Missouri Senator Kit Bond has been in the Senate since 1987 and intends to leave when his term is up next year. Apparently he's a rank-and-file, run-of-the-mill Republican. And one of his constituents posted this to his congress.org bio:
It seems quite apparent to me that you are trying very hard to suppress my dissent! The requirement that I must type in the words I see to prove I am not a robot is ludicris!
- springfield, MO - 11/06/2009
Not that that reflects on the Senator in any way. It just needed sharing.
Bond is co-author of The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam with Pulitzer Prize-winner (and democrat)Lewis M Simons. Not much on the book, but here's the publisher's info:
A U.S. senator and Pulitzer Prizewinner, both experts on Southeast Asia, offer a bold new approach to address radical Islam and fight global terror
The next front in the war on terror is in Southeast Asia, warn Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Lewis Simons, both leading experts on the region. The U.S. has bankrupted its policies in dealing with the Islamic world. As Fundamentalist Islam gains traction in Southeast Asia, backed by Saudi money, the U.S. must act swiftly to re-establish its credibility there and help defuse global terrorism. Bond and Simons present a bold plan to accomplish this key goal by substituting smart power (civilians in sneakers and sandals) for force (soldiers in combat boots) in Indonesia and the other nations of Southeast Asia, home to the world's greatest concentration of Muslims.
• Introduces a critical new "smart power" approach to combat global terror
• Written by two experts on Southeast Asia with extensive contacts in Washington and overseas
• Tackles a crucial challenge to U.S. foreign policy and President Obama's administration
• Examines a wide range of views and people, from Osama bin Laden-trained armed terrorists to radical clerics to western-trained officials who plead for Americans to come to their countries to teach, start small businesses, and improve health care
The Next Front offers exactly the kind of fresh, out-of-the-box thinking the United States needs to rebuild its credibility and transcend its foreign policy failures.
The introduction, available at this e-book site, indicates sanity (chapter 1 is also online, but I didn't open the .pdf. Chances are it's also sane). I found a few promising publicity-type articles as well. This was intriguing:
Co-authored with veteran journalist Lewis Simons, "The Next Front" might surprise those who have watched Bond, a Republican and Intelligence Committee hawk. The authors began several years ago with the intent of warning the world of terrorist threats in and around Indonesia, the world's biggest Muslim-dominated nation.
What they came up with was a different sort of book, a more nuanced approach that led to a midstream switch in publishers.
Near the beginning, Bond and Simons rebuke the world-whipping neoconservatives who held sway during President George W. Bush's administration...
The book's strength lies in Simons' interviews in a region he knows well. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Simons has lived for stretches in Southeast Asia since he labored there as a Vietnam War correspondent....
And there's this:
...In co-author Simons, Bond has a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who lived in that part of the world after his days as a Vietnam War correspondent. While Bond was supplying themes and policy goals, Simons was traveling the region for months conducting interviews, sometimes with extreme characters.
Simons’ reporting gives The Next Front an appealing narrative that frequently is absent in books about policy.
The two joked about their ’odd couple’ relationship and how they collaborated despite being worlds apart on most issues.
"Although Lew has become a very close friend, I am glad he doesn’t live in Missouri because he would never have voted for me," Bond remarked.
I think I'd rather hear Jon chat with the co-author. Well, maybe this'll be more than just another "this part of the world is important! Y'know, they're muslim, too..." segment. We'll see.
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