{"id":28215,"date":"2012-01-06T10:06:47","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T14:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28215"},"modified":"2012-01-06T10:07:46","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T14:07:46","slug":"another-book-i-wont-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28215","title":{"rendered":"Another Book I Won’t Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hollywood seems to lack for new ideas; how many movies are re-makes, sequels, or prequels? Our news media (as Jonn note<\/a>s) certainly lacks perspective and originality as well.<\/p>\n

Us geezer types are often accused of lusting after “The Good Old Days” while the REAL hypocrites like the antiwar crowd, and OWS, are trying to recapture their own imagined “Good Old Days”.<\/p>\n

Rarely is this\u00a0hypocrisy quite so blatant as in this book (no direct link from me!)<\/p>\n

A review: In “The Operators,” Michael Hastings, the man whose Rolling Stone interview doomed the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, offers up dispatches from Afghanistan.<\/a><\/p>\n

During the Vietnam War, the generation of David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan transformed America’s mainstream media into a hotbed of antiwar and antimilitary muckraking. By the time a major war effort returned, in 2003, that generation had grown too old to visit the trenches, allowing the emergence of Generation X reporters like Dexter Filkins and George Packer, who did not share their predecessors’ contempt for the military. Most Americans welcomed the change.<\/p>\n

Not so Michael Hastings, as we learn in “The Operators,” his account of events in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2011. Mr. Hastings asserts that this generational change drove him to write “The Runaway General,” the Rolling Stone article of June 2010 that doomed the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. With characteristic acerbity, Mr. Hastings laments that his press colleagues have abandoned the spirit of Vietnam, when “war had been exposed as the Giant Lying Machine, in Halberstam’s words.” Instead, he says, they write glowing profiles of generals and other officials in the hope of gaining greater access to sources.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hollywood seems to lack for new ideas; how many movies are re-makes, sequels, or prequels? Our … Another Book I Won’t Read<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":467,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,177,172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-dumbass-bullshit","category-geezer-alert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}