The Italian journalist has a piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. My favorite part: For Christ's sake, in 1991 the Iraqi army deflated like a pricked balloon. It disintegrated so quickly, so easily, that even I captured four of its soldiers. I was behind a dune in the Saudi desert, all alone. Four skeletal creatures […]
I just signed the loan papers for my new home this morning. Why should this interest you? It shouldn't, except that today is the day for the obligatory banging of the tip jar. You can donate at the Amazon or PayPal links over at the left, or, buy a book or something through the big […]
Over at MediaMinded there's a summary of the feud between media critics William McGowan, author of "Coloring the News" and Eric Alterman, author of "What Liberal Media." To make a long story short, Alterman apparently (I haven't gotten that far yet) slams McGowan's book based on a negative review in the Washington Monthly magazine. (The […]
From Rod Dreher over at National Review: "[T]he French are going to go proctological on America in the Security Council this week, leading to a fresh round of pop-cult French-bashing." "Go proctological!" How apt.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I recently received a review copy of Alterman's new book and began reading it. I got through about 2 1/2 chapters when I realized that I should be reading with a pencil in hand. Every few sentences, Alterman would make some claim that I would find unfounded […]
I've been in the journalism business for more than a decade (if I count my student-journalism days at Cal Poly SLO) and I've always been happy to help student journalists, aspiring writers and even talk about journalism to schoolkids. So, when asked, I often volunteer to share what I've learned. It usually comes down to […]
Britain's Sunday Mirror is reporting that the Iraqis are trying to get a head start on the imminent war -- by crossing the Kuwaiti border and attempting to surrender to British troops. The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise. The stunned […]
A little jewel from his latest: The "human shields" are leaving Iraq, disenchanted after discovering that their Iraqi "co-ordinators" wanted to deploy them not at "humanitarian" facilities but at military bases. One fellow said he was used to working with young children and would have preferred to be deployed at an orphanage. Pity the poor […]
I just caught a couple of minutes of something that appeared to be a debate between some enlightened British intellectuals on C-SPAN. I turned the channel after one of the "anti-" America speakers rattled off a list of countries we've sent troops to (or, in one case, bombed) in the past decade or so. His […]