Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Appointed by Bush as the architect of the Iraq “surge”, Gates continues to enjoy Obama’s confidence as Defense Secretary. As deputy director of the CIA under Reagan Gates advocated the bombing of Nicaragua, and called for the US to do everything in its power short of direct military action to remove the Sandinista Government. Gates advocated selling arms to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Despite evidence that he was complicit in the events of the Iran-Contra scandal he escaped conviction.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Islander,
Along with the cultural highlights, maybe noting the deaths of artists is also a good thing?
Ruth Park is certainly someone to celebrate. Apart from her novels and children's books she produced two great volumes of autobiography, and was an active writer until very late in her long life. Sadly it was marred by tragedy, as she outlived her husband, the brilliant D'Arcy Niland, by more than four decades. No-one could ever replace him in her life. Her twin NZ-born daughters Deborah and Kilmeny became distinguished book illustrators. Kilmeny, who worked in animation in her younger days and was a top human being, died early last year.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Alex Coleman,
Alex, those links are to that notorious nest of leftard tinfoil-hattery the Guardian. They're still at it with this scurrilous dissing of the politically buffed and toned.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
I could, off the cuff, give a reasonably historically detailed account of the mis-use of US power in Nicaragua under Reagan if there’s some need to prove moral and historical credentials.
I don’t doubt that you could, but you appear to be almost willfully ignorant of events in that part of the world during Carter’s term. If you’d like an example of a US diplomat with a pretty much proactive and unblemished record on human rights you couldn’t do much better than Lawrence Pezzullo, who was moved from Uruguay to Nicaragua as the hideously corrupt Somoza regime collapsed under its own weight. Although probably self-serving to some degree, Pezzullo’s account of the Carter administration’s ineptitude as it struggled with the realisation that the despot must go and its distaste for the Sandinistas makes edifying reading.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to James Bremner,
. . . the USSR and who knows who else have just about any US secret that they want
Why shoot, those goshdarned soviets.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to James Bremner,
. . . most of those voices inside or outside the US inherently most suspicious and critical of the USA are of the left.
As far as that applies to American citizens, it presupposes a single narrowly politically defined USA, rather than the diversity of opinion fostered and guaranteed by the Constitution. Plenty of teabaggers appear to believe that they're victims of some form of conspiracy from within their own ruling "elites".
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. . . bust through the viewer’s intellectual fourth wall and let us feel what the characters feel.
Those sticks could really get on your tits.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Ross Mason,
I remember the starving people’s of SE Asia Magic Bullet we were going to supply and save the planet with. The Milk Biscuit.
I remember that. It evoked an image of “feeding out” to the grateful third-worlders from a tractor and trailer.
Now we feed out their palm kernels to our dairy cows. -
The other FT has a less shriekingly partisan take on Wikileaks.