Word: bum
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...famous royal jail suffered from the delusion that he was Julius Caesar. Picture this momentous turning point of the French Revolution, punctuated by "possibly the greatest anticlimax in all history ... a decrepit old boy saying ... 'Did you know I came, I saw and I conquered?'" Ba-da-bum. O.K., it might not generate the laughs author Mark Steel gets in his stand-up routine, but that's not what he's trying to do in his new book, Vive La Revolution: A Stand-Up History of the French Revolution. Rather than regale readers with jokes, Steel aims to present...
...erroneous reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium there. The claim made it into the President's State of the Union address and has been a sore point for the White House for some time. Though members of his staff have been fumbling to answer questions about the bum information, the President was smart enough to stay miles away from an answer. He reasserted his main belief: that Saddam was a threat. To the extent he answered the question at all, he merely said: "There's no doubt in my mind that when it's all said and done...
...Staff Andy Card, say despite mistakes, connecting the dots pointed to a clear Iraq threat and possession of weapons of mass destruction. "Intelligence is not an exact science," says Card. "Some dots you collect may turn out not to be real; others turn out to be real dots." One bum dot that has come back to haunt the Administration: A line in the President's State of the Union address referring to reports about Iraq's efforts in Niger to obtain uranium oxide to build nuclear weapons that later turned out to be false. "I would put that...
...stockpiles. "There was a predisposition in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told TIME. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in planning the war with Iraq but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intelligence. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says. "I just think they felt there needed to be some sort of rallying point for the American people. I think they said it sincerely, but I also think that...
...best writing comes at the beginning, in the chapters covering the meaningless, sun-soaked overture of spring training. There, sitting in the stands with the senior citizens in Sarasota, Fla., watching a trio of trainee pitchers share a joke, Angell confronts the hidden pain nursed by every bleacher bum: "We would never be part of that golden company on the field, which each of us, certainly for one moment of his life, had wanted more than anything else in the world to join." It's like being a Muggle with your nose pressed up against the gates of Hogwarts...