News
The Tears of August
C-SPAN has just broadcast the first half of a two hour interview with former CBS newsman Roger Mudd. The occasion is the publication of his memoir The Place To Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News. C-SPAN grand poobah Brian Lamb does his usual...
Dith Pran RIP
Dith Pran, the translator who survived the killing fields of Cambodia, died earlier today of pancreatic cancer; he was 65. He worked as a photojournalist for The New York Times. He was made internationally famous when the actor who portrayed him (Dr. Haing S. Ngor) in...
Anti-heroes and Anti-valets Upping the Ante
Robert Harris's novel The Ghost had considerable success in Britain where it was seen as a very thinly veiled roman a clef. The just-recently-ex PM in the book, Adam Lang, overlaps in almost every way (up to and including the same number of syllables in their names)...
Another Pat Nixon War Zone Pilot Steps Forward
A recent commenter of John Taylor's post on Pat Nixon's visit to the Vietnam war zone also remembers this historic event. In fact, he was one of the helicopter pilots who transported the President and his party in South Vietnam. The following is the account of CW4...
Duck, Mrs. Clin— Uh, Mrs. Nixon
Col. Gene Boyer, middle, escorting Pat Nixon in Vietnam, 1969 Gosh, it would be fun to be an eyewitness sitting in the Clinton War Room today, hearing the Official Explainers duck and dodge the latest round on Mrs. Clinton's "misspeak" of her dangerous arrival in...
John McCain — A “Realistic Idealist”
Much has been made ---and rightly so--- over Senator Obama's speech last week about race. One would hope that the important speech Senator McCain made yesterday to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles will receive similar attention. Senator McCain declares himself...
So Senator Clinton Was Telling the Truth. Who Knew?
Boy is my face red. It turns out that recently discovered news footage from the former First Lady's trip to Tuzla proves that everything she said was accurate; if anything, the "H Bomb" (as she was apparently admiringly nicknamed on this trip), modestly underplayed...
The Non-Return Return of John Hughes
Yesterday's LA Times featured an article by Patrick Goldstein pointing out that the current release starring Owen Wilson, is based on an old treatment written by John Hughes, the man who gave us 1980s (and early 1990s) classics like The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink,...
Is Michael Gerson Right About Obama?
The Times of London today has an interview with Michael Gerson, the former speechwriter for President Bush, now a Washington Post columnist, in which he repeats the argument, frequently found in his recent Post columns, that Barack Obama would be a more formidable...
Forty Years On
Tariq Ali is sixty-four years old. But instead of asking age appropriate questions like “Will you still need me?” and “Will you still feed me?” he is asking “Where Has All the Rage Gone?” Prompted by a TV show called “Revolution 68”, he asked that very question last...