Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I tend to think of neoconservatives as libertarians with a foreign policy, so it surprises me afresh every time the libertarian columnists at LewRockwell.com tear into the neocons, exaggerating the size of the neocon movement and then beating on this oversized strawman.

This week Jim Lobe pops his own blow-up neocon doll in Neocon Collapse in Washington and Baghdad. He admits that no top-level administration officials have been neoconservatives, but somehow still sees neocon shadows behind the throne being routed in the aftermath of recent Iraq scandals. As evidence, he offers a fruitless meeting between some former staffers and Condoleezza Rice - how the mighty have fallen!

I’m assuming most of my readers can’t tell a neoconservative from a paleoconservative - I have trouble myself sometimes, even though I’m familiar with the neocon approach to foreign policy. The Neocon Collapse article doesn’t specify what the fatal neocon mistake was, nor what the “realists” are doing differently now that they are allegedly in power. Instead, Jim Lobe’s rant reads like paranoid ravings about neocons being “a key part” of this and “lead[ing] the charge” for that, placing people “in key positions”, “dominating” this, “push[ing] hardest” for that, having “friends” in the media, “outflank[ing],” “influenc[ing],” “circumvent[ing],” and so on.

When the powers of good push back the neocons, they do so in equally vague terms of “wrest[ing] control of Iraq policy from the Pentagon” (as if Iraq policy were somewhere our elected officials hadn’t put it), and a former staffer making “blistering attacks” against “powerful figures” that the media was “ever cautious about taking on” - figures no one has even heard of.

It takes some writing skill to say “I hate neocons for reasons I’m not telling you” in a thousand words or more. Mr. Lobe didn’t have to drop a hint, but I suspect he couldn’t help himself. Which country in the Middle East has “territorial ambitions”? Is it the one that invaded Iran and Kuwait? Is it the one that invaded Israel and turned Lebanon into a puppet state? Is it the other one that invaded Israel? Or maybe the other other one that invaded Israel? It’s a tough question, but he has an answer.

[Update: I’m not the only one who’s spotted this phenomenon. Backspin links Dore Gold on the ‘neocon conspiracy.’]

Lorem Ipsum of the day: The Motherlode can even generate Morse Code

Veronica asked me about FTP clients for the Mac. I’ve been using command line ftp since OS 10.1 - it’s free and reminds me of my misspent youth on SunOS. The first thing that sprang to mind was, of course, Transit (links are coming), but that costs money - I know because I stopped using it when my demo expired.

You never know when a new FTP client has come out (well, I do, but I’m speaking rhetorically here), so I tried Google and discovered…Pure Mac is back! Pure Mac isn’t an FTP client - it’s the ultimate index of Mac shareware. It used to be the site to visit to find Mac software, and then they stopped updating. But now it’s being revived and the FTP page is one of the ones that has already been updated.

So with the help of Pure Mac I was able to recommend - and download for myself - Cyberduck, a free FTP client for MacOS X (10.3 and above) with a very cool icon.

As long as I’m maccing, here’s a link dump:

• Security Cannot Be Spun, another hole essay from DaringFireball
• 12″ Powerbook vs. iBook: What’s a Mac fan to do?
• MacOSXHints on keyboard layout generators
• Tumult HyperEdit, a live HTML and PHP editor
• Fish - make your own virtual aquarium, if you can figure out the cryptic interface
• Various ways to eject a stuck CD
• Spending a year on a Mac - True Switcher Tales
• Did I mention that MT NewsWatcher was finally upgraded?
• MacOSXHints on recording HDTV with your Mac
• I’m pretty sure I mentioned Ecto, a blogging client
• I’m almost certain I mentioned LyX/Mac, but possibly not this LaTeX font tutorial

Despite my fears of the dreaded lost password problem, I upgraded to WordPress 1.2. I did, indeed, experience the Dread Problem, but deleting my wordpress cookies solved it for me. Others have not been so lucky. (I backed up the database before making any sudden moves, of course.)

The new version spontaneously reordered my categories, but this advice fixed the problem. I’m hoping to use the subcategory feature to organize my categories better, although it’s kind of flaky.

Note the new blog design. If it looks dull and grey, give it a minute. In a real browser, color will slowly trickle in. I’m using the colorpress script under a semi-transparent greyscale PNG background image to get the colors. Since Win/IE is a piece of aging junk that can’t handle transparency, the most you’ll see with it is some pretty text colors. I’m also seeing some wackiness with the tabs and post content in Mac/IE - the workaround is, as always, to use a real browser. Tell me, though, if Win/IE munges the entries as well. Thanks.

[Update:] With Seema’s help, the Win/IE flashing problem has been fixed and the floating comment box is more or less anchored in the right place. To fix the latter I reduced the number of columns in the textarea from 70 to 40. (I had to edit wp-comments.php by hand to do that. While I was in there I upped it from 4 rows to 6.) The stylesheet then resizes it to the correct size in real browsers. Mac/IE’s float bug is beyond my power to fix, but if you make the window narrow enough (just over the width of the tab bar), the blog will become legible.