Saturday, May 29, 2004

I get extremely bored on the plane. I never now travel without this. It is great; 1000 times better than an i-pod. Yet, I wasted my time on the way back from DC reading James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. If you have been reading the books on the administration and the neo-conservatives, there is nothing new here. After 425 pages, I only learned that: Rumsfeld interferred with a Gallup family member to favor Nixon in the 1970s (in Gallup polls at the time) (p. 17); that Richard Armitage may have been involved in the Phenix "program" during the Vietnam war [that was reported before] (p. 45); and that Wolfowitz was the first to recruit that awful Dennis Ross into government service (p. 80). The New Yorker always has fawning profiles: yet the profile of Aaron McGruder (creator of The Boondocks) in the April 16th&26th issue was mean and nasty.