July 30, 2002

Very Sorry

Success! Already people are taking up the catchphrase that I suggested earlier. M'ris was even clever enough to chop off the first four syllables, leaving it at just "Moussaoui". Not bad, although it's still kind of long and hard to spell. Why couldn't he have been named something simple, like Jones? Or Smith? Or Lindh? Oh, well. M'ris also has some helpful suggestions for a gender-neutral version of "mistress". So far we have "lover" (which fails to convey that one party is married), "partner" (gender-neutral, but not sexual-orientation-neutral), "paramour" (too musty), and "love-monkey" (tee-hee! But no).

Recently I read a column by conservativish Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly where he up and apologized for not being very nice in his columns. And here it is, not even Yom Kippur. Well, I think this is a capital idea. Like Kelly, I am also ashamed of some of the not-particularly-nice things I've said on this site, and I so will attempt to make up for this with...

An Apology

• On July 15, 2002, I referred to our steel tariffs as "lame" and our farm bill as "even lamer". These were rash words. I understand now that the tiny number of voters in key swing states who benefit from these policies are clearly worthy of this sort of personalized attention from the Bush administration, and the rest of us should be a little more gracious about the whole thing.

• On June 15, 2002, I called the NY Times "clueless" for not keeping permanent links to their articles on the web. Honestly, who am I to criticize their Internet strategy? I'm sure they thought about their website design very carefully, and no doubt they know a hell of a lot more than boring old Jakob Nielsen and Tim Berners-Lee do on the subject.

• On June 3, 2002, I approvingly quoted David Coursey regarding Napster's demise, when he cited the event as "proof of a loving higher power that smites evildoers." I also sneered at Rage Against the Machine for the same reason -- for marketing themselves as revolutionaries while in reality just being exemplars of the same-old-same-old. In retrospect, this was an unfair assessment. After all, Napster and Rage Against the Machine are both against the RIAA, which makes them automatically worthy of our sympathy and support.

• On May 8, 2002, I called the Cato Institute "insufferable", in retaliation for their reference to Californians as being "dim-bulbs" and "whiners". This sort of tit-for-tat namecalling is uncalled for and, as good old Ben, Bryan, and Brendan would be quick to point out, degrades the level of our national discourse.

• On April 17, 2002, I accused morning DJ Don Bleu of being "deeply cynical". This in turn was cynical of me. On the same day, I called conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage a "frothing right-wing nutcase"... but I also said that he seems to care about what he's doing, so I think that one's a wash.

• On March 10, 2002, I complained that Outlook Express 6 could not export its emails to a file. This was a false charge -- you can retrieve your mailboxes as files if you're willing to familiarize yourself with the internals of Outlook Express and dig around in the depths of the Windows 2000 filesystem. You can even convert your emails to non-Microsoft formats, if you're willing to scour the web for various cryptic open source tools. So sorry, Microsoft, my mistake.

• Waaay back in February, I implied that Chairman of the SEC Harvey Pitt was unsuited for his position because he had been the chief lobbyist for the accounting industry and had been directly responsible for halting former chairman Arthur Levitt's attempts to protect investors. I did not mean to impugn Pitt's ethics or integrity. Moreover, now that the danger is clear I have no doubt he's doing a bang-up job to restore public faith in our capital markets.

• Six months ago, I had some unkind things to say about the Republican candidates for governor and their failure to provide us with an alternative and coherent energy plan. In fact, in light of their attacks on Davis on this topic, I believe I called them all "pathetic." Clearly I spoke too soon -- Bill Simon's website, once bereft of energy policy information, now has something to say on the matter. Strangely, the outline of his plan (invest in solar/geothermal/wind, renegotiate energy contracts, fund energy research at California universities) sounds suspiciously like what the Democrats (and even the Green Party) are saying. But hey, if you can be flexible enough to satisfy your right-wing primary voters in the spring and the more left-wing general election voters in the summer... well, more power to you.

• In December 2001, I gloated over Enron's ignominious begging of the California Department of Water and Power for electricity. It's never nice to kick someone when they're down... and since Enron's corporate crew clearly had a deep respect for the needs of their fellow citizens, I can hardly fail to afford them the same courtesy.

• Finally, in November 2001, I made fun of Jonathan Franzen for his churlish behavior regarding Oprah's book club and his pretentious claims to membership in the "high-art literary tradition."

  Come to think of it, I'm not sorry about that last one at all.