Category Archives: Almost Seven Wonders

The Almost Seven Wonders files

Bob Rumson: Vote For Me Or Die! Die! Die!

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Reprising an earlier post, here’s what I was referring to:

Dick Cheney isn’t real, people.  He’s actually Bob Rumson, the evil, manipulative candidate played by Richard Dreyfuss in Rob Reiner’s and Aaron Sorkin’s 1995 film The American President, somehow enchanted and brought to life.

Seriously, now.  Richard Dreyfuss made so many little choices that look so much like Cheney, I’m more than half-convinced he was slyly playing Cheney, who was already notoriously evil, if not quite so well-known.  If not, in retrospect his instincts were… scary.

Yes, that’s the word.

PS — welcome to those of you clicking over from The Washington Monthly (or anyplace else who links to this entry).  This site is only a few days old, picking up from my guest posts at This Modern World (where Tom Tomorrow continues to post great stuff) and not everything is organized yet, so if you’d like to see more news here, click “Home/Main Blog” on your left, not “News.”  Or just click here.

Strange, yes.  But if there’s anything Bush proves, it’s that there’s a fine line between vast incompetence and brilliant surrealism.

If you like the polls, they change every day, with results posted as jpgs for easy emailing.  Enjoy!

Military.com

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My best friend in the whole wide world (not to mention a hell of a writer) wants to point everybody over to Military.com, a website which ain’t exactly a bastion of liberal anti-war activists.

And yet these are some of the top headlines over there:

Marines Show Frustration In Iraq, which begins with this:

The sound of the Black Hawk medical helicopter is an ominous sign for the Marines patrolling this forgotten western corner of Iraq that borders Syria. It means that one of them is seriously wounded or killed at the hands of their elusive enemy…

“We are losing guys left and right,” says Cpl. Cody King, 20, of Phoenix, Ariz. “All we are doing around here is getting blown up,” he says, not hiding his anger.

Reservists Doubt Their Combat Readiness:

… almost half of Army Reserve soldiers believed their units were not “well prepared” for their wartime missions.  Army Reservists who had served in Iraq graded their units’ readiness for war even lower…

Check out the lead sentence of Troops Experience Difficulties In Voting:

U.S. service members based in Iraq and across the globe can’t be confident that their votes will be counted in this year’s presidential election, analysts and military advocates said this week.

And further down, in the featured articles, we even learn that all the high-tech advantages field commanders supposedly had during Shock’n’Awe

Military.com

Posted on by

My best friend in the whole wide world (not to mention a hell of a writer) wants to point everybody over to Military.com, a website which ain’t exactly a bastion of liberal anti-war activists.

And yet these are some of the top headlines over there:

Marines Show Frustration In Iraq, which begins with this:

The sound of the Black Hawk medical helicopter is an ominous sign for the Marines patrolling this forgotten western corner of Iraq that borders Syria. It means that one of them is seriously wounded or killed at the hands of their elusive enemy…

“We are losing guys left and right,” says Cpl. Cody King, 20, of Phoenix, Ariz. “All we are doing around here is getting blown up,” he says, not hiding his anger.

Reservists Doubt Their Combat Readiness:

… almost half of Army Reserve soldiers believed their units were not “well prepared” for their wartime missions.  Army Reservists who had served in Iraq graded their units’ readiness for war even lower…

Check out the lead sentence of Troops Experience Difficulties In Voting:

U.S. service members based in Iraq and across the globe can’t be confident that their votes will be counted in this year’s presidential election, analysts and military advocates said this week.

And further down, in the featured articles, we even learn that all the high-tech advantages field commanders supposedly had during Shock’n’Awe