Slate has a new redesign, and for my money its Crap. The old slate had a fairly streamlined look. The new one looks "puffy." Good thing the writing is still excellent. Today's candy review and Idea of the Day are both very funny.
Note: I hardly even read Salon anymore. Even the free articles. They seem to be looking to the extremes (Talbot and Horowitz) to drum up controversy, throwing in some PG-13 sex angle when they can, and hoping folks will pay $30 a year.
Andrew Sullivan (I can't believe some of the ideological company I'm keeping these days...) makes the point that by putting together a piecemeal biological attack, the terrorists avoid the kind of blowback they invited with the Sept. 11th attacks, and that the Government has avoided talking about any kind of response.
Here's how its going to play out: we will discover that the Anthrax was sent by a lone nut, probably Caucaisan and unrelated to the September 11th bombings and al-Quaeda. The Anthrax itself will be tracked down to the Soviet wastepile in Uzbekistan that we have already committed to destroying. Any further attacks will be blamed on al-Quaeda and response will be folded into the attacks on Afghanistan.
Israel
Sometimes I feel towards Israel like I would towards an alcoholic brother. "I love you, I want to help you, but I really can't support what you're doing to yourself and the people around you, and I'm running out of patience."
I'm not an expert on Israeli history, or on the current situation on the ground. But I know that many of Israel's actions over the last year are wrong, are indefensible, and are making the situation worse. You can probably substitute "since 1982" for "over the last year" in that sentence, but again, I'm not an expert on Israeli history.
In some ways, it seems almost inevitable. Just as an abused child usually grows up to be an abuser, so too the deep scars produced by the Holocaust would seem to predispose Israel towards violence, towards horror, towards a final solution of its own. And I'm not arguing that Palestinian refugee camps are Death Camps. I would maintain no moral equivalency between Gaza and Auswitz, as some would.
But they could become such. It's far less unthinkable than most Israelis (or Jews) want to admit.
I still think the best solution is pretty close to the Camp David proposal, but getting there will likely be uglier now. Fences, border patrols, perhaps a UN protectorate of the Temple Mount.
But Israel has to solve its problems itself - the first rule of any kind of self-improvement work; you can't expect other people to change. As long as you see your problems as being all "out there" nothing improves.
This doesn't mean the Palestinians are right. But Israel can't keep acting as though a rational discussion of grievances or powerful shows of force will make the problems go away.
There are so many things Israel does right. They have, to use the cliche, made the deserts bloom. They have a vigorous and vibrant democracy. Human rights are (theoretically) constitutionally guaranteed. The Jews gained Israel, both Biblically and Historically, in part because their high moral and ethical practices made them "a light unto the nations." The Jewish people have built up a tremendous amount of moral capital over the past millenia. And I fear in 20 years we've squandered nearly all of it.
John Bloom (better known as Joe Bob Briggs) gives a concise history of
Ground Zero. He portrays it as a history of America in miniature.
