Petraeus & Crocker: More Laughs, Please
A wickedly funny read and spot-on commentary out of the NY Times from the always erudite Dick Cavett, on that “sober team of mirthless entertainers, Petraeus & Crocker.” {If ever there was a post so aptly suited for EA’s category: “Poseurs and Pretensions,” this is it!}
Petraeus uses “challenge” for a rich variety of things. It covers ominous developments, threats, defeats on the battlefield and unfound solutions to ghastly happenings. And of course there’s that biggest of challenges, that slapstick band of silent-movie comics called, flatteringly, the Iraqi “fighting forces.” (A perilous one letter away from “fighting farces.”) The ones who are supposed to allow us to bring troops home but never do.
Petraeus’s verbal road is full of all kinds of bumps and lurches and awkward oddities. How about “ongoing processes of substantial increases in personnel”?
Try talking English, General. You mean more soldiers.
