Word: w
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...extraordinary account of the Bush Administration's torture policy, The Dark Side, which I read simultaneously with American Wife. It is no small astonishment that Sittenfeld's portrait of the President and his circle made Mayer's horror story more plausible for me: suddenly you understand how George W. Bush could abdicate his authority and allow Dick Cheney and his alarming chief of staff, David Addington, to abandon the Geneva Conventions and engage in the most gruesome forms of torture. You can easily see Charlie Blackwell - whose (inaccurate) notion of the efficacy of torture would have been shaped by Hollywood...
...librarian envies and mistrusts. He adores her, without question. She succumbs, with reservations. In Curtis Sittenfeld's brilliant novel American Wife, their names are Alice Lindgren and Charles Blackwell, and they come from Wisconsin. But we also know them, on the evening news, as Laura Welch and George W. Bush from Texas...
...personal responsibility - on torture, on the war in Iraq (in which authority was transferred first to Cheney and then to David Petraeus), on the regulation of major economic institutions and, of course, after Hurricane Katrina - will come to be seen, I suspect, as the defining failure of George W. Bush as President. One hundred years from now, historians will scratch their heads and ask themselves the same question that plagues Alice Blackwell: How did this amiable but feckless man ever get to be President? Curtis Sittenfeld has provided a plausible secret history of an American embarrassment - and a grand entertainment...
...first night of the hurricane-delayed proceedings, was Exhibit A. Who would have predicted eight years ago, when Lieberman basked in the cheers of thousands of Democrats after accepting their nomination as vice-president, that the GOP would one day offer him a prime time slot instead of George W. Bush...
...would speak up for W...