Have You Hugged Your General Today?
Scrapbook Have You Hugged Your General Today? THE SCRAPBOOK takes second place to no one in its admiration for General David Petraeus and his deputy, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno,...
...You may or may not be shocked to learn that the Times has yet to opine on Biden’s ten years of stinginess...
...Was he, in fact, a spy...
...Can anyone imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower offering John Foster Dulles a big hug, or John F. Kennedy and Dean Rusk entwined in each other’s arms...
...Now, the practice of hugging in front of the microphones has become endemic among politicians—and, as we see, among fighting men, too...
...Replied Sobell: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that...
...Joseph McCarthy cast a wide swath with indiscriminate attacks on genuine liberals as “reds” (and even though McCarthy made some charges that were accurate), the anti anti-communists came to argue that anyone accused by McCarthy or Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover should be assumed to be entirely innocent...
...We note, however, with some slight measure of alarm the adjacent photograph of these two distinguished soldiers at their change-of-command ceremony in Baghdad...
...When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too...
...We’re delighted that General Petraeus now takes over Central Command, and gratified that General Odierno has succeeded him as the top commander in Iraq...
...Articles We Didn’t Start ‘Hall of Fame: Brad Pitt nominates Kenneth Roth for making Human Rights Watch the scourge of tyrants everywhere” (Vanity Fair, October 2008...
...This must be what happens when all of your reporters are dumpster-diving in Alaska...
...Salon, September 16, 2008...
...No doubt, there is mutual affection, as well as respect, between these two officers and West Point graduates (Petraeus ’74, Odierno ’76) who have served their country with such distinction...
...They are everything He or She hates in a Christian.’ “I have been in a better mood ever since, and have decided not to even say this woman’s name anymore, because she fills me with such existential doubt, such a sense of impending doom and disbelief, that only the Germans . . . ” (Anne Lamott, “A call to arms: How to handle the fury brought on by this election...
...Douglas MacArthur can be seen here more or less hugging Lt...
...Christopher tended to look like that most of the time...
...Scrapbook Have You Hugged Your General Today...
...What was once the province of movie stars at the Academy Awards or French generals handing out medals—at least Odierno didn’t peck Petraeus on the cheek...
...Sentences We Didn’t Finish ‘I had to leave church Sunday morning when it turned out that the sermon was not about bearing up under desperate circumstances, when you feel like you’re going crazy because something is being perpetrated upon you and your country that is so obscene that it simply cannot be happening...
...THE SCRAPBOOK takes second place to no one in its admiration for General David Petraeus and his deputy, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the officers and gentlemen who have been architects of the surge...
...Michael and Robert Meeropol, the sons who were orphaned at 10 and 6 respectively by the execution of their parents, told Roberts they “have now concluded that continuing to claim that their father was innocent of an espionage conspiracy was no longer defensible...
...Guilty as Charged Morton Sobell, the codefendant with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the famous 1953 espionage case, has finally fessed up to his guilt in helping pass nuclear secrets to Stalin...
...To be sure, Mr...
...Most seemed to know what was coming, and would wrap their forearms gingerly around the president’s back—perhaps even pat it a couple of times, if the hug went on for too long...
...Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?’ “And he said, ‘Absolutely...
...But poor Wainwright—whose nickname was “Skinny” before the war—could probably barely stand up, and MacArthur was, shall we say, one of our more theatrical generals...
...But a hug...
...Biden Their Time We noted last week the low rate of giving revealed by Joe Biden when he released a decade’s worth of tax returns— one tenth the rate of Dick Cheney’s contributions, which were a source of fascination to the New York Times eight years ago...
...Jeez: Here we are again...
...Because a demagogue like Sen...
...is now swiftly supplanting the firm handshake and shoulder squeeze in front of the cameras...
...asked New York Times reporter Sam Roberts of the 91-yearold ex-con described by the Times as “an advocate for progressive causes...
...I sat outside a 7-Eleven and had a sacramental Dove chocolate bar...
...Times: The left has consistently defended spies such as Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Sobell as victims of contrived frame-ups...
...But now, with Sobell’s confession of guilt, that worldview has been demolished...
...Hugs among men in public service, we are quick to concede, is a particular b?te noire of ours—and discouraging them, we fear, is a losing battle on the cultural landscape...
...I asked, ‘Don’t you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent...
...Ronald Radosh, coauthor with Joyce Milton of the definitive history, The Rosenberg File, took a well-deserved victory lap in the L.A...
...But THE SCRAPBOOK has happy memories of the sight of the retiring secretary of state Warren Christopher, an elder statesman of the pre-hug generation of American manhood, who froze when Clinton swept him up in his arms, and looked as if someone had thrown a bucket of embalming fluid in his face...
...It all started nearly two decades ago with President Bill Clinton who, when introducing speakers or bidding farewell to departing cabinet officers, would envelop them in his capacious arms, and give ’em a squeeze...
...Jonathan Wainwright (1945) after Wainwright was released from three-and-a-half years’ brutal captivity in Japanese POW camps...
...Oh, sure, Gen...
...A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise—lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world—are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what’s left of our precious freedoms...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 3
