Liberal Mac User Grumblings About the Hillary Chat

Posted on January 22, 2007
| buzz-it! | Huff it!

sad mac I didn’t see it. I sent some provocative questions beforehand that I knew she’d be too good a politician to take on in her first chat. The video would not play on a Mac, or at least not my office Mac which is a WAY cool Intel Quad Xeon thing. I stayed late at the office, signed in to the site. Set up to record the video stream….and nothing. Some disjointed text scrolled in a little window. It was clear that I was not getting all of her words. I tried to hurry and boot Windows XP in Parallels. It needed to install a bunch of sh*t and Java and this and that, and then in the end, displayed nothing.

It’s too bad too. I hope someone posts it on you tube or the Clinton campaign keeps an archive of the conversation videos in the now-standard flash video format.

I really needed to see the “conversation” or chat because in the leadup I read Marty Peretz on TNR Online saying, she said in her Saturday announcement:

“’she would be forming an exploratory committee to determine whether she will become a formal candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2008.’ This is so transparent that it cries out for ridicule.”

Andrew Sullivan called the piece “brutal but perceptive.” I call it brutal and blatantly unfair. Ms. Clinton did use the words “exploratory committee,” but there was nothing disingenuous about it, the rest of the quote from Mr. Peretz was not to be found in the video. Watch it yourself. The exploratory committee is standard issue these days. Everyone knows that. There was nothing tentative about it. In the next sentence she said “I’m not just starting a campaign, though.” The heading on the page was, “I’m In.”

In one of my questions posted to Ms. Clinton, I suggested that since I was the only blogger or news source I’d seen that connected that her announcement was 2 years to the day before her anticipated inauguration, that she should give me a job. Now I think she should give me a job to whip her technology team into shape. Whaddaya think? An evening chat, folks are at home, they’re going to be on Macs, right? OK, I might be dreaming, but her old buddy Al Gore is on the board of Apple Inc. and he could supply her with some numbers as to how many home users were excluded.

Of course if my Environmental Pal Al runs, maybe he’ll just save the Mac using voters for himself?!