Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (3680)	4/16/2002 11:18:11 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Well, I just heard about MSFT's lousy XP80 operating system. It hung up on my husband! He rarely uses my pc and when he did the OS hung up! He's angry! The economy will get worse in Washington State b4 it gets better, I think.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (3680)	4/17/2002 12:24:13 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

George is taking a nap Comment Matthew Engel in America Tuesday April 16, 2002 The Guardian The Bush regime is a very strange one, really it is. But there is an excuse for its sluggish performance over the Middle East. It is awfully busy: the White House correspondents' annual dinner is on next month. This is one of those putrescent journalistic occasions in which the main object of the exercise is not the food, but the star-shagging. The hacks compete with each other to secure the biggest name they can get as their guest. It is professional as well as social death to turn up with the assistant secretary for human resources at the Department of Veterans' Affairs if your chief rival turns up with Cheney, Colin or Condy. These occasions are rather revolting: all the anxiety of an American high school prom dance, without the hormones. What makes it different this year is that the White House has started vetting the guest lists and telling staff members who they may and may not accompany. This operation, masterminded by Bush's press boss, Karen Hughes, thus rewards those organisations and reporters they wish to encourage and punishes those who have caused offence. As a piece of control freakery, it is apparently unprecedented. (Alastair Campbell? Rank amateur.) When resources have to be devoted to this kind of exercise, it is understandable if there is not much energy left over for trivial stuff like the Middle East. Where was the president last week when it all boiled over and Colin Powell headed to Jerusalem via everywhere except a day of scuba diving in the Bahamas? Well, on Monday, Bush was in Tennessee, where he praised Knoxville's Citizens Police Academy as a "model volunteer programme for the nation". On Tuesday, he was in Connecticut, again speaking in favour of voluntary work. On Wednesday he was anti-cloning. On Thursday he was pro-federal money for religious charities. I'm not sure what he did on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but he sure as hell wasn't working the phones to the Middle East's power brokers. And yesterday he was heading to Iowa to talk about the economy. He is also doing a fair amount of party fundraising. The president has a cast of thousands working to create an impression of dynamism and policymaking vigour about his person, even if he is really mostly asleep or having carpet sex. At the moment, in between sorting out table plans, they are not succeeding. I can empathise entirely with the president's position. I'm bored witless with the Middle East too (hey, George, want to be my dinner guest?). Unlike him, though, I have at least been reading about it for the past 35 years and I have spoken to Yasser Arafat. After September 11 Bush's situation, though grave, was straightforward. He had to make a set of fairly easy yes-no decisions and articulate the feelings of Americans, which he did well. Now life is complicated again. Everything in the current situation has horrendous downsides. If he turns against Sharon he risks being ignored (which has already happened), alienating pro-Israel voters (not so much the Jewish vote, which is overrated as a bloc, but the Christian right) and being seen to condone terrorism. If he supports him he risks alienating the Arab world, jeopardising oil imports and any hope of invading Iraq or wiping out al-Qaida. Either course could wreck his main policy objective. So he has opted out, except perhaps to pray that Powell comes up with something. There is even something strangely half-hearted about the stuff he is doing. These daily setpieces in the hinterland are supposed to be an attempt to use what Theodore Roosevelt called "the bully pulpit" of the presidency to influence the national debate, and especially the Democrat-controlled Senate. Actually, they get little attention, especially in the Senate, where he would have more success if there were less pulpit and more bully. For the moment, he has little chance of getting through any of the pending legislation he allegedly cherishes: with luck, his scheme to wreck the Arctic wildlife refuge on the off-chance of finding a six-month supply of oil for use sometime round 2010 will be formally suffocated in the next few days. The White House is only now coming round to the idea of a strategy to win support for all the rightwing judges he wants to appoint. And his speeches, it has been noted, seem increasingly incomprehensible, not because of his malapropisms but because he has lost his old knack of translating Washington jargon into plain-folks English. What we are seeing, I think, is a president who is essentially disengaged, as he was so often in his early months on the job. When the going gets complex, he would rather be elsewhere. Maybe between speeches he's working on the table plans. matthew.engel@ guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk