{"id":1047,"date":"2006-11-21T14:09:47","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T18:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1047"},"modified":"2006-11-21T14:09:47","modified_gmt":"2006-11-21T18:09:47","slug":"magisterial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1047","title":{"rendered":"Magisterial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Geoffrey Wheatcroft has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/story\/0,,1953116,00.html\">a wonderful piece<\/a> in the <em>Guardian<\/em> today on Lord and Lady Black. He is funny both about their social pretensions, which were indeed comic and life-enhancing, and their fanatical American nationalism, which was distinctly less life-enhancing. As he points out, they brought some other strange Canadians into London life as well:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>For some reason, Steyn no longer writes for the <em>Telegraphs<\/em> and <em>Spectator<\/em> as he used to, pronouncing from New Hampshire with enviable self-confidence on the affairs of Iraq or anywhere else.<br \/>\nApart from predicting that George Bush would win the 2000 presidential election in a landslide, Steyn said at regular intervals that Osama bin Laden &#8220;will remain dead&#8221;. Weeks after the invasion of Iraq he assured his readers that there would be &#8220;no widespread resentment at or resistance of the western military presence&#8221;; in December 2003 he wrote that &#8220;another six weeks of insurgency sounds about right, after which it will peter out&#8221;; and the following March he insisted that: &#8220;I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story.&#8221; I miss him, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Geoffrey Wheatcroft has a wonderful piece in the Guardian today on Lord and Lady Black. He is funny both about their social pretensions, which were indeed comic and life-enhancing, and their fanatical American nationalism, which was distinctly less life-enhancing. As &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1047\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1047\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}