Mammamegs--
The cost will be off the wall and the benefits I believe, will make this a
huge flop and make MSFT BOB look like the Ipod. It appears to be clunky
and dysfunctional to me, and won't be a must have for many households in my
country which faces gas prices heading towards double what they are now with
a joke for environmental turn arounds that have no emissions standards.
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
I think it's functionality would be like a doorstop or a way overpriced
coffee table.
CH
"We'll keep filling Coffins at Dover as fast as they can be built, because
they don't contain the bodies of the white Republican elitist and white
Democrat elitist's kids, fathers, brothers and rarely mothers and daughters.
We'll keep hiring Blackwater as mercanaries to "protect the troops" when
troop explosion levels by IEDs are now at record highs--80%. My party will
keep treating Ronnie Raegan as a Saint when he was as flawed, bigoted, and
cruel towards people less fortunate than he was as they come. We don't give
a damn what our base wants or the Democrats either. Nothing can stop our
continual hemorraging of lives that aren't our families and treasure."
George Bush
"The Republican candidates are the biggest collection of losers that has
ever run making up their policy and changing it weekly."
--Anyone with an IQ of 3
Sunday, June 03, 2007
NY Times
FRANK RICH: Failed Presidents Ain't What They Used to Be
A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a
tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.
That's in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a
Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in "Frost/Nixon" next Sunday while
everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. "Frost/Nixon," a
fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president's 1977 television
interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon's record. But Mr.
Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his
exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is
so shocking that it's hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you've
left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for
George W. Bush?
Perhaps not. It's hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to
hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than
an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element
of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from
nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to
dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is
far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc
he's inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse
president than Nixon - some already have - at the personal level his is not
a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella's
talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew
McConaughey's).
This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in
the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what
the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a
sizable American majority just wished that his "presidency was over." This
flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the
deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can't wait
for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page
and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon's larger-than-life
villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did
after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.
The rage is already omnipresent, and it's bipartisan. The last New York
Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their
country was "seriously off on the wrong track," the highest figure since
that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan)
is the hypertension of the parties' two angry bases. Democrats and
Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be
escalating in vitriol by the hour.
On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress's failure to
instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. After it sent
Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-withdrawal deadlines 10 days
ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill, and not just from bloggers. John
Edwards, once one of the more bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war
("I believe that the risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of
action," he thundered on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally
bellicose toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending
the president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed "again and again" so that
Mr. Bush would be forced to realize "he has no choice" but to end the war.
It's not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this
feat when the president's obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats' lack
of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.
Among Republicans the right's revolt against the Bush-endorsed immigration
bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from rational debate about
complex policy questions to plain old nativism, reminiscent of the
19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base's traditional gripes -
knee-jerk wailing about the "tragedy" of Mary Cheney's baby - can't be heard
above the din.
"White America is in flight" is how Pat Buchanan sounds the immigration
alarm. "All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay the fine with a
credit card" is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill's punitive measures for
illegal immigrants. Bill O'Reilly, while "reluctantly" supporting Mr. Bush's
plan, illustrates how immigration is "drastically" altering the country by
pointing out that America is "now one-third minority." (Do Jews make the
cut?) The rupture is so deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the
bill, is challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal
editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like "Fight Club."
What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common is a
conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if they don't
adhere to their bases' strict ideological orders. "If Democrats do not stick
to their guns on Iraq," a blogger at TalkLeft.com warns, there will be
"serious political consequences in 2008." In an echo of his ideological
opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the immigration bill the "Comprehensive
Destroy the Republican Party Act."
But there's a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the fin-de-Bush
rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among
Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll
that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else.
Sixty-one percent believe that we should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63
percent believe we should withdraw by 2008. Majorities above 60 percent also
buy broad provisions of the immigration bill - including the 66 percent of
Republicans (versus 72 percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a
guest-worker program.
What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how
gridlocked Washington may look now. However much the G.O.P. base hollers,
America is not going to round up and deport 12 million illegal immigrants,
or build a multibillion-dollar fence on the Mexican border - despite Lou
Dobbs's hoax blaming immigrants for a nonexistent rise in leprosy. A new
president unburdened by a disastrous war may well fashion the immigration
compromise that is likely to elude Mr. Bush.
Withdrawal from Iraq is also on its way. Contrary to Mr. Edwards, only
Republicans in Congress can overcome presidential vetoes and in so doing
force Mr. Bush's hand on the war. As the bottom drops out of Iraq and the
polls, those G.O.P. votes are starting to line up. The latest example came
last Sunday, when the most hawkish of former Rumsfeld worshipers, Senator
Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined his party's Congressional leaders, Mitch
McConnell and John Boehner, in talking about drawing down troops if
something "extraordinary" doesn't happen in Iraq by the time Gen. David
Petraeus gives his September report on the "surge." No doubt Mr. Sessions,
who is up for re-election in 2008, saw a May 12 survey in The Birmingham
News showing that even in his reddest of states, nearly half the voters want
America out of Iraq within a year and favor candidates who agree.
This relatively unified America can't be compared with that of the second
Nixon term, when the violent cultural and political upheavals of the late
1960s were still fresh. But in at least one way there may be a precise
political parallel in the aftermaths of two failed presidencies rent by
catastrophic wars: Americans are exhausted by anger itself and are praying
for the mood pendulum to swing.
Gerald Ford implicitly captured that sentiment when he described himself as
a healer; his elected successor, Jimmy Carter, was (to a fault, as it turned
out) a seeming paragon of serenity. We can see this equation at work now in
Mitt Romney's unflappable game-show-host persona, in John McCain's
unconvincing efforts to emulate a Reagan grin and in the unlikely spectacle
of Rudy Giuliani trading in his congenital scowl for a sunny disposition.
Hillary Clinton's camp is doing everything it can to deflect new books
reminding voters of the vicious Washington warfare during her husband's
presidency. Then again, even Michael Moore is rolling out a kinder, gentler
persona in his media blitz for his first film since "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king. In this
climate, it's hardly happenstance that many Republicans are looking in
desperation to Fred Thompson. Robert Novak pointedly welcomed his candidacy
last week because, in his view, Mr. Thompson is "less harsh" in tone than
his often ideologically indistinguishable rivals and "a real-life version of
the avuncular fictional D.A. he plays on TV." The Democratic boomlet for
Barack Obama is the flip side of the same coin: his views don't differ
radically from those of most of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality
is the essence of calm, the antithesis of anger.
If it was a relief to the nation to see a president as grandly villainous as
Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe even a used Hoover
would do this time.
