Mon nez est très encombré, et je ne peux pas souffle bien par lui.
Sayings sounds so much lovelier en français. Translation: I'm getting over a cold, yet remain quite congested and unable to smell even the diced garlic I've just swallowed to boost my immune system. I think I may have done something to irritate my boss, whose boss's boss's boss is God. It's not wise to annoy people who have connections.
I find the congestion clears but for a moment if I'm energetically moving around or exercising, and so, upon my arrival home, I opted to walk to the apartment mailbox to gather the mail. Nothing too exciting, but I did get bargain books catalogue from Hamilton Bookseller. I think I may have bought a philosophy book from them once. This edition featured in its politics section books titled The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity...Reader: The Hideous Truth About America's Ugliest Conservatives; How to Talk to a Liberal If You Must; How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help--and the Rest of Us; and Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk. Hatred sells similarly to way sex sells, doesn't it? Really, are these books about the common good, justice, and political truth, or are they sold for the purposes of fruitless self-gratification?
On a less nauseous note, I got around to reading Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency, which is not a tale of how President Bush terrorizes, which in our political climate is what I momentarily wondered, but a first-hand narrative and hospitable critique of certain actions, ideologies, and policies of public servants in the Bush administration. The terror president is simply the president in the time of terror. Goldsmith is a former Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel, whose job it was to determine whether or not the president's plans or actions are legal. Not a neutral job, that.
What impressed me most about Goldsmith's book is that he worked very hard to criticize within the existing contexts. He shows us what daily pressures men like Alberto Gonzales and David Addington were under, both from daily reports of dreadful threats from terrorists and the hyper-legalized culture in which our public servants operated. Goldsmith doesn't shy away from stating when and where he thinks the president or members of the administration were wrong or even crazy (Goldsmith was the one who withdrew the now infamous "torture memo" crafted by John Yoo), but he criticizes knowing that he's talking about real people; he doesn't reduce Yoo or Addington down to evil caricatures that play villains in his narrative. He sees them as people passionate about preventing another terror attack, but driven by what he sees as a dangerous idea of executive power.
Goldsmith's book raises some issues worth more reflection (over 10,000 lawyers, not including reservists, work in the Defense Department), but such reflection will need to wait until my sinuses are clear and I can write with something passing for intelligence and insight.
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