My Bathroom Is Granny Smith Apple Green

This week has been a very busy one for us here. We've got the bathroom renovation just about finished, but both my work and Shelley's has been very hectic despite have a holiday shortened week. Dad and Mom Snyder came over on Monday and worked on the house which was a blessing. There is some good news too as I've been able to schedule my first visit back to the States in over a year (in the middle of June and thankfully gas prices are starting to fall somewhat). I can finally collect my things that have been taking up space in my parents' house for so very long. Some of the stuff has been packed away since I left Utah over 5 years ago! It will be nice to go through it. I hope I mistakenly left a few thousand dollars in one of those boxes, but I tend to doubt it. It's been a very rainy week also which with the overcast skies has kept it relatively dark and made it easier to sleep during the days, though the dogs are still adjusting to the new sounds of the neighborghood and have 'barked' me into an awake state far too often. We find ourselves in another summer of booked weekends. This weekend is Jeff and Renee's wedding (yay!), next weekend is the third Harry Potter film opening, the following week we are celebrating Shell's birthday with a cookout, and the following weekend I'm in The Old Dominion! Somewhere in there we have to sneak in the next renovation project which will be the complete kitchen makeover!! I'm still waiting to take pictures of the new bathroom, however my wife has banned all photography until it is 100% ready (so I think next week you'll have a first look). This week's deeper thought: The devil is in the details. *by the way as a side note to Joni- next week's deeper thought will be on CANADIAN politics...heh* I read a fantastic op-ed piece in the Toronto Sun today (which you can read for yourself here: http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Salim_Mansur/2004/05/27/474364.html ) The author, University of Western Ontario professor Salim Mansur, makes the point that all too many people have become lost in the sidebar stories of Iraq's occupation, however justified and deserving of interest they may be, while missing the bigger picture of Iraq's liberation. He makes the case for a messy transition to democracy being seen only for the messy parts, not the transition to democracy. What struck me so much about the piece was how it fell seamlessly beside a point made by a quote from Richard Clarke's book that was passed along to me by my friend Susan. Clarke's main criticism, it seems, with President Bush was not that Bush was disengaged or stupid, but that he seemed to need the complex problems broken down into simplistic (what Clarke labelled "bumper sticker") language. What Clarke and Mansur both speak to is that Iraq, and the war or terror, and for that matter foreign policy, is a complex dilemma that requires solutions and reasoning of subtly and nuance. The problem for Bush (and by that I mean to say Karl Rove) is that they have built the legacy of the administration into a "War Presidency". Rather than defining himself, Bush has allowed himself to be defined. That isn't leadership, it is reactionary politics. By attempting to 'boil it down' to some fundamental slogan as a means of selling something to the citizenry is the first act of a bad political play. It also highlights what has long been my biggest problem with the Bush team- their lack of faith in the American people. Perhaps it hails from watching Bush 41 go down to defeat, perhaps it is from something inside this President, I'm not sure. But time and again, issue upon issue, the Bush administration has either patronized, pandered, or just plain mistrusted the very people it hopes to lead. The first two tax cut packages were clearly designed to rid the Right's memory of Bush 41's 'no new taxes' backslide- a complete pander to Conservatives at the expense of the surplus. Then, after 9/11, the Bush administration failed to trust the American people and ask for a sacrifice of those tax cuts to shore up the economy in a time of national (nee global) crisis. Finally, at every step, they have mistrusted the American people to deal forthrightly with the decision to go to war. I supported the war, and I still do. I'm a neo-Wilsonian, this is true, and while I believed the claims of WMD, it was never, for me, the only or even first reason to remove Hussein. The only safeguard to terror, the only force that can beat back radical fundamentalism, is democracy. Democracy is the engine of economic globalization, it is the engine of international diplomacy, and it must be, in the final analysis, the engine of security. Democratizing those last vestiges of radicalism and totalitarianism is our only salvation, but as theologians teach us, salvation is a long and winding road. Until next week