"Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works," technology writer Clifford Stoll, in a 1995 Newsweek piece entitled, "The Internet? Bah!"
Category: Dick Morris Award Nominee
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
"Washington Post Confirms We Are No Longer Capturing & Interrogating High-Value Terrorists," – Marc Thiessen, the day before news broke of the capture and interrogation of the top Taliban commander.
By 'interrogate', of course, Thiessen means torture, as understood by every legal authority in this country and the world before John Yoo's brilliance transformed the legal field. It is this kind of mediocrity, Orwellian newspeak – as well as brazen support of war crimes – that must have led Fred Hiatt to give him a weekly column in the fast-imploding Washington Post.
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee II
Another good friend (Bob Wright), another Dishmas gift:
One hallmark of spiritual maturity is unity of internal purpose—the subordination of the mind's unruly impulses to an overarching goal. On the golf course, as I've said, this involves a kind of micro-discipline: imperviousness to distraction on a second-by-second basis. But beyond the golf course, it involves a kind of macro-discipline; the structure of your everyday life has to serve the larger purpose of perfecting your game. "I like Buddhism because it's a whole way of being and living," Tiger [Woods] said in the Sports Illustrated article. "It's based on discipline and respect and personal responsibility."
Discipline, respect, responsibility—now there's a guy who could become a major-league role model!
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee I
We didn't really have enough of them for a contest this year, but maybe we didn't need to. This column by my friend David Brooks (sorry, David, but the Dish has gotta do what the Dish has gotta do) is a near-classic of total wrongness (and I have, of course, been there myself):
As an adult, he is famously self-controlled. His press conferences are a string of carefully modulated banalities. His lifestyle is meticulously tidy. His style of play is actuarial. He calculates odds and avoids unnecessary risks like the accounting major he once planned on being. “I am, by nature, a control freak,” he once told John Garrity of Sports Illustrated, as Garrity resisted the temptation to reply, “You think?” …
The ancients were familiar with physical courage and the priests with moral courage, but in this over-communicated age when mortals feel perpetually addled, Woods is the symbol of mental willpower. He is, in addition, competitive, ruthless, unsatisfied by success and honest about his own failings. (Twice, he risked his career to retool his swing.)
It turns out he retooled his swing a few more time as well. But this blog stands in moral judgment of no one's sexual life. My own has been a cavalcade of wonder and weakness.
Von Hoffman Award Nominees
by Patrick Appel
Foreign Policy rounds-up the ten worst predictions of 2009. E-mail andrew@theatlantic.com with any they forgot.
The Limits Of Hoffmanization, Ctd
Christopher Orr's thoughts on that Snowe poll:
Under normal circumstances, this is the kind of insurgent candidacy that would quickly be squelched by the party establishment in the name of holding onto a GOP seat in inhospitable terrain. And perhaps that's still what would happen. But the establishment's clout contra the conservative insurgents is at a historic low, and it wouldn't take much–a Palin endorsement here, a Beck crusade there–to scramble the usual political assumptions.
The real question, of course, is what Olympia Snowe thinks when she sees this poll: that she's probably finished with today's GOP and should keep her independent streak alive by voting for health care reform (or, at least, cloture); or that she badly needs to shore up her right flank by voting against?
Ezra Klein's take on whether Snowe would switch parties:
[Snowe] has deep personal connections to the Republican Party: Her first husband was a Republican legislator in Maine's House of Representatives, and her current husband is the former Republican governor of Maine. Becoming an independent seems a lot likelier than becoming a Democrat.
The Limits Of Hoffmanization
A poll came out today showing that Olympia Snowe (R-ME) might be vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, even though the GOP would probably lose the seat if they forced her off the ticket. Yglesias thinks she will have to switch parties:
This means that when you’re thinking about whether Snowe will support a bill or not, the issue ultimately comes down to not triggers versus non-triggers, or employer mandates versus free rider fees, but whether Snowe wants to remain a Republican or not. Based on this polling, a Snowe who votes for a comprehensive health care overhaul is basically not going to be viable as a GOP primary candidate. Conversely, a Snowe who votes for comprehensive health reform and switches parties would remain a very popular general election candidate with a safe seat.
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
"Q: Mr. Secretary, on Iraq, how much money do you think the Department of Defense would need to pay for a war with Iraq?
Rumsfeld: Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up come up with a number that's something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question. I think the way to put it into perspective is that the estimates as to what September 11th cost the United States of America ranges high up into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, another event in the United States that was like September 11th, and which cost thousands of lives, but one that involved a — for example, a biological weapon, would be — have a cost in human life, as well as in billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, that would be vastly greater," – January 19, 2003.
Von Hoffman Award Nominee
"It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naively, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day," – The New Republic, January 19, 2004, "Our Choice."
Colbert's take after the jump:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Joe Lieberman Is a True Independent | ||||
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Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
"Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy," – Larry Summers, on the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999.
The Dish 