{"id":198024,"date":"2007-12-20T00:21:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-20T05:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/12\/20\/snark-as-only-the-british-can-do-it\/"},"modified":"2007-12-20T00:21:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-20T05:21:00","slug":"snark-as-only-the-british-can-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/12\/20\/snark-as-only-the-british-can-do-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Snark, As Only the British Can Do It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Financial Times<\/span> has an absolutely <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/03c4773c-a6c3-11dc-b1f5-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1\">snarkalicious review of John Bolton&#8217;s book<\/a>, <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Surrender is Not an Option<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>A quick sample:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>A lack of intellectual curiosity might not matter if Bolton were a gifted storyteller, or interestingly introspective. But that is not the case. If he has ever had difficult personal or moral choices to make, he is not letting on. At one point, he does acknowledge that he took steps to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. He writes: &#8220;I made the cold calculation that I wasn&#8217;t going to waste time on a futile struggle,&#8221; adding: &#8220;Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation.&#8221; The whole episode is dealt with in a paragraph.<\/p>\n<p>Many people of Bolton&#8217;s generation made similar decisions. But it would be interesting to hear a little more on this subject, from a man who has given his book the bellicose title Surrender is Not an Option. When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">emphasis mine<\/span>)<\/p>\n<p>Go read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Financial Times has an absolutely snarkalicious review of John Bolton&#8217;s book, Surrender is Not an Option. A quick sample: &#8230;. A lack of intellectual curiosity might not matter if Bolton were a gifted storyteller, or interestingly introspective. But that is not the case. If he has ever had difficult personal or moral choices to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[964,1002],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-relations","category-good-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198024"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}