Whether you want to call it a “war on terror” as George W. Bush would or an “overseas contingency operation” as our current president prefers, we are at war. At least those who are waging battle against us are at war. I am not sure that politicians in Washington are at war or that the general public quite feels the war. This war almost came home to us again on Christmas Day with a Nigerian terrorist.
There has been a lot of discussion about what went wrong when an islamist terrorist was allowed on a plane flying into Detroit wearing a pantie bomb and was on a terrorist watch list and was given a visa by the State Department and bought his one-way ticket with cash, and was able to get his desired seat to maximize impact.
Some have suggested that the fact that the pantie bomber failed is a testament to the ineptitude of the terrorists. I believe that the pantie bomber was inept, but the network that got him to almost succeed seems pretty effective.
Mitch is back and that means another great book for me to read. Author Vince Flynn
In this novel, America is not directly threatened, but Rapp and the CIA travel the world to combat extremists. I am obviously reading the Rapp novels years after they were first published (Executive Power was published in 2003) and it is interesting to think about what was happening in American back then. I found these two excerpts particularly interesting:
I had thought about the framework for this posting for a little while, but only recently found the hook that I wanted to use. I was checking in on Facebook and noticed a posting from a friend of a friend ”liking” a photograph [that actually makes sense if you use facebook] of President Obama and his family returning from their Hawaiian vacation. Many of the friends posted comments and since I surmise from the photograph that most of these folks are young I was not too surprised at the comments.
“Great picture. What a beautiful family. I’m so glad they got a chance to escape the maddness for a short vacation.”
That is not a typo on the book name; it is author Don Brine’s
“a man had a very cunning theory which he wrote down in a book, and it proved to be very popular indeed…But then it turned out that this very cunning theory was not so cunning after all because it wasn’t true. Not even remotely. Not even a tiny bit likely.”
Imagine that your a well-off suburban father and you find yourself deep in the inner city as you search for your troubled teenager. Or imagine that you are a mother who recently went back to work as a lawyer only to be pulled away because your son has disappeared.
In Hold Tight
I guess that it is tradition to end the previous year and start a new year with some wishes or resolutions for the future. As we move into the second decade of the 21st century I have a few of my own…hopefully for your enjoyment:
It slices, it dices, it does the work of many other home utensils. We have all seen the commercials and while we often turn the channel, a lot of times we watch…and even buy. In the first chapter of What the Dog Saw
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors and Blink is on my top ten list. When I first saw his new book in the store I naturally picked it up to buy it, but was not enthused by the description and actually put it back down. The description that this was “the best of his writing from The New Yorker” did not interest me.
