Failing that, a few academics and scholars to talk us through how his books work – individually, in their various sequences, as an oeuvre – in between crony contributions might have dispelled both the sensation of a giant love-in and that everyone was engaged in nothing more than a game of biblio-biographic pelmanism.
No one was going to get between Karzai's cronies and a loose development dollar.
The rift between former Saddam cronies and the religious insurgents may be America's best chance to weaken the Islamic State, Foreign Policy notes.
Now, though barred from running for president, the general is the FRG's leader in Congress and it has 64 of the 113 seats.The new government is a fine balance between Mr Portillo's cronies, and those of General Rios Montt.
Surely he did the traditional thing and divided it up nicely between his friends and cronies and sent the rest to Citibank.
So, while on the macro level he's carving up his country's resources between him and his cronies; on a micro level he's demonstrating his power by throwing away objects that are, to him, mere trinkets.
"The lack of sincerity of the regime is obvious to the extent that no one from the LCC even accepted the invitation". Hamwe called the conference "a conversation between Assad's Baath cronies" with a handful of independent activists there for "decoration" as the crackdown continues.
It may even help the transition to drive a wedge between a few old-regime cronies and the bulk of the establishment, many of whom may harbor grievances against "the family". A transitional government should aim for inclusion, and should test the democratic commitment of dubious players rather than inadvertently induce them to become violent opponents.
In the later Mubarak years, the president held the balance and the peace between his family and their capitalist cronies on the one side, and the military on the other.
But when insiders at major corporations see top officials getting away with it -- moving unscathed between stints as crony capitalists and high office or even, as in the case of Richard Perle, playing both roles at once -- they have to feel that old rules no longer apply, and that they can get away with even more self-dealing than before.
