Two things to blogulate, now that I'm back in the saddle after one of those hiatuses necessary to the proper functioning of the synapses.
First up is the President-elect. What is the intent of the current leaking from Camp Obama about 300 billion in tax cuts? Is it a reliable account, and an overreach to appease unappeasable Republicans? Paul Krugman, he of the Nobel Prize and all, thinks it might be overreach. Of course, properly focused tax cuts could be a fine thing, and perhaps this is all PR maneuvering to lay the groundwork for the actual battle ahead, in full expectation of different numbers in the end. I'm certainly not above believing he's simply making a mistake. Hope not. Should offer interesting insight to see how this unfolds.
But may the coolest heads and the wisest prognosticators win, no matter how this stimulus works out. This is complicated and high stakes material, so we rather need some success. And as Bush said in a rare moment of lucidity, nothing succeeds like success.
And speaking of Shrub, he prompts subject number two. In the very fine Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, our hero, A. Square, exists happily in a world of two dimensions, blissfully unaware of the third. Then a troublesome Sphere comes along and plucks poor Square right up (a direction he didn't even know existed) and flips him over. Square's world is changed, and he begins the difficult process of understanding higher dimensions.
All this to say it comes as little surprise but is nonetheless dismaying that Bush, faced with a multi-dimensional crisis in Gaza, stubbornly adheres not to even a two-dimensional view of the world, but something more akin to one-dimensional, travelling forward and back like some binary reactionary. The Gazan situation deserves more scrutiny than Bush's painfully predictable open-ended endorsement of whatever Israel does. It's not surprising, but hope for an actual well-informed, nuanced world view springs eternal, especially since the power of the presidency is such that a few proper moves could likely steer the conflict to an earlier end. Maybe we'll get a president who reads more than the Cliff's Notes someday.
