At the True Believer Station

Comings and goings:

• As you've by now no doubt heard, Steve Jobs died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. You'll get any enconia you want concerning Jobs elsewhere. From what I can tell, his greatest accomplishment is putting design back into the equation. Apple's products are elegant, in both senses of the word. And I've never owned one, although I've worked on an Apple computer for the past 4 years in my office. My MP3 player is just that, an MP3 player, and while I have my music on iTunes at work, my music collection at home is strictly housed on Windows-based machines. I realize that, for millions of consumers, Apple's offerings are the products of choice. In the end, Bill Gates still wins the battle, though, although I suspect when Gates goes to meet his Maker, you'll not see anything like the reaction that Jobs has received. James Lileks compared Jobs to Walt Disney. That seems right, especially given the role that Pixar now plays in the Disney orbit. Bill Gates is more like Henry Ford, I guess. Everyone likes Disney more, but Ford was more important.
• We also learned that Sarah Palin has decided to sit the 2012 campaign out. My friend Brad Carlson has an excellent take over at his place and I commend it to your attention. Among a host of shrewd observations, Brad says this: "While I'm rather ambivalent about this decision, many of Palin's ardent supporters appeared to be utterly devastated. That's rather concerning to think my fellow righties would create such a cult of personality in a politician that Palin saying "no" would elicit such a response. Lest we forget how we rolled our collective eyes at the crazy leftists who obtained such an emotional attachment to Barack Obama." That's 100% right. I have no use for cults of personality. Too many of my fellow citizens are looking for a savior, or at least a deus ex machina, who will find a way to change this nasty world we inhabit. No one has that skill set. While I will always believe that the takedown Palin got from the MSM in 2008 was one of the most scurrilous sequences in modern political history, there's no point in denying that it worked precisely as intended.