Word: simonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Voice Silenced In "Why Pakistan Matters" [Jan. 14] Simon Robinson argued that Musharraf's plan of balancing American interests with Islamist sympathies to keep himself in power backfired. I disagree with that assessment. Musharraf has been using the threat of extremists to prove his utility and indispensability to the Western world. The real danger to Musharraf was from the Supreme Court, the dismissed Chief Justice and the lawyer community. That danger has now subsided, thanks to the state-of-emergency order. The only remaining danger to Musharraf was Bhutto, and that's why she is no more. The sad part...
...best seller, he supposedly suggested the title Lincoln's Doctor's Dog. Pitches itself, doesn't it? There have been more books about Abraham Lincoln than any other American; this month brings us William Lee Miller's President Lincoln (Knopf; 497 pages), Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas (Simon & Schuster; 384 pages) and Did Lincoln Own Slaves? (Pantheon; 311 pages) by Gerald J. Prokopowicz, among others. That Lincoln is a suitable subject for scholarly work nobody would deny, but the volume of it suggests something more: an obsession, an addiction, a Lincoln compulsion...
...crucial missing piece of history by interviewing hundreds of people who witnessed the Ukrainian killings firsthand. "The testimony is just unbelievable," says Paul Shapiro, director of research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is honoring Desbois at a dinner in the capital in April. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish-rights organization in Los Angeles, is awarding Desbois a Medal of Valor in May. The center's international director, Shimon Samuels, says Desbois' findings might even cast doubt on the long-accepted estimate that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, since "he's found killing sites...
...Simon believes the focus on minorities has kept the show's ratings down. "When people say it's not a 'water-cooler show,'" he says, "that's about the whitest thing they can say." The show is also dark, metaphorically, by the standards of nearly every previous TV cop show. "On commercial TV, there's no f______ way you can say, 'This is America, and we're not all right anymore,'" says Simon. "Not if every 12 minutes you have to say, 'Hey, we're sorry we brought you down, but check out the new iPods!'" And the show...
...Simon's progressive politics, The Wire betrays a kind of small-c conservative nostalgia for hard work and honor, for shoe-leather police work, for reporters who pound the pavement, even for criminals who try to follow some kind of code. The Wire offers a bird's-eye critique of society, but it doesn't look down on individuals. Its heroes are flawed, fated people who try even without hope, who teach kids with horrid home lives, who try to kick unshakable addictions, who do the hard labor of investigations even when their bosses punish them...