Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Where's the Outrage?

Rich Galen

Friday October 7, 2011

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In one of the GOP Presidential debates the number of prisoners who had been put to death in Texas drew applause from the audience. In a subsequent debate, the issue of the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was being discussed and, during a short video of a Marine talking about being openly gay, two members of that audience booed.

None of the candidates on stage reacted to the boos which led to a week of projectile sweat outrage by Liberal commentators as to why no-one told the boo-ers to put a sock in it. Note, please that the moderator(s) didn't ask the candidates about it after the fact.

During my tour de force performance on the Bill Maher show later that week, they showed the same clip with the two people booing and I said, "It was only two people. It wasn't like the whole audience stood up and waved its collective fists at the screen" or, as Dr. Samuel Johnson was wont to say, "words to a like effect."

Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher continued to claim, or at least feign, outrage at the lack of response by the candidates but the discussion moved on.

Now, to present day.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are apparently accepting of a small, but vocal number of their team who have shouted anti-Semitic remarks.

Is it a large percentage of the protesters? Of course not. But, at his press conference yesterday President Barack Obama claimed a loose fellowship with the protesters, and, according to the LA Times, "Obama said he has monitored the movement, which has spread to dozens of cities nationwide. 'I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel.'"

So, if he has "monitored the movement, he must have been briefed on the (few) anti-Semitic outbursts and yet the President, like the dog in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Silver Blaze, did nothing.

If Liberals were outraged by the lack of response to a hateful reaction to a serving U.S. Marine by two people in a debate audience, why aren't they equally outraged by the lack of response to a hateful reaction to Jews in general by a handful of protesters on Wall Street?

New Topic

I never met Steve Jobs. I have had breakfast with Bill Gates once, and not with 1,500 other people; with three other people one of whom was Speaker Gingrich.

I have never been a "Mac Guy," I am comfortable with, and good at, Microsoft's DOS (in the early days), and Windows (in later iterations).

I resisted Microsoft's move to the graphical interface of Windows (which was not pioneered by Apple - it was designed by Xerox but popularized in the machines of Steves Jobs and Wozniac) on the technologically elitist grounds that "if you can't deal with a 'C-prompt' maybe you shouldn't be using a computer."

As I thought about this position, it occurred to me I must have sounded much like an early pilot who, having seen an altimeter in a cockpit for the first time, might have said, "Hell, son, if you don't know how high you are without one of those things maybe you don't belong in an airship."

In the mid-1990s when I was working for EDS I was in a unit that used Apple Powerbooks as our travelling computers. I was sitting at DCA working on my laptop and a man came up to me and asked how I liked the Apple.

"I hate to admit it," I said, "but I really like it."

He said that was great because he was the regional sales manager for Apple.

I still use a PC for my heavy-duty writing, but I have fallen in love with my iPad and am trying to figure out how to buy an iPhone 4S without having to wait in a line at my AT&T store a week from today.

In 2010 Apple employed over 46,000 people in the U.S. - the large majority of them at Apple retail stores. Apple provides employment for thousands more at the plants overseas where the guts for its devices are made.

It's a pretty good model: Invent things here. Assemble them somewhere else. Sell them all over the planet.

I'm sorry Steve Jobs is gone. We need more of him.

The On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Another chance to subscribe to MULLINGS. Also, Links to ABC News' look at the Wall Street demonstrations, to Silver Blaze, to the LA Times' obit for Steve Jobs and to Mr. Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, which is a must-read.

Also, a Mullfoto from the baby demonstration in downtown Washington, DC and a very sweet Catchy Caption of the day.

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