WHAT A WEEK

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday about whether U.S. citizens may be imprisoned without trial or legal representation if they're declared by the little fucker to be "enemy combatants" in the war on terror.

The righter-than-rightwing editorial page of The Wall Street Journal warned the court not to let its "sense of its own importance" lead it to believe "it can do a better job of running the war on terror than an elected chief executive." Elected? How about appointed? I didn't hear the Journal complaining about the court's self-importance back then, when the same court did the appointing.

The 9/11 commission hears today what he and his crony in chief have to say to justify how they screwed up the war on terror from the moment they took office.

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales likes the fact that there will be < EM>no verbatim account of the 9/11 commission's meeting in the Oval Office with the little fucker and his crony in chief. After all, it's the little fucker who insisted on that condition in the first place, and we all know how desperate he is to get to the bottom of things. Or as Gonzales blithely told CNN, "information will make ... its way into the [commission] report in some fashion or another, I suspect." How nice.

Meantime, 10 more U.S. soldiers have died today in the little fucker's war of choice.

April 29, 2004 11:02 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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