Précis · d' · é-composition

Our neighbors and we are thinking about buying 1/4 of a beef.

Several friends and Amazon kept telling me that I would love Carlo Emilio Gadda's detective novel set in fascist era Rome and with a forward by none other than Calvino and a translator like William Weaver, I finally succumbed and bought it. I like fannydangle modern and post-modern European novels as much as the next guy, I don't necessarily need plot and I can do anomie like nobody's business, but here's the problem with this book; either Weaver just wasn't quite up to the job or Gadda shouldn't be read except in Italian. Gadda is one of those guys who loves to play with language and the slangs of the various Italian dialects are notoriously varied not to mention often mutually incomprehensible and he obviously knows them well enough. Plus he throws in Latin, French and a bit of Greek. If you're going to be that inventive, your book should sing but it doesn't and page after page I found myself wondering whether I should have read it in French and regretting that my Italian just isn't novel-ready. It was like watching a virtuoso play violin from behind plate glass; I can see how maginficent it must be but I can't hear half the music.

I failed, last night, to see how Senator McCain could be both a maverick and a 'steady hand on the tiller'. Maybe that's a bit shallow of me, but even if he were a steady hand, it would seem to be in the wrong direction. I am also tired of no-one calling him on the Russia/Georgia thing. Obama is probably right to let it slide, since, if he wins, it will most likely be about the economy but it still irks me. In 2004 Kerry kept deriding Bush for getting us into a costly and needless war, but he might have lost on the judgment issue because he (and frankly, neither HRC nor Obama nor Biden) could give neither a specific way to pull out of Iraq nor a set of prerequisites and principles for a pull-out and the Republicans could always assure their base that the war was just while telling independents and centrists that, regardless, the Democrats stood basically for nothing more than defeat.

Obama has been notoriously slick on the issue, telling the Deomcratic base that we should pull out according to a timetable and then fudging on that later and insisting that he had to reserve final judgment for when he was in power and based on the facts on the ground - which is, perhaps, wiser. Pushing the 'why did we go to Iraq when we weren't even remotely done in Afghanistan' angle is looking smarter and smarter (despite the Iftar last months where Saudi King Abdullah, Taliban agents, Afghan government officials and representative of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar sat down together) as the Taliban continue to harrass coalition and government forces, the ISI is up to who-knows-what, not to mention the Iranians, in an increasingly unstable country.

The judgment issue can be used against McCain with regard to Russia/Georgia, too. Like seemingly all Republicans, he dreams of being Churchill during the 'wilderness years' (that childish conceit of being able to tell the whole world 'I tod you so' while saving the world, too) but the reality is that this more like the run-up to WWI than to WWII. Bush and McCain's insistence on quickly expanding NATO when we have neither enough European support or backbone nor enough of an immediate national interest to antagonize Russia in an area still honeycombed with ethnic/cultural Russians is the wrong priority. Like Germany in the Belle Époque, faced with the two-front threat of Russia and France, Iran now has hot wars lead by the U.S. on its eastern and western borders and its reaction is just as predictably prickly and paranoid. There is a possibly deep well of resentment among Iranians against the Ahmedinejad administration fed by lowering living standards and convoking some kind of regional discussions with major players in the region might give an adept American President the opportunity to finally stop getting schooled diplomatically so McCain's continued eschewing of anything but belligerence not only seems foolish but even more so since he is diplomatically committed to over-extending us in Eastern Europe. Deriding Biden's musings on a three state solution in Iraq was a little foolhardy, too, unless McCain can see better into the future than anybody else. Iraq has only been a (semi) unified country in its present sense since '26, the Awakening soldiers now to be paid by the Shi'ia majority government may not remain loyal, the country could still very well splinter on its own and if McCain wants to talk about being disloyal to good friends, turning our back on the possibility of an independent Kurdistan may someday go down in infamy.

McCain's instincts are bellicose, his thinking pedestrian and outdated, and his diplomatic skills, uh, well not great. It's why I thought he lost the debate.

Walter Annenberg is a life-long Republican who was close to Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

"It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier," said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. "It's ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It's nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It's so silly."

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Also despite all her foreign experience prattle, she has showed no interest in Russia as governor of Alaska.

Sen. John McCain, NBC interview, Sept. 10

"My job has been to oversee nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas."

Gov. Sarah Palin, Golden, Colo., Sept. 15"

"Alaska is the ninth-largest energy supplier in the United States, accounting for a modest 3.5 percent share of the nation's total energy production." From today's Washington Post.

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