Nice weekend!
As usual, things hit the fan while I was away, so I have a lot of catching up to do and I'll spend the next few days wishing I'd been able to post various thoughts in a more timely manner. Having spent the past few days at my mother's (stateside) apartment with a very slow dial-up connection, I made do with the available print media for most of my news. So my blood pressure took a bit of a beating. Two especially irritating items, which I've since been able to locate on the web, were these:
Despite Mideast Setback, U.S. Is Forced to Stay the Course
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
See, the headline was annoying enough.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — The sudden resignation of Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority stunned Bush administration officials today and raised fresh questions about the administration's strategy of trying to marginalize Yasir Arafat and work only with so-called moderate Palestinians to achieve peace with Israel.
"Sudden?" "Stunned?" Where's this guy been? And though the expression "so-called moderate Palestinians" sounds promising, it's not. I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean, but I am sure that it doesn't mean that the "so-called moderates" are actually pretty much just as extreme and the "extremists."
This part was sort of funny, though.
A bitter consequence of the day's developments was that, with Iraq still deeply unsettled, it will now be even harder for President Bush to paint an optimistic picture when he addresses the nation on terrorism on Sunday night, a speech evidently scheduled before reports late Friday that Mr. Abbas might resign.
"Even harder" than what? Harder than it was after the bombing of the Jordanian embassy or the UN headquarters or the mosque in Najaf? Harder than it was after a bus full of women and children returning home from prayer got blown to smithereens in Jerusalem? See, I didn't think there was a whole lot of reason for optimism even before Abu Mazen resigned and the IDF missed Yassin. But maybe it's me.
Anyway, someone must be blamed for this sorry state of affairs. And Mr. Weisman sums it up thusly:
While the Bush administration has blamed Mr. Arafat, there has also been a feeling among some that Israel had not done enough to shore up Mr. Abbas so he could stand up to Mr. Arafat and take action against Hamas and other militant groups.
OK, it's the New York Times. What did I expect? (But just who, exactly, is/are "some?" I'd really like to know.)
The other one, though, is from the lefter-than-thou Jewish weekly The Forward. And on second thought, I'll save that one for later. In the meantime, you can enjoy this week's front page editorial entitled "Bush's Quagmire, and Ours," in which The Forward does its best Howard Dean imitation, calling the war in Iraq "a clueless blunder into a bottomless quagmire." (They just love that word, don't they?)
To be continued . . .
