Edited on Mon Nov-17-08 07:31 PM by kpete

Latest Cover of the American Conservative

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“I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that.” — President Bush, speaking to Israel’s then - prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2002, quoted June 3, 2003

He’s going SOON!

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/03/geo…

Simon Schama
The Guardian, Monday November 3 2008

“Forgotten but not gone” was the way in which the supremo of Boston politics, Billy Bulger, liked to dismiss the human irritants he had crushed beneath his trim boot. The same could now be said for the hapless 43rd President of the United States as the daylight draws mercifully in on his reign of misfortune and calamity. How is he bearing up, one wonders, as the candidate from his own party treats him as the carrier of some sort of infectious political disease? How telling was it that the most impassioned moment in John McCain’s performance in the final debate was when he declared: “I am not George Bush.”

Where, O where are you, Dubya, as the action passes you by like a jet skirting dirty weather? Are you roaming the lonely corridors of the White House in search of a friendly shoulder around which to clap your affable arm? Are you sweating it out on the treadmill, hurt and confused as to why the man everyone wanted to have a beer (or Coke) with, who swept to re-election four years ago, has been downgraded to all-time loser in presidential history, stuck there in the bush leagues along with the likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding? Or are you whacking brush in Crawford, where the locals now make a point of telling visitors that George W never really was from hereabouts anyroad.

Whatever else his legacy, the man who called himself “the decider” has left some gripping history. The last eight years have been so rich in epic imperial hubris that it would take a reborn Gibbon to do justice to the fall. It should be said right away that amid the landscape of smoking craters there are one or two sprigs of decency that have been planted: record amounts of financial help given to Aids-blighted countries of Africa; immigration reform that would have offered an amnesty to illegals and given them a secure path to citizenship, had not those efforts hit the reef of intransigence in Bush’s own party. And no one can argue with the fact that since 9/11 the United States has not been attacked on its home territory by jihadi terrorists; though whether or not that security is more illusory than real is, to put it mildly, open to debate.

Bet against that there is the matter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, more than 4,000 American troops dead, many times that gravely injured, not to mention the puncture wounds and mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners - and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.

If Bush himself has been largely kept out of sight, his baleful legacy has been visible in the McCain campaign. McCain has made much of his credentials for independence of mind, a claim which once was credible given his support for immigration reform and opposition to Bush’s tax cuts. But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, all of this became less important than the lessons of the Reagan-Bush-Rove political playbook which, with the exception of the Clinton election of 1992, seemed to have a track record of unbroken success.

- snip -

In his heart of hearts I actually think the shell-shocked Dubya, somewhere in the bowels of his presidency knows this. But he is nowhere to be found, and so on goes the mad rant that health care reform and progressive taxes are the Trojan horse for socialist revolution. To which those who have another view altogether might want to say, fear not, for yours, as a Republican president once said, is a government of the people, by the people. And really it will not perish from the earth…

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“My attitude about the world changed, and I know the attitude about the world from a lot of folks here in America�s attitude changed.” — President Bush, Discussing the Sept. 11 attacks, Fairfax, Va., April 10, 2007

-That’s the light at the end of the tunnel!

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I’ve Twined a new article on How to Build the Global Mind, here.

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I’ve blogged about some interesting Twine stats that show positive user engagement trends, that beat several leading sites — here on my Public Twine (which is where I actually do most of my blogging…

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UPDATE: There’s already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.I’ve been writing about a new trend that I call “interest networking” for a while now. But I wanted to…

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I’ve posted a link to a video of my best talk — given at the GRID ‘08 Conference in Stockholm this summer. It’s about the growth of collective intelligence and the Semantic Web, and the future and…

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I’ve posted a new article in my public twine about how we are moving from the World Wide Web to the Web Wide World. It’s about how the Web is spreading into the physical world, and what this means.

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Video from my panel at DEMO Fall ‘08 on the Future of the Web is now available. I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the…