Talking to North Korea
Tod Robberson of The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, remarks on North Korea's remarkable transformation from international outlaw to welcome member of the fraternity of nations. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of countries supporting international terrorism. Meanwhile, Iran continues to be shunned. Robberson asks readers to explain the inconsistency behind Bush's actions.
A reader named "Frank" suggests that Bush never took a one-size-fits-all approach to terrorist states: "Not sure how one defends treating all situations across the globe in the same manner. The players and dynamics in each situation are different."
Nice trick, flipping Bush's position 180 degrees and declaring it a strength of his and a weakness of Obama's. Bush lumped North Korea, Iran and Iraq into the same Axis of Evil. Bush didn't OK negotiations in some instances but not others when he said, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." Suddenly, a month after Bush accuses Obama of appeasement for suggesting we talk with Iran, Bush announces a deal with North Korea and the Bush apologists try to paint Obama as the naive politician who can't understand Bush's rational approach of negotiations instead of preemptive war. Where have I read all this before?
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." -- George Orwell, 1984
Searching The Dallas Morning News
Mike Hashimoto, of The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, passes on the advice of an editor who says that if you're having trouble using the search function on the newspaper's Web site, a workaround is to go to Google and use its worldwide search with the additional term "site:dallasnews.com". Hashimoto rightly asks "what it says about a business headed away from print and toward the Web that we have to provide workarounds for customers who just want to find something we're offering?" Rod Dreher chimes in with his own tale of woe -- the Web site no longer recognizes him as a registered user.
TDMN doesn't have the technology to compete. And it's moving too slowly to ever catch up. The problem is common to print media in general. Maybe it's true that it's impossible to teach old dogs new tricks.
Rod Dreher's problem is illustrative. He says the Web site no longer recognizes him as a registered user from his work computer. Forgotten user ids, passwords, deleted cookies, all could be responsible and all have one thing in common: the problem is on the user end. But Rod refuses to re-register on principle. He just doesn't use his own company's Web.
There you have it. TDMN's Web site sucks. And its own employees are abandoning the Web site rather than working with it to get it fixed, even though their jobs depend on getting the Web site right.
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