Deadpan

The conventions of newspaper writing dictate that something like Michael Cooper and Marc Santora doing a The New York Times article about Rudy Giuliani's decision to surround himself with dangerous lunatics can't call them "dangerous lunatics." Instead, you get this kind of deadpan humor:

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Mr. Giuliani a variety of perspectives.

By the end of the piece, I even learn that Giuliani thinks trying to broker a settlement of the Israel-Arab conflict was a "mistake" and even a "debacle" so I guess Rudy is at least consistent in prescribing endless war as a preferred policy for everyone.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/10/deadpan/43427/