It's state against state.
Foreign reporting can irk the natives whose affairs are being too casually summarised, but the succinct dispatch from overseas is often pithily insightful.
The common sense of the matter is most pithily, if not most elegantly, expressed in the words of Mr. Justice McLean on circuit in United States v. Keen, 26 F.Cas. p. 686, No. 15,510 (CC Ind.1839).
Like a Democrat version of PJ O'Rourke, Maher is suave, angry, pithily funny and possessed of a fine foul mouth when necessary.
The latter is pithily expressed in Brother in the Night, a textbook piece of boogie that opines that it won't be so bad if the bank-robbing narrator gets shot down, as long as it happens on southern soil.
That process is pithily expressed in "Pick Yourself Up," the intrepidly cheerful Dorothy Fieldstandard Kern standard from "Swing Time," which declares that the wisest strategy after a personal setback is to "pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again".
This is perhaps most pithily expressed in the phrase many abusive men use to justify violence against women: "she was asking for it".
The president's current state of flailing mayhem could not be more pithily summed up.
That leaves something like the way the Kosovo intervention was legitimized, pithily described as "illegal but legitimate".
The Republican party's sudden amnesia over its view of Mandela was most pithily captured by Salon, which dubbed the phenomenon the "right-washing" of his legacy.
And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a "creepy-ass cracker".
