Some Stuff

Hey everybody. I just got back from Missouri, where I was visiting the parental units down on the farm. And when I got back...voila!...here's high-speed 'net access all hooked up! Woo hoo!

While I was at RDU waiting for my flight to MO, I finally picked up Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. It's really weird that I've waited so long to read it, but (a) I had a frantic end-of-the-semester during which, as you can see, I didn't even blog, and (b) I had sorta thought that I'd read enough about it that reading it would be rather a waste of time. Well, I was wrong about that. It's an extremely fast and extremely interesting read. Despite having little time to read while I was away, I had finished it by the time I got back to Chapel Hill. I'm not going to try to write anything involved about it right now, but: every American should read that book. No matter how big a news junkie you are, no matter how much you've read about it, you really must read it. Clarke comes across, as always, as an extraordinarily straight shooter and all-around virtuous fellow. I don't mean that he says those things of himself, of course, I mean that that's the sense of the man one gets from reading his book. Such judgments are, needless to say, fallible, but they're far from worthless.

He doesn't hesitate to say positive things about the Bush administration when he believes positive judgments are warranted...but he doesn't often believe they are. His assessment of this administration's efforts against al Qaeda is almost uniformly negative, and his reasons for these assessments are cogent. In fact, I'm sort of proud of the fact that many of Clarke's judgements agree with many of the judgments I expressed in my last post. Of course, I may have absorbed those conclusions by osmosis since his stuff was already in the air, and since other people had expressed similar thoughts, and of course his judgments about these matters are worth far more than my own...nevertheless, I was pretty proud of myself for, I believe, having come to some of the right conclusions. I'll crow about my own inferential prowess some more in the future, but for right now all I really have to say is:

GO PURCHASE RICHARD CLARKE'S BOOK AND READ IT NOW.