THIS MODERN WORLD

Sean Hannity just used the guitar riff from “Ohio” as bumper music.

Behind the firewall, unfortunately:

… a rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth. He provokes much laughter — unlike his buzzer skills, his comic timing never fails him — and a few unexpected tears.

Much more than a handbook for “Jeopardy!” wannabes or an exciting play-by-play, the book is a prose poem to the late-blooming joy Mr. Harris finds in exploring “a location unfixed in physical space and time” that he calls Trebekistan and in meeting many fellow travelers along the way…

It’s a pleasure to tag along on his journey.

Oh, and look! It’s for sale here!

From Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

It rankled Powell that his U.N. presentation had come to be considered a pivotal event on the path to war: “It’s annoying to me. Everyone focuses on my presentation…Well the same goddamn case was presented to the U.S. Senate and the Congress and they voted for [Bush’s Iraq] resolution…Why aren’t they outraged? They’re the ones who are supposed to do oversight. The same case was presented to the president. Why isn’t the president outraged? It’s always, ‘Gee, Powell, you made this speech to the U.N.'”

Beyond the general mopery—I do one little presentation in front of the entire world at the U.N. calling for war that turns out to be 100% false and suddenly everyone’s pointing fingers at me!—I enjoy the implication that Powell is in fact outraged by what happened.

I guess this burning outrage he feels has manifested itself by him (1) never saying anything in public about it unless asked and (2) taking no actions of any kind. He’s so unbelievably outraged that he hasn’t even bothered to find out the names of the people he claims are responsible:

POWELL: George Tenet did not sit there for five days with me, misleading me… He believed what he was giving to me was accurate. The intelligence system did not work well. There was some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.

WALTERS: Want to name names?

POWELL: I don’t have the names. These are not senior people but these are people who were aware that some of these sources should not be considered reliable. And they were aware that we were putting this information in the believing.

For a detailed look back at what exactly Powell’s subordinates were telling him at the time, go here.

Today:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier this week, you told a group of journalists that you thought the idea of sending special forces to Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden was a strategy that would not work…recently you’ve also described bin Laden as a sort of modern day Hitler or Mussolini. And I’m wondering why, if you can explain why you think it’s a bad idea to send more resources to hunt down bin Laden, wherever he is?

THE PRESIDENT: Pakistan is a sovereign nation. In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we’ve got to be invited by the government of Pakistan.

Man, I hope no one tells President Bush or Vice President Cheney about this! They’d be really mad!

2004 State of the Union Address:

BUSH: America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

Two months later:

CHENEY: The United States will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

I keep thinking about that line in Brooks’ column, in which he makes a point of noting that Bush is seated “between busts of Lincoln and Churchill.” Now obviously this was White House staging at its crudest — it’s no accident that Bush didn’t instead just pull up a chair between busts of Warren Harding and Millard Fillmore. But how common are busts of foreign politicians in the White House? Would they actually, in the course of a normal day, have a bust of Winston Churchill anywhere, let alone on display next to Abraham Lincoln?

… I suppose I could have googled it, but what fun would that be? Anyway, a reader who knows how to use a search engine forwards this:

In the Bush admistration’s oval office can be found several paintings depicting his home state of Texas. Also on display in President Bush’s oval office are three busts – one of Abraham Lincoln and another of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The third bust has become the object of a certain amount of controversy – a bronze bust of Winston Churchill sculpted by Jacob Epstein in 1946 and owned by the British Government Art Collection (GAC).

The British now want their bust back and insist that the artwork, loaned to President Bush four years ago by PM Tony Blair, should not have been loaned outside property owned by Great Britain.

The bust is part of an extensive collection of rare and valuable fine art owned by the British people and maintained by the government. The GAC oversees a huge hidden collection in an unknown underground storehouse somewhere in the Soho district of London. At last count the storehouse boasted over 12,000 works of art including 2,300 paintings and watercolours and 8,000 historical and modern prints by such famous artists as Gainsborough, Constable and Hogarth.

Shortly after he was sworn into office in 2001, President Bush mentioned in a speech that he “lamented the fact that there was not a proper bust of Winston Churchill…to put in the Oval Office” as he had been an admirer of the former British leader because as Bush later said, “he was a great war leader”. Bush’s statement prompted Tony Blair to make arrangements to loan the Churchill bust to the President for the duration of his term.

A spokesperson from the offices of the Government Art Collection said, “the sculpture remains a part of the Government Art Collection, and its display in the Whitehouse. I suppose that the only sense in which the loan is “unprecedented” is that the works of art in the Government Art Collection are almost exclusively used for display in British Government buildings to promote Britain and reflect our history, culture and achievements in the visual arts. So the loan of the work to the Whitehouse is unorthodox and outside our usual remit.”