ITEM!
A ten-year-old boy of our acquaintance recently spent the day with a friend of his, following his friend’s father, who works for one of the television channels, around Parliament House in Canberra. Somewhere in the endless warren of corridors they had a chance meeting with Mr Howard, our Prime Minister. Ever the consummate politician, he took some time to talk to the boys and foster their interest in politics (and maybe secure their votes for his party one day in the future). Debriefing later, the ten-year-old, when asked his impression of Mr Howard, said, “He’s very loud.”
ITEM!
Reading a piece by David Cole in the New York Review of Books about the ramifications of the US Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case, I came across a sentence that was at once beautifully understated, and horrifying (horrifying in the sense that you could never have imagined, five years ago, a situation in which such a sentence would ever need to be written):
“And it is quite possible that [US] government officials might actually decide not to commit war crimes - now that they know they are war crimes - even if prosecution is unlikely.”
