Word: vizier
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...swear, anyone who counts in the Taliban is either missing an eye, a hand or a leg, or is barely old enough to have grown a beard. This all-powerful vizier, named Tayab Agha, was 25. The Kandahar police chief is the same age, and I've heard that he roars around in a brand new Hi-Lux with a Metallica sticker on the hood. (He got his job a few years back pulling Mullah Omar out of the rubble after truck bomb exploded outside his house.) Maybe now, when his Islamic caliphate is collapsing around...
...academic conference a few years ago, the speaker onstage asked, rhetorically, "What was the best year?" Irving Kristol, grand vizier of neoconservatives, shouted from the audience without hesitation...
...anti-Bush interpretation says the choice is too safe, and may even emanate from the candidate's father - Dad sending along his old vizier to keep the kid out of trouble...
...advice here, however, is to stick with The Friends of Freeland (Knopf; 508 pages; $26), an amiable and decidedly quirky novel. Its narrator, Eggert Oddason, is chief speechwriter and grand vizier to Freeland's President, a gifted though alcoholic giant named Hannibal Hannibalsson. After 20 years of ever decreasing coherence, Hannibalsson breaks a solemn promise to retire and runs for, or lurches blearily toward, a fifth five-year term. Can he win? His opponent is a woodenhead, and being booze-soaked is no bar to high office, since that is pretty much the permanent condition of most of the population...
...headlong flight across the desert by the ruler's beloved daughters and his sons-in-law, one of them the land's chief armorer; their reception by a friendly monarch who shelters them in a palace. Finally, the betrayed ruler's son, who has wormed his way to grand vizier, leads a pursuit attempting to retrieve the fugitives. In a fury he denounces them before the neighboring king, who rebuffs the mission coldly...