PRELUDE TO DISASTER

If you missed James Bamford's interview of David J. Rothkopf, author of the new book "Running the World," which ran twice Sunday on C-SPAN, beseech the network (email: online@c-span.org) to post the video in its online archive pronto, before Georgie Boy's speech on Tuesday night.

Rothkopf's cool, penetrating assessment of the Cheney-Rummy tag team and of Condoleeza ("Ms. Mushroom Cloud") Rice -- as well as previous architects of American power from Kissinger to Brezinski and Scrowcroft to Powell -- provides an inside look at the current U.S. regime and its failed foreign policy of war. The interview will leave you slack-jawed with admiration for Rothkopf's calm, intellectual dissection of what has gone wrong.

Meantime, Bob Herbert reminds us this morning:

The war in Iraq was sold to the American public the way a cheap car salesman sells a lemon. Dick Cheney assured the nation that Americans in Iraq would be "greeted as liberators." Kenneth Adelman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board said the war would be a "cakewalk." And Donald Rumsfeld said on National Public Radio: "I can't say if the use of force would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

Now compare that with Rummy Boy's latest declaration: "The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years." And he actually wants us to believe his latest line of bullshit: "We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win." Uh-huh. When Georgie Boy offers that crock Tuesday night, which I'm betting he will, we oughta pelt him with tomatos and give him the hook.

June 27, 2005 10:50 AM |

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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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