Word: despotisms
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...hard to imagine any of Russia's current leaders getting a birthday party like the one thrown Monday at Moscow's Ismailovsky Hotel for the former despot, Josef Stalin. The grand hall was packed beyond capacity with more than 2,000 revelers - some of whom wept as patriotic poems were read. Famous actresses sang ballads with the backing of a full military orchestra. And towering over the stage was an enormous portrait of the birthday boy in his military regalia, adding an element of the surreal to the entire scene...
...Karzai is [not] a saint or even much of a statesman. But neither is he a despot, a fanatic, a sybarite, or an uncouth bigot--qualities that typify the leadership of countries for which the U.S. has also expended blood and treasure in defense of lesser causes. Our failures in Afghanistan so far have mainly been our own, and they are ours to fix. To blame Mr. Karzai is to point the finger at the wrong culprit in the pursuit of disastrous, dishonorable defeat."--11/11/09...
...swank and showmanship to make him an irresistible cartoon villain. (The same can't be said for Sutherland's mayor, a one-note sociopath who risks Metro City's very existence in order to get re-elected. Why doesn't he just rig the ballot boxes like any normal despot...
...chief who, in order to satisfy his lust for brandy, sells his own people into slavery and the contemporary politician who, coveting a Mercedes-Benz, embezzles the funds of a charity set up to help orphan children?” But, as Naipaul reiterates, even the most glutinous despot is hopeless without a sympathetic, or at least ambivalent host of subjects: “Africans are content with the political kingdom.”Thirty years after it first appeared in the United States, “North of South” is as thrilling, disturbing, and relevant as ever...
...That said, there's something a bit creepy about the megapower that's accumulating at the Fed, one of Washington's least accountable institutions. Why should the markets decide who oversees them? Haven't the markets decided enough? Bernanke may be the ideal benevolent financial despot - a nebbishy superscholar with minimal connections to Wall Street and no previous hunger for power - but the next Fed chairman may be less ideal. And Obama has proposed to give even more regulatory power to the Fed, even though it has shown little interest in the past in curbing the excesses of the markets...