Everybody should run out and buy a copy of the August Harper’s Magazine. I want to write a separate post about Dan Baum’s “Happiness Is A Worn Gun: My Concealed Weapon and Me”, but I can’t resist pimping the positively Menckenian David Samuels:
… The reporters practice their questions, as if this were still the old days and raising their hands meant that there was even a slight chance they might be called upon. In fact, Obama hasn’t had a real press conference in almost a year, which is the longest period of such abstinence since anyone began keeping track. The reporters who get to ask questions are selected weeks in advance by the White House. Still, pretending is helpful for morale.
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“How about negotiating with the Taliban? You still good with that?”
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“Is your brother a CIA agent?”
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The question refers to Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA’s landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that “Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place,” quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the official said. “He can create jobs.”