Free Fatal Conceit by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

you’re . . . whoop . . . okay?”
    Karp patted his friend on the back. They’d been playing the movie trivia game ever since he’d met the little news vendor more than a decade earlier. He’d never lost a round either. But today he just had no heart for it. “Sorry, Warren, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Some other time, okay?”
    â€œYeah, sure. Here’s your . . . bullshit whoop . . . papers. Nah, keep your money, least I can . . . asswipe oh boy ohhhh boy . . . do for a friend who’s having a rough morning.”
    â€œAnd you’re a good friend, Warren,” Karp responded. “We’ll catch up later. By the way, Dmitri was innocent, but the jury found him guilty.” He turned and walked away from the worried news vendor and headed for the main entrance of the courts building. He intended to go through a side entrance on Leonard Street where a private elevator reserved for himself and judges carried him up to his eighth-floor office. But he’d been so preoccupied with Lucy that, after inadvertently almost knocking Warren to the ground, he decided just to go in the front entrance at 100 Centre Street.
    The building wasn’t open to the public for business until 8:00 a.m., a half hour away, but a security guard let him in. He crossed the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator before glancing at the front page of the New York Times . Most of the articles wererelated to the upcoming elections. The top story was about yet another gaffe the presidential challenger had made at a fundraiser. It was an ill-advised attempt at humor that had come off as insulting to women, and of course the Times —and, Karp suspected, the rest of the media would follow suit—had taken it out of context and blown it out of proportion to make it look as though the candidate had intended it in some callous way. The Times quoted the president’s bombastic campaign manager, Rod Fauhomme, as saying the challenger was “out of touch and out of time” with voters.
    As he read, Karp shook his head. He’d met the president’s opponent and thought of him as a good family man and astute captain of industry, more interested in righting the ship of state with sound economic policy than in engaging in a war of empty words. He was overmatched when it came to rhetoric and disinclined to get into personal attacks, though he was consistently portrayed as “mean-spirited” and the pawn of corporations and Wall Street. Combine that with a cheerleading media that fawned all over the president without even the pretense of objectivity and it was a wonder that some pollsters still gave him a slugger’s chance at a come-from-behind victory.
    The president’s poor showing at the first debate had been met with open dismay and alarm by a shocked media, which then rallied to make excuses for their man. Many insisted that he was tired from the “unfortunate necessity” of attending fundraisers in Hollywood but coincidentally engaged in the day-to-day necessities of his job, and truly surprised by the “lies and half-truths” of his opponent’s debate points. The president had then come back in the second debate on foreign policy—a subject that the challenger admittedly had little experience in—by claiming to have almost singlehandedly destroyed Al Qaeda and the threat of Islamic extremists while negotiating for “a safer America than when I came into office four years ago.”
    Easy, Butch, Karp cautioned himself, presidential politics will be what they are; you’ve got enough to deal with right here at home. He looked for news about what the media now referred toas the “Chechnya incident.” He found it relegated to the bottom of the page and there wasn’t much. A brief recap of what was known: that about 3:00 p.m. EST, a U.S. State Department compound in a remote area