By Steve Rhodes
Geez, I didn’t know the PC guy was an author. John Hodgman’s his name, and this blurb by Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor piqued my interest. (I mean, I didn’t even recognize him from his appearances on The Daily Show – what gives?)
His new book, More Information Than You Require, is billed as a satirical almanac.
Here’s his Wikipedia page, and here’s his interview with Boing Boing TV.
Woodward’s War
The cover of the New York Times on Sunday was Jill Abramson’s review of Bob Woodward’s final treatise on Bush at war, The War Within.
“In The War Within,” Abramson writes, “Bush remains inured to harsh truths. Gen. George Casey concludes that the principal problem with Iraq ‘is the president himself,’ a perception that informs the narrative as it records years of dithering during which the president stubbornly refuses to accept, even as the evidence mounts, that a military strategy based on Rumsfeld’s lean troop levels and the lack of a viable post-invasion plan make the ‘victory’ he demands thoroughly un-achievable. And the White House’s insistence on loyalty and optimism inhibits even the few realists left on the team, like the National Security Council aide Meghan L. O’Sullivan and the State Department deputy Philip Zelikow. O’Sullivan finally brings herself to tell Bush that Iraq is ‘hell'” but Zelikow, who made more than a dozen visits to Iraq and recognized the bleakness of the picture, sheds his pessimism in Bush’s presence. ‘Perhaps Zelikow didn’t want to be entirely out of step with the optimism or didn’t want to be seen as a naysayer,’ Woodward speculates. ‘Perhaps he could not overcome the old cliche that advisers fold in front of the president.’ Zelikow’s boss, Condoleezza Rice, is also complicit. She knows that Bush needs to hear the skeptical, not only the best, case from his military men, but she too softens the reality for the president, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state. And she doesn’t dare go around Cheney or Rumsfeld to deliver the truth.”
Courage saves lives; cowardice kills.
Local Draw
Steve Huntley of the Sun-Times also reviewed The War Within on Sunday – and mostly ignored the book’s verdict on Bush and found a way to rally ’round the flag.
“If the momentum rolling forward in Iraq culminates in success, as looks increasingly likely, historians will wonder why President Bush clung so long to a failing strategy and rosy pronouncements before finally shaking up his war policies and replacing his civilian and military commanders,” Huntley writes. “That issue is at the heart of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. His analysis, not always persuasive and disputed by the White House, paints a damning portrait of a commander-in-chief not fully engaged, ready to let his national security adviser formulate policy, and undermining his own credibility by telling the public America was winning in Iraq while privately admitting the war effort was going badly.”
And then Huntley pivots to tell us why Bush is so great.
“While Woodward’s book is unrelenting in its harsh judgment of Bush, it also presents him as the decisive figure who refused to let America fail in Iraq.”
To the contrary, the Woodward book appears to show that Bush’s refusal to confront the realities on the ground almost lost us the war – and may still yet.
Blue Genes
Roy Bount Jr. reviews the memoir of Christopher Lukas, brother of the New York Times writer and author J. Anthony Lukas, a tremendous talent who took his own life in 1997.
“The title of this memoir alludes to the tendency among the author’s family members to kill themselves, and in particular to the suicide of the memoirist’s brother, whose depression seems to have made him feel that a book he had written, which was about to come out, wasn’t good enough. The memoirist, for his part, informs us that ‘every morning, for many years, I have awakened, thinking: I’m ready to kill myself.” In an ‘Envoi’ to the memoir, written as it was going to press, the memoirist informs us that Susan, his wife – whose ‘irrepressible joshing’ lifted his spirits for 30-odd years – has suddenly died.”
Indeed, J. Anthony Lukas’s suicide was commonly explained as his unhappiness with his latest work – Big Trouble, which was nearly universally praised. Christopher Lukas’s memoir appears to fill in that easy narrative by offering the background of a totally dysfunctional family combined with (or causing) a life battling depression that shows once again that human beings are not synonymous with the work that their talents produce – or the happiness or joy that that work brings others.
Al-Cheney
“In Angler, his forceful new study of Mr. Cheney’s tenure in office, the Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman writes that ”the vice president shifted America’s course more than any terrorist could have done,’ that while al-Qaeda took a terrible toll on 9/11, ‘decisions made in the White House, in response, had incomparably greater impact on American interests and society,'” Michiko Kakutani writes in the Times.
When you become your enemy, your enemy has won. The horror of 9/11 offered America to show itself as a great nation; instead, we were revealed as cowardly weasels and rats.
Posted on September 30, 2008