I wasn’t terribly surprised when Vonnegut left us; I saw him speak when I an undergrad, and he was frail then.
Losing Halberstam, on the other hand, is a shock. I was hoping that he would produce a book on the Bush wars as incisive as this one and this one. If you haven’t, buy them, read them, and loan them to your friends.
Salon has posted some retrospective interviews, which are also worth the time.
Now Playing: Episode 361
The Presidential campaign gets nasty while the banking crisis goes international.
Links Mentioned: The coveted Buckley endorsement … and the Brooks non-endorsement … the European banking bailout vs. the U.S. bailout redux … Frank Rich … GM and Chrysler get cozy.
Hadn’t heard of him until KUOW re-ran a 2002 interview with him last night:
http://www.kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=3478
It was so prescient for a while I couldn’t tell if it had been recorded before or after the Iraq war. But there’s the datestamp: October 2002. The argument that “no one could have predicted” the chaos in Iraq melts away pretty quickly.