IF IT'S NOT COCAINE, WHAT IS IT?

He must be snorting something. Dummy Boy insists, "I'm pleased with the progress" in Iraq. That's what he told a New Hampshire newspaper in an interview published Saturday, the same day a suicide car bomb killed 19 people and wounded 67, when it "plowed into a crowd of men seeking jobs with the Iraqi National Guard" in Kirkuk.

Never mind that it was the third bomb of the week "aimed at Iraqi security forces." Never mind that "attacks on state officials have become common." Never mind the kidnappings of foreigners. Never mind the sabotaged oil pipelines. Never mind the campaign "to cripple the institutions of the interim government."

Never mind that insurgents control Falluja. Never mind that "American forces have lost control over at least one provincial capital, Ramadi, and have only a tenuous grip over a second, Baquba," another provincial capital near Baghdad. Never mind that "other large cities in the region, like Samarra, are largely in the hands of insurgents."

Never mind that "polls show increasing anti-U.S. sentiment and a growing sense that American forces should get out and leave things to the Iraqis." Especially never mind the National Intelligence Estimate that says civil war could erupt down the road. (See DARK DAYS AHEAD.) Why shouldn't he be "pleased with the progress" in Iraq?

September 19, 2004 8:43 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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