Opinion: In today’s pages: Risky Rudy, the real Mr. Coffee, energy ideas
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Columnist Niall Ferguson thinks Rudy Giuliani could be a risky choice for president:
In common with nearly all the Republican candidates, Giuliani’s hero of choice is Ronald Reagan. But he also makes a point of likening himself to Winston Churchill. That worries me. It shows that Giuliani buys the idea that since 9/11, the U.S. has been fighting World War III. You know how this routine goes. Al Qaeda is made up of Islamo-fascists; 9/11 was Pearl Harbor; Saddam Hussein was the Arab Hitler; the fall of Baghdad would be like the liberation of Paris. And so on. Now it’s Giuliani’s turn. ‘We should try to accomplish [in Iraq] what we accomplished in Japan or in Germany,’ he says. What, like bombing the place flat?The reality is that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism today is wholly different from the threat posed by the Axis powers in 1941-42. To judge by Osama bin Laden’s latest rant, he aims at mass conversion, not conquest (with low-interest loans as the latest inducement).
Atlantic senior editor Corby Kummer explains how Alfred Peet, the late founder of the eponymous coffee chain, created coffee snobbery. Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commission president H. David Nahai says upgrades and rate hikes could prevent heat-induced power outages. And columnist Gregory Rodriguez notes that Belgium isn’t the haven of ethnic harmony it’s cracked up to be.
The editorial board continues its ‘A Warming World’ series with a study of the potential of wind and solar power.
Readers react to a Times editorial saying ‘service’ classes, in which students perform office work for teachers, aren’t useful. Los Angeles’ Regina Goldman says, ‘Everything I had to know to work in an office, I learned while a high school student in the Office Service Club....’