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Jul. 26th, 2014
I don't suppose we need to doubt Mallon's quotation from Nixon's second inaugural speech. It resonates with a rich irony.
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"We shall answer to God, to history, and to our conscience for the way in which we use these years."
-- President Nixon, in "Watergate" by Thomas Mallon
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"We shall answer to God, to history, and to our conscience for the way in which we use these years."
-- President Nixon, in "Watergate" by Thomas Mallon
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Going through the New York Times, I see that a couple of good spy books are out. Not the fiction kind. About real spies, written to entice and not shoo readers away, if not exactly novel-like histories. I am interested, though I do not know how to fit it into my reading life. There is one that gets deep into our history with the Middle East, Hugh Wilford's "America's Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East". It begins with a focus on Theodore Roosevelt's grandson, who was a big spy covering the region. I may have to stuff this one between my Lincoln and literature.
The 2013-2014 Mideast Peace Talks (4)
Jul. 26th, 2014 03:15 pmWhen it comes to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, one suspects it is usually one step forward and two steps backward, and that's when they are making progress.
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Two days after the Israeli Cabinet vote, Tzipi Livni walked into the White House. It wasn’t her first visit. As Israel’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2009, she had been a Bush administration favorite. Here, as Israel’s chief negotiator, she looked around the Oval Office and saw a new set of faces: Obama, Kerry, Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Martin Indyk (Kerry’s envoy to the talks), and the three other members of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams. Months earlier, Livni had campaigned on the idea that Israeli-Palestinian peace was possible; voters awarded her with a seventh-place finish. Now she was getting the chance to prove them wrong.
( Read more... )
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Two days after the Israeli Cabinet vote, Tzipi Livni walked into the White House. It wasn’t her first visit. As Israel’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2009, she had been a Bush administration favorite. Here, as Israel’s chief negotiator, she looked around the Oval Office and saw a new set of faces: Obama, Kerry, Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Martin Indyk (Kerry’s envoy to the talks), and the three other members of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams. Months earlier, Livni had campaigned on the idea that Israeli-Palestinian peace was possible; voters awarded her with a seventh-place finish. Now she was getting the chance to prove them wrong.
( Read more... )
Little Ratso
Jul. 26th, 2014 09:53 pmLittle Ratso was getting his grub on again. Shit!
He's cute, though. Or should I say 'she'? If I knew there was no question of breeding more of them, I wouldn't mind feeding it, so long as there were no trouble with the cats. But I figure breeding is probably what it will do best, so that I strongly wish it were gone, even if it meant getting run over by a car, or killed by a dog.
He's cute, though. Or should I say 'she'? If I knew there was no question of breeding more of them, I wouldn't mind feeding it, so long as there were no trouble with the cats. But I figure breeding is probably what it will do best, so that I strongly wish it were gone, even if it meant getting run over by a car, or killed by a dog.