Okay, so my beloved Powerbook crashed for the second time today. After backing up all my files, I took it down to the Apple store in Soho, New York City. Actually, “store” doesn’t capture what that place is like. It’s a church. The clean, spare lines, the vaulted glass ceiling, the large posters of Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon, the illuminated perspex stairs that ascend toward the tabernacle … and the reverent hush of the trendoids who bustle there. I almost found myself reflexively genuflecting. I took my frayed laptop – not even a year old – to the “Genius” desk and had a very helpful guy review my case. It’s hopeless. The hard drive seems completely screwed and it has to be replaced entirely. It makes strange whirring and clicking sounds all the time. I won’t see it again for ten days. There’s nothing I can do in the meantime but use my friends’ computers to update the Dish and do all the work I usually do on a Thursday, my busiest day of the week, on the hotel p.c. Am I complaining as a relatively public switcher from p.c.s to a Mac? Not entirely. I’m sure all sorts of computers break down like this (although I never had a p.c. that did). Maybe it was the dank air in Provincetown that did it in; or my ceaseless use of iTunes. But it’s a little embarrassing for Apple to have such a high-profile “switch” ad campaign going on and have one of their most enthusiastic switchers see his computer collapse from mechanical problems within a few months.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “With regimes like the Iraqi one, there will be no peace in the Middle East. You cannot contain a regime like Saddam Hussein’s. That was a mistake of the West. So the question is: Is America ready to face up to the mistakes it made in ’91 and in the ’80s? Are the Americans ready to support democracy? Because people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden grew out of the Middle East. They are not products of Afghanistan.” – Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, a leading German expert and activist on Iraq. This interview is persuasive and riveting, and also puts the lie to the notion that there is a single, unified “German” view on Iraq. It also highlights, I think, one of the weirdnesses of the current debate. That weirdness is that the anti-war Left’s partly justified argument that the U.S. has been implicated in the past in Saddam’s disgusting regime leads them nevertheless to argue that we should do nothing today to rectify that. Why not? Aren’t we, in particular, responsible? Shouldn’t we, in particular, set it right? It’s a telling feature of the anti-war left that they never use their criticism of American foreign policy in the past to advocate a more aggressive and progressive American foreign policy for today. Which leads to the question of whether their horror of tyranny and evil abroad is what really motivates them – or whether hatred of America and what it stands for is their unifying thread.
KRUGMAN COMES CLEAN: On the Thomas White email. And good for him. Maybe he’ll temper his anti-Bush dyspepsia in future. Yeah, right. By the way, I agree with almost all his column today. What I don’t understand is why an argument advocating boosting government spending and reflating the economy in a dangerously deflationary time should include reversing planned tax cuts. Isn’t that self-negating? I’d be in favor of more government rebates for lower income people today, as Krugman recommends, but I see no reason, in a period where deflation is a potential problem, why we shouldn’t have tax cuts as well. Perhaps Krugman’s hatred of Bush’s tax cut has blinded him to the fact that so far, it has clearly helped us avoid a deeper recession and, if expanded, could head off deflation as well.
WHAT THE ARABS REALLY THINK: “It is no secret that Washington’s Arab allies have assured it in private that, as long as a diplomatic fig leaf is provided by the United Nations, they would do nothing to oppose military action against Saddam Hussein. Jordan has adopted its own version of diplomatic duplicity. It has issued appeals to Washington not to attack Iraq but is playing host to American troops in the context of military exercises clearly related to any future action against Saddam Hussein. Prince Hassan, King Abdallah’s uncle, has emerged as an active supporter of the Iraqi exile opposition groups, and even attended their conference in London last July.” – from another must-read, clear-eyed assessment of Arab political culture by Amir Taheri.
USEFUL IDIOT WATCH: Nick Kristof goes to Baghdad and finds people ready to attack the U.S. Quelle surprise! In a police state where the tiniest dissent on the tiniest matter can have you disappeared and tortured, Kristof deduces no support for a U.S. invasion. Let’s check in and see what happens if we do invade, shall we? We have long memories in the blogosphere, Nick. And little pity.
DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “I think Muhammed was a terrorist” – Jerry Falwell, dumb and crass as ever.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: “Some at racism conference urge reversal of decision to exclude non-blacks.” No, as Dave Barry might say, I’m not making this up.
AS.COM GETS RESULTS: Uh oh. Remember that military blog I referred you to? After I mentioned it, they got so swamped with emails of support they had to shut the site down. Sorry, guys. But you can still send them emails.
GORE’S LIES, CONTINUED: A devastating little dissection of his recent opportunism and deception from the centrist writers at Spinsanity.
JEB BUSH’S SENSE OF HUMOR: What to make of this story:
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told a delegation of lawmakers that he had “some juicy details” about the sexual orientation of a missing Miami girl’s caretakers. During a meeting Wednesday, Bush implied that the two women, who had just been charged with fraud stemming from the investigation into Rilya Wilson’s disappearance, were lesbians. “As (Pamela Graham) was being arrested, she told her co-workers, ‘Tell my wife I’ve been arrested.’ The wife is the grandmother, and the aunt is the husband,” Bush explained, using his fingers to indicate quotation marks to emphasize the word “grandmother.” “Bet you don’t get that in Pensacola,” Bush told his guests, a group of lawmakers from Florida’s Panhandle.
Here’s what I make of it. Bush is pandering to a bunch of good ol’ boys whom he assumes are homophobes. I don’t believe Bush is a homophobe himself – but that only makes the pandering worse. I’d love to see him crack the same joke in the same room as Mary Cheney, the vice-president’s daughter. Maybe that would help him realize what a know-nothing bigot he sounds like. He still doe
sn’t get it, does he?
The Dish 