Word: pol
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...find out how to perform this difficult but necessary task, I called Democratic pol Steve Grossman, who seemed to be on board. He was ready to get the moral message to the people, and he had just the tool: The Holy Bible. After a few verses from Isaiah, I was ready to vomit...
...ample cause for contemplation, Obama's is really a story about what might be. In the past year, Obama has been compared, in all seriousness, to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bill Clinton. Democrats debate whether he should run for President in 2012 or 2016. "No Chicago pol has heard this kind of flattery since an alderman compared Richard J. Daley to Jesus Christ," noted the Chicago Reader...
...Short accurately describes Pol Pot's 1975-1979 regime as "a slave state, the first in modern times." His account of those hellish years?1.5 million people murdered, starved or worked to death?is familiar yet shocking. Almost as shocking is the sheer incompetence of Pol Pot's rule. He had barely come to power before initiating the policies that helped him lose it: the evacuation of urban centers, which caused mass rural starvation, and the extermination of the skilled and the educated. In 1978, dimly sensing his reign of terror was collapsing, he issued a belated directive for cadres...
...Short is too good a writer to simply dismiss Pol Pot as an evil aberration. But his alternative argument?that brutality is somehow hardwired into Cambodian society?is not scholarly enough to be convincing. He makes his case largely by an unblinking focus on horror: children decapitated, lynch mobs eating their victims' fried livers, and so on. This attempt to place Pol Pot's wickedness in a wider psychohistorical context feels misguided rather than malicious, although Cambodian readers might feel differently...
...chaotic reminder of the difficulties of successfully imposing democracy through force, a lesson being relearned from scratch in Iraq. If Cambodians are, as Short says, "oddly reluctant" to analyze the violence and corruption that plagues their society, it is because most are still too busy trying to survive it. Pol Pot is gone, but history is a nightmare from which his beleaguered compatriots are still trying to awake...