Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
S ome 22 months ago your companion last opined here that “the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.” Moreover I put this as the blurb, so it’s been a statement as clear as I can muster on my personal homepage over this well-nigh half a presidential term. And I feel embarrassed of the stridency.
I’d heard a lot of the nastiness leading to Barack Obama becoming President. The scandalously absent senatorial stint. The candidate from an earlier office who strangely dropped out of a race against him. Being in the pews for the spews of Reverend Wright. All that. And back in March 2010 there had so far only been diplomatic mishaps — the return of the Churchill bust, the iPod gift to the Queen, the bowing to foreign rulers — all of which suggested this was an Administration that could well be disdainful of entrenched allies and by extension its own polity.
The feeling began to change with the killing of the pirates. Then the Bin Laden assassination: after this it was no longer tenable to hold the previous opinion of possible perfidy. One issue finally turned me. It’s probably a silly one, as, in my lack of a real grasp of goings-on, I grabbed onto it as emblematic, and when I do that I invariably turn out to have misjudged. But still I stand by it. Among the first astounding 800-word excerpts I posted at Latmag, was Public Library One: Benjamin Franklin’s account in his autobiography of learning to get things done in Philadelphia by putting himself as much as he could out of sight. When Obama said he was leading from behind in the NATO action to remove Qadaffi in Libya, the right did not acknowledge the wisdom of this approach, but instead jumped on it as yet another example of at best witlessness, at worst, treason. Eventually some conservatives praised the Libya action but first the praise was timid then it was quiet. My confidence in the Right was shaken.
They should have understood — because they themselves were persuaded — that killing Bin-Laden was a game-changer, that Obama could no longer be attacked on these grounds. Getting Qadaffi out with no loss of American life; enabling a resounding European military success — these are significant achievements. Attacks on foreign policy started sounding like groupthink, rendering the general point-of-view less astute and moral than fixed and relentless, which may be appropriate for the parties themselves in campaign mode, but not for the media, even the partisan media. And since I presume to be Dr Bellweather Everyman, it seems that the Right’s failure to properly acknowledge these undeniable successes upset their credibility among many and made Obama’s reelection more likely than not.
Indeed, although the first year of foreign policy seemed to have been squandered on petty and debilitating resets and errors, the ship of state now seems to be more or less sailing in the same direction that George W Bush set; we’ve heard consistently, for example, that despite political tensions, military-to-military cooperation between the US and Israel is deeper than ever before. This enhances credibility and trust in many quarters, such as mine. Walter Russell Mead’s account of the recent diplomatic blitzkrieg in Asia suggests that the Administration is at least on the case and may actually even be on the ball.
If the Right is more honest about Obama’s newfound success abroad they might have a better chance against him, as American presidents are apparently generally elected anyway on how things are at home, not abroad. And this Administration has not found a way to overcome the creeping paralysis of the United States’ political process. I have another emblematic measure in this realm, and it is: I’ll know America’s fixed when they let me in. American institutions spent money on my education for years; most of my clients are based in the US and they transfer money out of the country to pay me. So I don’t think I’m being overly prideful in saying that all in all the USA should prefer me in rather than out. And yet, there’s no clear, simple, straightforward immigration passage for me. It’s an outrage that in this nation of immigrants, Ellis Island is a museum. I did believe, and wrote here, that if McCain won, he would have fixed immigration. And immigration is in turn emblematic of all the other things that seem to elude fixing. Currently, the American system does not seem to be midwiving the expected divinely efficacious results.
Sat 12 May ’12 @ 9:40pmAdam Khan
And here’s Walter Russell Mead arguing the point in Was Ike To Truman as Obama is to Bush?. He takes it further and argues that Obama is consolidating Bush’s foreign policy. This seems a general pattern in democratic politics, just as Tony Blair and New Labour consolidated Margaret Thatcher’s oft-reviled but necessary policies.
Previously
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Nonetheless, I’d like to point out “Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy” by Charles Krauthammer, written back on Oct 19, 2009, 25 months ago now, which hashes out more fully the terribly negative situation at the start of the term. While things have improved, they didn’t have to start out so awfully.