If I don’t like the way my iPhone works, I don’t hesitate: I search online. I can count on finding an answer. Not a way to make my iPhone work the way I’d like it to; rather, a Perfectly Reasonable Explanation of why Apple believes that the iPhone should work that way, and why it refuses to let me override the default behavior.

If I don’t like the way my Android works and I look online for solutions, I can usually find a way to change it.

The sine qua non of the provider of such Perfectly Reasonable Explanations, of course, is John Gruber.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee

House Foreign Affairs Committee (first part)

House Foreign Affairs Committee (second part)

(I suspect the committees have different names despite their identical topics of interest for the same reason the easiest way to sell something to the Army is to tell them the Navy is buying it.)

Now, C-SPAN makes the same error here that I’ve seen widely, and I’m going to be pedantic about it for a moment.

Benghazi did not — and does not — have a “consulate.”

The reason for that is pretty simple: To have a consulate, you need a consul. Benghazi hasn’t had one. That’s why Embassy Tripoli (and the State Dept. generally), in documents like this one, refers to “the U.S. mission in Benghazi.”

Everyone clear on that? Good. Well done.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek,” candidate Barack Obama said in 2008. At the time, his comments came in for criticism: They were narcissistic; they were tautological; they didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

First off, let’s drill down to a fuller version of Mr. Obama’s quote:

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who’ve been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can.” (Cheers, applause.)

(emphasis added)

Joe Klein, of Time, is among the critics talked about in the ABC piece Meyerson links to. He said this at the time (2008):

The man’s use of pronouns (never I), of inspirational language and of poetic meter — “WE are the CHANGE that we SEEK” — is unprecedented in recent memory.

*^*^*

And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign. “This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It’s different not because of me. It’s different because of you.” That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.

No, no, and furthermore, no.

It’s probably the “pronoun trouble” Klein mentions, but I never saw Mr. Obama’s use of “we,” in “We are the change we seek,” as somewhow being a self-referential, royal “we.” No, as the lead-in sentence, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time,” indicates, I’ve always heard it as:

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. So we, the people, all of us in this room — we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We, the people, are the change that so many of us seek. We, the people, are the hope of…”

Etc., etc.

So, no, the Obama campaign was not about how great Mr. Obama was. It was about how great the common, everyday American citizen is. This is probably why the press, as typified by Messrs. Meyerson and Klein, never got that. At the end of the day, they believe only the subjects they cover are legitimate in thinking they’re great, or have any impact on the American political comity. They don’t cover common, everyday people — if for no other reason than there’re so damned many of us — therefore, it must have been their subject, Mr. Obama, saying he was great, at the expense of the rest of us. (About the myopia of the press, especially campaign/political press, see, in general, James Fallows’ Breaking the News.)

It’s this promotion by the press of a worldview where only a select view are relevant to the political process, or have any impact on it, that’s perhaps the most dangerous in political reportage today. One of the biggest challenges we face is how the many feel they’re pawns on the tables of the few. This editorial view, even if unconscious, surely doesn’t help.

But it was exactly that worldview which the 2008 campaign by Mr. Obama repeatedly addressed. It was that worldview they repeatedly fought, and tried to persuade everyday people to see how they were — and still are — the most potent political force in the world. It was that assault on the Great Person view of politics that many in the press didn’t — and, obviously, still don’t — get.

And that’s a damned shame.

EDITED TO ADD: I will lay money the pronoun trouble with “we,” is why Mr. Obama used the phrase, “We, the people…” so often in the second inaugural address. It wasn’t just to echo the constitution; it was to spoon feed those in the press who apparently can’t parse simple, declarative sentences.

The key difference, of course, is these were dealerships owned by the marque, which Detroit was forced to give up in the 1930′s after lobbying by the dealerships resulted in regulations and legislation making that split permanent (see earlier post about collective bargaining). Elon Musk and Tesla Motors are fighting that, but that’s probably because Musk is trying to emulate Jobs’ example (look at the picture of the Tesla Store in Denver in that story as Exhibit A).

Still, the real point is, at the time the Apple Store was brought out, few were selling to sell Apple products; fewer still were willing to repair them. The Stores took aim squarely at that situation.

Collective bargaining is collective bargaining.

Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby

Alma Deutscher might sympathize. From the time she began speaking, she was the subject of a linguistic experiment: her father refrained from associating “sky” and “blue” to see if she would spontaneously put them together—a natural equation, like two and two making four. It didn’t happen, so eventually her father started asking her point-blank what color the sky was. She didn’t answer until she was twenty-three months old: “white.” “It took another month until she first called the sky ‘blue,’” her father wrote,

and even then it had not yet become canonically blue: one day she said “blue,” another day “white.”… In short, more than six months had passed from when she was first able to recognize blue objects confidently until she named the blueness of the sky. And it seems that her confusions were not entirely over even by the age of four, because at this age she once pointed at the pitch-black sky late at night and declared that it was blue.

This is prompted by an episode of Radiolab that I heard recently, and was relating to my mother. I of course got it completely wrong, and thought it was all things blue that weren’t called such, not merely the sky.

One of the greatest historical controversies was that between the methods of the “houses” (schools) of Shammai and Hillel, which lasted for more than a century. It was eventually resolved in the famous dictum: “Both are the words of the living God, and the decision is in accordance with the House of Hillel.”