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Arianna Huffington and Harry Shearer

the breakfast table:
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The Void

By Harry Shearer
Posted Wednesday, June 3, 1998, at 9:38 AM ET

It's always hard to say goodbye to a friend, doubly so when he's someone you've never met. I'm going to miss William Ginsburg. We always need a symbol of pettifoggery close at hand, and, with Johnnie C. becoming almost Nixonian in his campaign for reinvention and respectability, and Barry Scheck and Robert Shapiro shunning the limelight, Ginsburg was a reliable target for half of this year. Washington society columns will have to go back to the dining habits of people on the payrolls of lobbyists and/or the public.

RSS

The report on the CIA's failure to anticipate India's nuclear tests had a nice observation: agents were misled because, when the winning party in India's recent elections campaigned on the platform of nuclear testing, our agents assumed the politicians would act like Americans, i.e., lie to the public but tell the truth to agents of a foreign government. The surprise was that the Indians preferred to lie to the agents and tell the truth to their public. Maybe cows are sacred after all.