Getting this on the recordTuesday, November 11, 2008 by Dave Winer. Sometimes I just make predictions to friends verbally and forget to put them on the blog, to get them on the record. So... I stand by my prediction that Bush, if he doesn't end up in jail, will be a very happy ex-president. Check out this CNN piece about his regrets. There will be more like that. I think Bush never really wanted to be President, I think he wanted to run for President. He was a very good campaigner, you really could see this during the 2004 campaign. On the stump, his timing was perfect, he was a fantastic speaker. I wonder if McC didn't make a big mistake by not having Bush go out for him this year (glad he didn't!). Anyway, once the campaign was over and he had to be President again, he was stumbling and bumbling and tripping over his words, as usual. This point is emphasized in the Oliver Stone movie. He's the dog who caught the car. Now what? That's the part Bush wasn't so good at. But as an ex-President life will be one big Texas BBQ with non-alchoholic beer. He can read a book every once in a while, watch a game, have some of his friends over, tell everyone they're doing a heckuva a job, and not have to worry about the shit he had to worry about. You could see it clearly when he was hanging out at the Olympics this summer. Man, he was having a great time, he looked fantastic, confident, tan, relaxed. Until Putin reared his head and brought him back to reality and then a few weeks later so did the economy. Now he just has to make a deal with Obama for a pardon (heh wonder how that's going) and in a couple of years he can go on a book tour to sell his memoir and I bet everyone will be nostalgic for the guy, amazing as that might seem now. Things kind of work out that way. |
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California. "The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
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