mr. Carter, one of the fiercest critics of the Iraq war, talked about how Mr. Bush ended war in Sudan and helped Africa. “I’m filled with admiration for you and deep gratitude for you about the contributions you’ve made to the most needy people on earth,” he told Mr. Bush.
Really? Spare me. I know it’s a complicated world and not everything is black and white. But here’s some black and white: President Bush was a war criminal and a liar.
Anthony Lewis
Anthony Lewis, 2003
[Matthew Peyton/Getty Images]
I’ve wanted to write about Anthony Lewis since learning of his death three days ago. He was my favorite New York Times columnist for many years. More recently, I’ve enjoyed his pieces in the New York Review of Books. But I don’t have anything specific to say. Let me turn instead to a few of the (many) remembrances of him.
First, basic facts from Adam Liptak’s NYT obituary.
Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times reporter and columnist whose work won two Pulitzer Prizes and transformed American legal journalism, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85. …
Mr. Lewis brought passionate engagement to his two great themes: justice and the role of the press in a democracy. His column, called “At Home Abroad” or “Abroad at Home” depending on where he was writing from, appeared on the Op-Ed page of The Times for more than 30 years, until 2001. His voice was liberal, learned, conversational and direct.
As a reporter, Mr. Lewis brought an entirely new approach to coverage of the Supreme Court, for which he won his second Pulitzer, in 1963.
“He brought context to the law,” said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the University of Washington who compiled a bibliography of Mr. Lewis’s work. “He had an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible but also in making it compelling.”
Before Mr. Lewis started covering the Supreme Court, press reports on its decisions were apt to be pedestrian recitations by journalists without legal training, rarely examining the court’s reasoning or grappling with the context and consequences of particular rulings. Mr. Lewis’s thorough knowledge of the court’s work changed that. His articles were virtual tutorials about currents in legal thinking, written with ease and sweep and an ability to render complex matters accessible.
[snip]
Mr. Lewis’s coverage of the court impressed Justice Felix Frankfurter, who called Mr. Reston. “I can’t believe what this young man achieved,” Justice Frankfurter said, as Mr. Reston recalled in his memoir, “Deadline.” “There are not two justices of this court who have such a grasp of these cases.”
Lincoln Caplan, writing at The American Scholar:
“The Constitution remains our fundamental law,” Anthony Lewis wrote, “because great judges have read it in that spirit.” Covering the Supreme Court for The New York Times in the 1960s, he was on hand when justices on the Warren Court did just that. Simply and eloquently, he explained how they made the court a central arbiter in American life and shaped the country’s march toward equality.
Lewis, who died Monday at 85, played an extraordinary role in that shaping. The court’s landmark decisions about racial justice, one person-one vote, and other deeply destabilizing social issues took hold because of the trust of the American people. Lewis helped foster that trust, through the authority and humane intelligence of his reporting and writing.
[snip]
He possessed a vivid, passionate intellect, and had the moral focus of a rabbi. He worked intensely in the texts, the talk, and the traditions of the Court, but that effort appeared to be an immersion more than work. The lesson I drew from his model was that, even for someone as gifted as he, hard work was essential to giving the Court its due—especially so for those of us following the Court who don’t have the exceptional gifts he had.
Because he had extraordinary access to justices and his writing helped elevate the stature of the Supreme Court, he was sometimes criticized as an insider and, in some sense, a captive of the institution. But when it let him down, as it did dramatically in Bush v. Gore, making a political ruling to throw the 2000 election to George W. Bush, he reminded readers of his uncompromising independence.
He loved the Supreme Court as an American institution, but loved the Constitution more. Another lesson I drew from his model was that, while the Court always deserves the respect of anyone covering it, that respect sometimes requires saying sharply why you think a ruling it makes is wrong. …
Anthony Lewis’s voice was from the Old Testament as well—awe-inspiring, judgmental, and righteous.
And Christopher Lydon, earlier today at Radio Open Source:
The best fun of being president of the US, I often thought, would be appointing Anthony Lewis to the Supreme Court. He was a non-lawyer with a persuasive understanding of the gift and genius of the Constitution. He had a historian’s grasp on how the law evolved. Justice Frankfurter said Tony knew the cases before the Court better than most of the sitting judges. And he could unfold the issues in lucid prose that grabbed me as a teen-age reader of the New York Times.
[snip]
Tony leaves us, I’d say, a memorable model for the best and broadest idea of a liberal at work. It wasn’t about dogma, much less radicalism. It was temperament as much as politics. It was about a modest optimism, a belief that institutions, even societies, could work on their flaws and get better. He was the human embodiment of the Warren Court, in that sense. He made a pair with his friend Justice William Brennan, who stood also for civility, compromise, persistence on an upward course. They stood for that era of reform in civil rights, in one-man-one-vote political representation, in the protection of defendants’ rights and the expansion of free speech and expression. Tony goaded the country with columns and landmark books on those central subjects, and by gum, the country got better. It can sound almost quaint, but he knew for certain that there were remedies for real ills in patient, hard-working devotion to our ideals in the Constitution and the law. So he never let up, and he never despaired.
One more quote, from Lydon again:
My favorite Tony Lewis columns – oddly unmentioned in the Times obit – might have been his answer to the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, the Nixon-Kissinger “terror bombing” of Hanoi – with no measurable purpose or benefit. Peace was at hand, they had said, the war all but over, but American B-52s poured it on: 2000 strikes over 11 days. “An episode that will live in infamy,” Tony Lewis wrote. And lest we forget he kept rewriting that column every Christmas for a decade. The lessons for Americans were still: “Beware obsession. Beware secrecy. Beware concentrated power. Beware men untouched by concern for the moral consequences of their acts.”
To read that Lewis column, from December 23, 1972, click here. And do read it. It’s as powerful today as it was forty-one years ago.
The Face of Evil
This post is a bit of a rerun, inasmuch as I already featured Tom Friedman’s famous justification for the Iraq War in a post last April. But I don’t know a better way to observe the tenth anniversary of that war’s start than to watch once again as Friedman responds to Charlie Rose’s question (astonishing in its own right), “Now that the war is over, and there’s some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?”
Jump to 2:36 for the high point, albeit with some context missing.
Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society? … Well suck on this. That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, … . We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.
This is about as depraved a defense of the war as I can imagine. We need to set an example by beating the crap out of some Muslim country. Let’s not pick on our ostensible allies (though they may be the ones that actually lend support to Al-Qaeda). We’ll go after Iraq. Because we can.
A decade later, Friedman remains the dean of American political columnists and the darling of the business community, with his best-selling books and speaking fees that must be approaching $100,000.
Oh, I just did a search to see if I missed Friedman’s apology somewhere and instead found an article in the Christian Science Monitor two days ago in which Dan Murphy took a look back at Friedman’s response to Rose, complete with a transcript of the passage I’ve merely excerpted. And this too, from Atrios yesterday.
Cat Appeal
Emma
The NYT published an article yesterday about Holly, the 4-year-old tortie who made it home to West Palm Beach two months after being separated from the couple she lives with when they were together at an RV rally two hundred miles away. Scientists can’t explain how she did it.
“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”
There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
I mention this story not because of its intrinsic interest, but because of my surprise on seeing last night that it had made its way to the top of the NYT list of most e-mailed articles. Tonight, it remains #1, and #4 under “Most Viewed.” Much as I enjoyed the story, I didn’t expect this. Are there really so many cat lovers out there, eager to spread the word about the wonders of the species?
Speaking of wondrous cats, our resident 16-3/4-year-old tortie Emma has not been doing well. At her annual physical 3 1/2 weeks ago, we were stunned to learn that her weight had fallen to six pounds, and her blood test suggested weakening kidneys. We’ve been experimenting with a variety of new foods since then. Last week she became listless, spending Thursday and Friday on her new heating mat without getting up to eat or drink. We brought her to the vet Saturday morning and she was down to five-and-a-half pounds. The vet recommended keeping her for the day so she could be hydrated, tested, and observed.
Tests showed that Emma’s white blood cell count was high, indicating an infection, perhaps a kidney infection, so she is now on antibiotics. We didn’t see any signs of improvement when she got home Saturday, or most of yesterday, but since last night she’s been eating again, moving around, behaving a bit like her usual self.
It looks like Emma has made it through. We have to continue with the antibiotics for another two weeks. Her nightly torture. They’re in liquid form, mixed with tuna juice by the pharmacist to make them more palatable. That’s the theory anyway. I’m not sure Emma got the message. At least she doesn’t claw us. In her prime, she would have made us pay. Now she’s much more tolerant of our ways.
The Rule of Law and Foreign Policy
The writer Robert Wright (author most recently of the 2009 book The Evolution of God) was a regular contributor at The Atlantic for the past year. He has now moved on to other ventures, writing his valedictory post a week ago. I wish I read him more consistently.
Wright took advantage of his post to “articulate three beliefs of mine that I rarely articulated this year, but that informed much of what I wrote, especially in the realm of foreign policy.” All three are worthy of reflection. Here’s the third:
If the United States doesn’t use its inevitably fading dominance to build a world in which the rule of law is respected, and in which global norms are strong, the United States (and the world) will suffer for it. So when, for example, we do things to other nations that we ourselves have defined as acts of war (like cybersabotage), that is not, in the long run, making us or our allies safer. The same goes for when we invade countries, or bomb them, in clear violation of international law. And at some point we have to get serious about building a truly comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation regime–one that we expect our friends, not just our enemies, to be members-in-good-standing of.
We learned not to expect sensitivity to this issue during the reign of Bush-Cheney, as they willfully ignored the rule of law. But President Obama would be different, or so I thought on the eve of his inauguration four years ago. Alas, little has changed. Two examples:
1. Drones. I never got around to writing about this at the time, but as Scott Shane reported in the NYT back around Thanksgiving,
Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.
[snip]
The administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still object to such measures.
But since the first targeted killing by the United States in 2002, two administrations have taken the position that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies and can legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they are found.
Commenting on this story a few days later, Georgetown law professor David Cole wrote:
The real problem is not that there are no guidelines written down—though the administration itself seems now to acknowledge that what it has is insufficient—but that we the people don’t know what they are. The idea that the president can authorize the killing of a human being far from any traditional battlefield without any publically accessible set of constraints, conditions, or requirements is unacceptable in a country committed to the rule of law. In his first and only speech on security and our national ideals, at the National Archives in May 2009, President Obama insisted that adherence to the rule of law is essential in the fight against terror, and to that end, promised to be transparent about his actions “so that [the people] can make informed judgments and hold us accountable.” Yet after four years and hundreds of killings authorized in secret, the most the president has been able to offer us about the scope of his most awesome power is a handful of vague paragraphs in a handful of administration officials’ speeches, which experts must then parse for clues as to what the rules might actually be. This is more akin to what law looked like in the Soviet Union than to what it should look like in the United States of America.
2. Fake vaccination program. Capturing (or killing) Osama Bin Laden was a high priority, but the end didn’t justify the means, or one of the means: fake vaccinations. As The Guardian first reported two Julys ago, “the CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family.” Three days later, The Guardian followed up with objections raised by Doctors Without Borders:
Médecins Sans Frontières has lashed out at the CIA for using a fake vaccination programme as a cover to spy on Osama bin Ladenon Thursday, saying it threatened life-saving immunisation work around the world.
The international medical aid charity said the ploy used by US intelligence, revealed this week in the Guardian, was a “grave manipulation of the medical act”.
[snip]
“The risk is that vulnerable communities – anywhere – needing access to essential health services will understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid,” said Unni Karunakara, MSF’s international president. “The potential consequence is that even basic healthcare, including vaccination, does not reach those who need it most.”
Tom Scocca reviewed the details at the time, concluding that
Bin Laden had already been found. The vaccination campaign was a matter of bureaucratic self-protection—to get DNA samples from people inside the compound, to confirm that the target that the CIA had identified in Abbottabad was correct, so that the agency wouldn’t embarrass itself. The most that the vaccinations could have done, if the DNA tests had come back negative, would have been to allow the CIA to quietly add this particular house to the list of places in which, over the course of a decade, it had failed to find Bin Laden.
And that assumes the vaccination trick even worked. According to the Guardian, it was “not known whether the CIA managed to obtain any bin Laden DNA, although one source suggested the operation did not succeed.” Yet we got Bin Laden anyway. The necessity that [a "senior U.S. official"] was pleading was fake necessity.
Last month, eight vaccination workers were killed in Pakistan during a nationwide vaccination drive.
Obama’s inauguration is a week away. May he show greater respect for the rule of law in his second term.
Ada Louise Huxtable
A month ago, I wrote about what I called a must-read piece by Ada Louise Huxtable on renovation plans for the New York Public Library, referring to her as a “famed architecture writer still at it at 91.” Alas, that was her final piece. She died earlier today.
In tomorrow’s NYT obituary, David Dunlap explains that she
pioneered modern architectural criticism in the pages of The New York Times, celebrating buildings that respected human dignity and civic history — and memorably scalding those that did not … . Beginning in 1963, as the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper, she opened the priestly precincts of design and planning to everyday readers. For that, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, in 1970.
Growing up in New York in those years, I had no idea that Huxtable was a pioneer. The NYT was our local paper. Whatever it did I took to be the norm. Reading the obit now, I recognize many of the then-new buildings she discussed as ones I watched rise or open. For instance, the Huntington Hartford art museum on Columbus Circle designed by Edward Durell Stone, which she said “resembles a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.”
The Kennedy Center in Washington, another Stone building, came in for opprobrium too:
Albert Speer would have approved. The building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
She was special. Read the full obit.
Pickpocket Magic
Readers of Ron’s View this past year may have noticed that I read an unusual number of books (for me). This came at a price. New Yorkers, New York Reviews of Books, Golf Worlds, and assorted other magazines piled up unread. I would download each issue of the New Yorker to my iPad when it became available on Sunday night and check what articles I would want to read when the print version arrived later in the week, then not read them.
Maybe this year will be different. Fewer books for sure. More magazine articles? I don’t know. But to get me started, I began reading a great article yesterday in the latest New Yorker, Adam Green’s piece on the pickpocket magician Apollo Robbins. It is freely available at the moment, not behind the New Yorker’s paywall. Check it out while you can.
Here’s the opening:
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.
“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“F—. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
The New Yorker has also posted a video in their culture blog of Robbins talking to Green and demonstrating his pickpocketing approach, with brief text by Myles Kane. I can’t embed the video. Go to the post, here, and watch it. It’s just under seven minutes long and well worth the time. Embedded up top as a substitute is another video of Robbins, which I have yet to watch in full.
Oversharing
What’s up with New York Times columnists? With David Brooks and Ross Douthat repeatedly on the decline-of-culture beat, why did Roger Cohen decide two days ago to jump in? He opened his latest column with news that “oversharing and status anxiety [are] the two great scourges of the modern world.” Cohen continues:
So let us absorb the mass of unwanted shared personal information and images that wash over one, like some great viscous tide full of stuff one would rather not think about — other people’s need for Icelandic lumpfish caviar, their numb faces at the dentist, their waffles and sausage, their appointments with their therapists, their personal hygiene, their pimples and pets, their late babysitters, their grumpy starts to the day, their rude exchanges, their leaking roofs, their faith in homeopathy, their stressing out, and all the rest.
Please, O wired humanity, spare me, and not only the details.
It is tempting to call this unctuous ooze of status updates and vacation snaps seeping across Facebook and Twitter and the rest information overload. But that would be to debase the word “information.”
Fortunately, the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal is on the case. He observes, “I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, Facebook even longer, though in a more limited capacity. And I’ve never noticed these topics permeating my timeline.” To demonstrate, he lists the first 20 tweets on his timeline, all of which sound interesting indeed. (You can follow the link and see for yourself.)
Madrigal’s advice to Cohen:
My diagnosis is simple, Roger: your friends and associates are terrible and boring. Being that you are a smart and interesting guy who would distill only the finest information from any social network, the problem is the garbage going into your feed, which can only come out as garbage in your column. And that garbage is being created by the people who you choose to follow and know.
In the spirit of Madrigal’s post, I will now list the last 20 items on my Twitter timeline. You can decide for yourself if these are interesting. But as Madrigal explains, the point is that his 20 items are interesting to him. If you want to make good use of Twitter, follow people who interest you. No one forces you to follow John Boehner.
Okay, here goes:
1. Link to NYT article on how Tolkien’s manuscripts ended up at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
2. Link to Lee Child piece in NYT on how to create suspense.
3. Link to David Pogue CBS Sunday Morning video.
4. Link to article on Coast Guard airlift to Florida of sea turtles stranded in Massachusetts.
5. Comment on Washington Redskins’ defense (from a politics and technology writer who rarely comments on sports).
6. Link to piece on militarization of domestic police forces, led by Homeland Security.
7. Link to article on a graduate student’s experience as a mass media fellow at Scientific American under a program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
8. Um, well, I kind of love the Twitter feed of Miguel Bloombito, who admonishes his followers: “Don’t be un assholero. Givero up tu seat de subwayo to las womaño de pregnanto y los señor citizens.” (This feed is a running joke based on Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to speak Spanish to summarize what he says in English in public announcements. See this article for background.)
9. A comment on David Gregory’s insistence today on Meet the Press on framing question in the context of going over the cliff, with the observation that this is how false consciousness spreads.
10. More from Miguel, getting into the Christmas spirit: “Doño mi ahora, el gay apparalo!”
11. An excerpt from the diary of John Quincy Adams, from a feed that tells us his doings two hundred years ago to the day while serving abroad as an ambassador.
12. A link to a chart (a “conspectus”) from 1880 on the history of political parties.
13. Sorry, it’s a Sunday. Not too many of the people I follow are active today. Miguel Bloombito again. I’ll skip the details.
14. A retweet by an editor of a link to a blog post at Language Log that I had already read, on some nonsensical piece about alleged decline in vocabulary of students. I may write about this separately.
15. A link to an ongoing discussion about raising the Medicare eligibility age.
16. A retweet of a link to the latest piece by the NYT public editor, which I may also write about separately.
17. Another link (from someone else I follow) to the work of the NYT public editor, sending us to her response to critics of another piece.
18. And, from this same person, a link to the public editor’s latest.
19. A link to The Economist’s best books of 2012.
20. A link to a poll at The Guardian for person of the year. Darn. Too late to vote. It’s closed. The overwhelming winner is Bradley Manning.
As I said, it’s Sunday. This isn’t entirely representative. But I see no evidence of oversharing. Oh, unless this post is itself evidence.
Wells on Fieri
I make it a habit whenever a restaurant gets a four-star review in the NYT to devote a post to it. At the other extreme, I also highlight the pans. Today was a pan day. Indeed, Pete Wells’ pan of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar is historic. With David Pogue and Andrew Sullivan, among others, beating me to the punch, and with the review currently listed at the NYT site as both the most emailed and the most viewed item, my linking service is probably unneeded. Nonetheless, in case you have yet to see the review, which has spent the day reverberating around the internet, have a look. And check out the slide show as well.
From the restaurant homepage:
Located right in the heart of Times Square, we’re all about big flavors and good times. Off-the-hook scratch-made food, hand crafted signature beers, killer cocktails and rockin’ tunes are on tap here at my joint and I look forward to havin’ ya over to my house!
From the review, which should be read in full:
Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?
Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?
Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? Were the “bourbon butter crunch chips” missing from your Almond Joy cocktail, too? Was your deep-fried “boulder” of ice cream the size of a standard scoop?
What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?
Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?
Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?
When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered?
Headline of the Day
[Tony Gentile/Reuters]
I was scanning the home page of the Sports Illustrated home page yesterday when I noticed the headline:
AC Milan owner sentenced to four years in prison
I should have known immediately who the AC Milan owner is. (I did know that AC Milan is one of the historic soccer powers in Europe.) But I didn’t, so I clicked on the link to learn more. The linked article had a slightly more informative headline:
AC Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi sentenced to four years in prison
Yes, of course. Berlusconi. Somehow, when I think of him, “AC Milan owner” is not the first description that comes to mind.
The article was brief. It opened, “AC Milan owner and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to 4 years in jail on tax fraud charges, European news agency are reporting.” This was followed by a quote from another source, then the closing sentence, “Berlusconi’s decision not to run for a fourth term as prime minister and legal problems have come in AC Milan’s worst start in 71 years, leaving the club tied for 15th place and in danger of relegation.”
Talk about a narrow focus. I know. This is Sports Illustrated, not the New York Times. But still.
In contrast, the NYT coverage made no mention of AC Milan. Its opening: “A court in Milan convicted former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of tax fraud on Friday and sentenced him to four years in prison. Mr. Berlusconi is also currently on trial over charges that he paid for sex with an underage prostitute. He has denied the accusation.”
