THIS MODERN WORLD

Auctions done.

This is so dreadful in so many ways, I simply don’t know where to begin. A few excerpts for those who can’t get past the Times firewall:

A leader’s first job is to project authority, and George Bush certainly does that. In a 90-minute interview with a few columnists in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Bush swallowed up the room, crouching forward to energetically make a point or spreading his arms wide to illustrate the scope of his ideas — always projecting confidence and intensity.

* * *
The other striking feature of his conversation is that he possesses an unusual perception of time. Washington, and modern life in general, encourages people to think in the short term. But Bush, who stands aloof, thinks in long durations.

“I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a culture,” he says, referring to his campaign against the instant gratifications of the 1960’s counterculture. And he sees his efforts today as a series of long, gradual cultural transformations. Like many executives, he believes that the higher you go, the further into the future you should see, and so his conversation is filled with speculations about the long-term effects of deep social trends — the current religious awakening or the politics of volunteer armies.

* * *
Sitting between busts of Lincoln and Churchill, he continued, “My hope is to leave behind something — foundations and institutions that will enable future presidents to be able to more likely make the tough decisions that they’re going to have to make.”

“Ideological struggles take time,” he said, explaining the turmoil in Iraq and elsewhere. He said the events of weeks or months were just a nanosecond compared with the long course of this conflict. He was passionate on the need for patience and steadfastness. He talked about “inviolate” principles written upon his heart: “People want you to change. It’s tactics that shift, but the strategic vision has not, and will not, shift.”

* * *
In other words, when Bush is strategizing goals, he is assertiveness on stilts. When he is contemplating means, he defers to authority.

And the sad truth is, there has been a gap between Bush’s visions and the means his administration has devoted to realize them. And when tactics do not adjust to fit the strategy, then the strategy eventually gets diminished to fit the tactics.

“Sitting between busts of Lincoln and Churchill.” Yeeesh. Brooks isn’t just a propagandist, he’s a clumsy propagandist.

Here’s a story from page A17 of the Washington Post today, September 14, 2006:

U.N. INSPECTORS DISPUTE IRAN REPORT BY HOUSE PANEL
Paper on Nuclear Aims Called Dishonest

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran’s nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document “outrageous and dishonest” and offering evidence to refute its central claims…

“This is like prewar Iraq all over again,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector…

Here’s a story from page A18 of the Washington Post exactly four years ago this week, on September 19, 2002:

EVIDENCE ON IRAQ CHALLENGED
Experts Question if Tubes Were Meant for Weapons Program

A key piece of evidence in the Bush administration’s case against Iraq is being challenged in a report by independent experts who question whether thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes recently sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program…

Here’s the Washington Post’s Iraq mea culpa from August 11, 2004:

THE POST ON WMDS: AN INSIDE STORY
Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page

…“The paper was not front-paging stuff,” said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. “Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday”…

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., “we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.”

Here’s the famous Dudley Moore-Peter Cook sketch “The Frog and Peach”:

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel you’ve learnt by your mistakes here?

SIR ARTHUR STREEB-GREEBLING: I think I have, yes, and I think I can probably repeat them almost perfectly.

(Edited for clarity.)

#369 on Amazon as I write this.

Here’s another review that I like:

This is a terrific book. It looks like it’s about Jeopardy and it says it’s about Jeopardy and it’s called Prisoner of Trebekistan but guess what? It’s actually about finding out how to do something really hard that you really don’t know how to do. And how that changes your life forever.

You learn how to study for Jeopardy–or anything, really–so for that alone, it’s worth having. I taught college English for ten years, which is why I think all college freshmen ought to have this book. It teaches you how to learn and it shows you that the point of learning is the way that new knowledge enlarges your world and changes you, not the knowledge itself. Don’t you wish you’d known that when you were eighteen? I wish I’d known that this clearly last week.

It’s a very funny memoir with a plot, or several, and high stakes: the author’s entire life. It’s a story about figuring things out. It’s about failure. Repeated, abject, public failure. It’s about how new knowledge changes the things you see every day. It makes you burst out laughing and frighten the cat. It’s a page-turner you can’t put down, especially if, like me, you have never followed Jeopardy and you don’t know what happens in the end. Even if you do know how it comes out, you’ll be completely fascinated by this look behind the scenes of the show.

And, in the course of the book, the author outlines the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy, which turns out accidentally to be a wise and funny guide to a happier and weirder and far more interesting life.

That’s pretty impressive.

My favorite part is how the author learned more and more and more arcane and far-flung facts to play Jeopardy and how that completely changed the world for him. I’ve never seen a more convincing argument for learning everything you possibly can. You get out of your own skull, outside your limited experience, and discover how much more interesting and complex and wonderful the world is.

You get to the end of the book so excited that you want to jump out of your chair, call all your friends, hug everyone, quit wasting time, and go see the whole world–you want to do every important thing right now!

What a terrific book!

This is from the new book Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

On the eve of war in Washington, journalists and others gathered at a cocktail party at the home of Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times…Judy Miller was one of several Times reporters there, and she seemed excited. Another journalist present asked if she was planning to head over to Iraq to cover the invasion. Miller, according to the other guest, could barely contain herself. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting for this war for ten years. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

I see.

Miller got herself a special embedding deal with one of the military teams searching for banned weapons. She then immediately wrote one of the most notoriously stupid stories ever to appear in the New York Times. (It was about how she was allowed to look at from a distance—but not meet or interview—an Iraqi wearing a baseball cap who purportedly said (1) Iraq was bursting at the seams with WMD, (2) Saddam and Osama were Best Friends Forever, and (3) Saddam was jealous of George Bush because Bush is so handsome.)

Here’s what the U.S. government thought of her, according to Hubris:

Judy Miller “is probably the best ally we have out there in the media,” Colonel Richard McPhee, the commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force told one of the unit’s public affairs officers, Sergeant Eugene Pomeroy, according to an email Pomeroy sent to a colleague.

And what does Miller have to say about that story today?

Asked about the baseball-cap story several years later, Miller told the authors of this book, “I won’t talk about the baseball-cap guy.”

Judith Miller was employed by the New York Times for twenty-eight years.