Friday, 28 November 2003

Bring it on: Let me comment in passing that Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq, though clearly arranged by his PR flacks to upstage Hillary Clinton, was a commendable gesture to boost the morale of our troops.

But if Team Dubya really believed in the "flypaper strategy" that Bush apologists were flacking back in May and June… then shouldn't they have announced the visit three months in advance, taken Bush on a leisurely sweep through Baghdad, Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle, and dared the terrorists to do something about it?

Or was all that noise about a "flypaper strategy" just a bunch of hokum?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:00 pm. comments.

Wednesday, 19 November 2003

Green card: After only six months of paperwork, including the part where I had myself fingerprinted and requested a background check from the FBI (which was an adventure in itself), I'm now a permanent resident of Australia. This means I can stay here as long as I like, regardless of my employment status, and that I don't have to keep re-applying for work visas. Also, any children that I have in Australia will automatically be Australian citizens. (I believe that this is always the case in America—if you have a child on American soil, the child is a U.S. citizen regardless of the parents' immigration status—but apparently that's not the case here. On the other hand my hypothetical child will have an Australian mother, so the little theoretical tyke would be an Aussie citizen regardless.)

As an Australian permanent resident, I can do anything that an Australian citizen can do except vote, stand for election, serve in the armed forces, be called for jury duty, get an Australian passport, or request help from an Australian embassy when in trouble overseas. Theoretically I could now apply for Australian citizenship and become a dual citizen, but that just feels like… I don't know, like cheating on your spouse or something. (I can understand people who are dual citizens by virtue of their birth or ancestry, but somehow the act of applying for citizenship in another country just seems… disloyal. I don't know why.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:00 pm. comments.

Sunday, 16 November 2003

The Need for Speed: This year's wildly irrational computer purchase was to get me one of these babies. (All hail the Australian dollar—now more than 30% stronger!) This computer is probably saving me ten valuable seconds each day of not having to wait for programs to launch; for the web surfing and e-mailing that is the majority of what I do in front of the computer these days, it's way, way overkill.

But I do occasionaly write computer software or do a little home-video editing on the side, for which the G5 is money well spent. (Okay, maybe not well spent, but at least I make some use of the extra horsepower aside from playing games.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:00 pm. comments.

Tuesday, 11 November 2003

Back in Oz: After a week of relaxing and getting over our jet lag in Singapore and on the beaches of Malaysia, we're back in the land Down Under. I've got about 1800 photos (!) that I need to sort through and put online (aside from the seven or eight you've already seen, that is), six weeks of mail to go through, a new computer to unpack and play with, and a whole lot of other things. I've also got several blog entries that were composed offline and I need to edit and upload; watch for them over the next few days.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:00 pm. comments.

Saturday, 08 November 2003

You're no Ronald Reagan: It's rare that I have an opportunity to actually see Dubya giving a speech; when it's "prime time" in Washington, it's late morning in Sydney, and I'm usually at work. But we were relaxing in our Singapore hotel room when Bush made his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, so I watched the entire thing for once instead of just catching the sound bites.

My first impression was that Bush is (still) not a very good public speaker—which made his attempts to invoke Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, all the more discordant: Verbally, Dubya is to Reagan what a karaoke singer is to Aretha Franklin. I'm always painfully aware that Bush is reading from the TelePrompter when he speaks; his words sound wooden and hollow, rather than having the resonant force of heartfelt sincerity. For all I know the inner Dubya is pouring his heart out, but the only line that sounded that way was "Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country or that people or this group are ready for democracy, as if freedom were a prize you win from meeting our own Western standards of progress." For the last half of that one sentence, Bush sounded angry and scornful; for the rest of the speech, lifeless.

Delivery aside, Bush's attempts to portray himself as a latter-day Reagan continue to wear thin. Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, criticized at the time as bellicose and unproductive, has since been recognized as a direct challenge to the very idea of communism; in hindsight, it was a well-timed blow to the foundations of a teetering structure. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech gingerly avoided confronting Saudi Arabia, the largest backer of state-sponsored terrorism, and called out lesser evils instead. Reagan built up America's military, and raised its morale; Bush has dulled the sharp edge of America's sword on an ill-prepared and under-resourced Iraq peacekeeping mission. Reagan worked for and won the support of our European allies; Bush told our allies to go hang before 9/11 ever happened, and has missed every opportunity to get them back on board.

Ronald Reagan didn't reach back a mere two decades for his claim on America's legacy, either: He invoked William Penn and Thomas Jefferson and the Pilgrims' vision of America as the shining city on a hill. Consider this line from Reagan's 1982 speech to the British House of Commons:

We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.

Reagan used the language of the Declaration of Independence; by comparison, the equivalent line in Bush's 2003 speech is a limp echo:

And we believe that freedom—the freedom we prize—is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

Bush did made a passing, oblique reference to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill near the end of his speech ("From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster&hellip"), so I suppose that counts for something. But Reagan was much, much more effective than Dubya at motivating and inspiring the American people. Bush's speech frankly reads like a checklist, and spent far too little time on what should have been his main subject.

For decades our Mideast foreign policy has been motivated by a love of stability and the cheap oil it produces; whether the average Iraqi breathed the sweet air of freedom wasn't high enough on our priority list as recently as 1991, when our armies stopped on the border and left the Kurds to their own devices. (Again.) Now, when Bush is explicitly renouncing the policies of his father (and Clinton, and Reagan, and just about every other President this century), and extending to the Middle East the promise America made the world in 1776… his speech only mentions those points as an afterthought.

Reagan would have done better.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:00 pm. comments.