LILEKS (James) the bleatMan, I wish I could come up with lines like that Pravda one...It’s been an unremarkable week, except for the fact that there’s so much FAMILY about; all my wife’s siblings and the attendant hordes of kids are here for the holidays, and I’m not accustomed to such things. I like it, though. Always someone to talk to, always something to talk about. One of the non-family houseguests was a Marine who was heading back to Iraq in two days. Impressive fellow; smart, articulate, knowledgeable about matters arcane & practical, confident. You know: a soldier. (I am convinced that the previous two sentences produce automatic eyerolling in some people, so deep is their conviction that soldiers are big icky mean stupid brutes.) To say that the officer believed there was a disparity between Iraq as he saw it and the Iraq the papers reporter would be an understatement along the lines of “Pravda was frequently slow to report crop failures.”
J.