Bush could get a landslide. Dan Drezner has a point.
IT’S SECURITY, STUPID: Very sobering news from the latest big poll within Iraq. The obvious problem is that people feel less physically secure than before the invasion. Of course, some of that is inevitable. The security of a police state is not true security. The centrifugal forces that Saddam was slowly failing to control were bound to have a period when they spun out of control. Nevertheless, more troops, more focus on simple street security seems a no-brainer. Also notice the astonishing disparity between the Kurds and everyone else. The Kurds love us. But of all Iraqis, 57 percent want us out within the next few months.
A STAR IS BORN: Amazing reviews in London for a new production of Hamlet, starring an unknown 23-year-old, Money quote:
This is the kind of evening of which legends are made, one of those rare first nights that those who were present are never likely to forget… Whishaw, with his light, tremulous voice, painfully thin body, and the kind of cheekbones that will have adolescent girls swooning in the stalls, presents the most raw and vulnerable Hamlet I have ever seen.
He has all the gangliness of adolescence and the unbearable pain of a once bright and happy scholar who returns home to find that his family has imploded and nothing makes sense any more.
No wonder that this inadequate prince finds it so hard to revenge. Whishaw brilliantly captures an adolescent deep in the depths of clinical depression, whose feigned madness sometimes slips terrifyingly into the real thing.
Yet he is also the most lovable of Hamlets. During the soliloquies he genuinely seems to be confiding in us, the audience, with a rare, bruised candour that catches the heart.
“Oh that this too solid flesh would melt” is delivered through tears and snot and I have never heard “To be or not to be” – during which he contemplates knocking back a bottle of sleeping pills – spoken with such freshness and depth of feeling. You seem to be hearing it for the first time.
Enough to make me want to jump, er, hobble onto a plane. (It’s playing till August.) I had the chance to play Hamlet in grad school – bigger, longer, uncut – and ended up even more fascinated by the character than I was before. Maddeningly, purely, human thought. Unactable. And then, days after Shakespeare’s birthday, some kind of miracle happens again.
The Dish 