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Plausible Deniability

Just finished reading Make Russia Great Again. One word to describe the book: hysterical. The story is tethered to the reality that were the years 2016-2020. But author lets his imagination take over and the one mishap follows the next. 

The cast of characters are all too familiar to anyone who follows American politics but Buckley's caricature of them turn them into faces in funhouse mirrors. Once they are that distorted out of reality, their actions don't seem so implausible anymore. He is lucky to be working with an inexhaustible supply of madness that those four years were but what is able to with it is truly masterful. This reviewer said it well:

Amid the twin economic and health catastrophes of our era, Buckley has done the impossible: Made Politics Funny Again. Laughter may not be the best medicine for covid-19, but it’s a heck of a lot better than bleach.

“Whom the gods would destroy, first they make believe that the thing is in the bag.” is a line in the book I found prescient for more reasons that one. That and this gem about the man himself "An upside to his stable genius was that he had so many brilliant ideas, he simply couldn’t keep track of them all." - probably for the best that such was the case. 

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