Doug Mohney has noticed that Tea Party in Space has outed Orrin Hatch and other ATK senators.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Remember When We Were Allowed To Win Wars?
Happy VJ Day.
And of course, it’s not just us. Israel isn’t allowed to win, either. That is the real cause of the continued festering in the Middle East.
[Update mid afternoon]
This seems related: Israel concessions on land are the wrong answer to the wrong problem.
What Has Happened To Obama?
…the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— “What Happened to Obama?” Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.
Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.” On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama’s goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ’60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.
And now they’re disappointed that they’re not getting one.
[Late evening update]
Sorry, went up to Lancaster to see the JetHawks lose big to San Jose (but we got a bobble-head doll of Fred Haise). There was a large contingent of XCORians who drove down from Mojave for the game.
Link was missing, but is there now.
The Berlin Wall
Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of its erection. Ilya Somin discusses its significance:
I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany…
And though the wall has been down for more than two decades, or perhaps because it has, a new generation needs to learn the lessons that such things are the inevitable result of Marxist thinking, and one can engage in Marxist thinking without having ever actually read Marx.
Old Law School
…versus New Law School:
New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling”: personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.
Somehow, I suspect that the current Attorney General of the United States is a product of New Law School, as is his boss in the White House. Speaking of which, here is the latest outrage in the federal gun-running program:
In a surprise move in a controversial case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona is opposing a routine motion by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry to qualify as crime victims in the eyes of the court.
…The maneuver by Burke appears self-serving: his office ran Operation Fast and Furious on the ground, and two guns “walked” under Burke’s command were used in the firefight that murdered Agent Brian Terry. Burke’s provocative decision to block a routine filing seems intended to protect him in the event of a criminal or civil trial…
Laws are for the little people.
More Bloggiversary Celebration
Ed Driscoll writes about ten years of Instapundit. So does Bryan Preston.
My recollections are here, at an interview I did with Pundit Press a few weeks ago:
When and why did you start Transterrestrial Musings?
It was October 2001, a few weeks after 911. But it wasn’t a result of 911 — it was a result of something that fortuitously happened a week or two earlier. Glenn Reynolds had started a blog, and a mutual friend of ours (Jim Bennett, who would later write The Anglosphere Challenge) emailed me with a link, writing, “Hey, look what Glenn is doing.”
A few days later, 911 happened, and the rest is history for his blog, but I saw him doing the kind of “letters to the editor” thing without needing an editor, and said to myself, “I could do that, too.” So I found some blog software (Graymatter), installed it on my server, and I was off to the races. Unfortunately, due to some glitches in software changes/updates over the past decade (frightening to think that it’s coming up on both Glenn’s and my tenth bloggiversary), I’ve lost the very earliest posts, but most of it is still there in one form or another. I’ve been on WordPress for the last two or three years after giving up on Moveable Type.
Interestingly, if you look back through his archives, you’ll note that his posts used to be a lot longer when he first started, because he didn’t have as many outlets for his writing. The same has happened to me over the years. I now only write long blog posts when I don’t think I can place them somewhere else where they’ll find a greater, more appropriate audience (e.g., Pajamas Media, Popular Mechanics). I won’t deny that knowing him before he was Instapundit probably helped me get started, because he was probably more willing to link my stuff in the beginning, but he’s always been very much about introducing new voices to the blogosphere, regardless of whether he knew them or not, if he found them.
And still does, I think. I would also note that before there was the blog, I had been on an email list with Glenn and several other libertarian types (including Bennett). Starting the blog was probably just a natural extension of that.
The Inertia Of The Federal Apparatus
Some thoughts from Yuval Levin:
The American system of government is designed to restrain radical change and, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws through haste, inadvertence, or design.” Our institutions are set up to oppose one another in ways that make sudden major steps unlikely, and that force significant and lasting actions of the government to take the form of painful plodding. Our republic takes a lot of time to turn and reaches decisions slowly, often over several election cycles and through a process of coming to terms.
The yearning for a cleaner, smoother process more amendable to technocratic control which is so central to the president’s rhetoric now (and a form of which was also at the heart of S&P’s defense of its downgrade of American credit last week) is a rejection of the American system of government dressed up as a defense of that system—a favorite gambit of progressives since at least Herbert Croly. At the core of its contemporary iteration on the left is a misreading of American politics in the two decades following World War II. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama speaks of a “time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was in power, civility reigned and government worked.” He has in mind in particular the early and middle 1960s—a period he suggests was the high-water mark of the American regime.
But in fact, that period marked a temporary but very costly failure of the adversarial controls essential to the American system. That failure did not occur (as some others have) because of a terrible war or a grave economic calamity. It happened in the midst of peace and prosperity. It had its roots in an unusual postwar elite consensus on social policy and in the catastrophic failure of the Republican party to offer a plausible alternative to that consensus in the 1964 election. The result was a brief but significant explosion of policymaking that yielded the hasty and careless creation of a massive artifice of entitlement and discretionary programs we have come to know as the Great Society. The peculiar combination of factors that enabled that spurt of reckless activism did not last long, and our politics soon returned to a more balanced state in which our governing institutions and parties staunchly resist one another’s advances and change is relatively slow and measured. But precisely that return to normality has meant that the products of the Great Society have been very hard to undo or reform. Our system of government was never supposed to allow such hyperactivity, and so is not well equipped to reverse its excesses.
We need at least one more election, and probably more, to make true progress (and not of the “progressive” kind).
The Script That Bombed
I hate when this happens:
A writer desperate to get a movie script read suffered the ultimate rejection Thursday when police blew up a briefcase he said contained the screenplay after an agent refused to read it, police said.
Just another day in Tinseltown. Maybe he can work up a treatment on the story. It would at least be a good opener.
The Credit Downgrade
…isn’t the Tea Party’s fault — it’s a symptom of the Marxist disease:
It is time to call a spade a spade — this is Marxism we are talking about, pure and simple.
This bubonic plague of the last century killed tens of millions in the Soviet empire alone, but a young generation of Americans who know little about its destructive power decided to give it a new lease on life. In November 2008 the Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, and soon after that the United States began being changed from a country belonging to “We the People” into one managed by a kind of Marxist nomenklatura with unchecked power.
This new American nomenklatura started running the country secretly, just as all Marxist nomenklaturas did. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” the leader of the nomenkatura in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, once told the media. That was a first in U.S. history. It did not take long before this American nomenklatura took control of home mortgages, banks, auto-makers, and most of the health care industry. When tens of thousands of Americans objected to the cloak of secrecy under which all this was taking place, the same Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. That was exactly what all post-WWII Marxist nomenklaturas called their opponents.
This is why Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” after the Cold War was so nonsensical. One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that while it defies human nature, it is in fact human nature to believe its tenets, and so the lesson must be relearned with each generation.
Kings Are So Eighteenth Century
Thoughts on the collapse of the Obama cult.
[Update a few minutes later]
The politics of “liberals” bashing Obama:
As I can fathom this August of discontent, it runs something like this: at best Barack Obama is too aloof, professorial and unable temperamentally or unwilling politically to mix it up with Republicans. Therefore he has compromised far too much on various budget deals, which in part explains his sagging ratings and the general laments in the American and European press that Obama lacks leadership qualities. The nearly $5 trillion in new debt since 2009 is a needed, if too timid, “stimulus”; and if it is seen by some as too excessive, it can be easily remedied by new taxes on the wealthy — something Obama talks about a lot but does little to enact, this buskin Theramenes who bends with the wind.
At worst, there is a sort of victimization that might be described as, “Obama mesmerized us and therefore we did not quite appreciate how inexperienced and unaccomplished he was until now when we sobered up — and when it is too late.”
…A number of us throughout 2008 and later were criticized for raising just these issues, both about Obama’s lack of experience and his Hamlet-like propensity of hesitation and his academic disengagement. But why this sudden about-face from former disciples?
They’re finally figuring out who the rubes were.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Not that it’s a shock that the president would lie, but it turns out that Joe Wilson was right:
There are between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens in the United States. The fact that immigration status will not be checked at these health centers means illegal aliens will be treated, at American taxpayer expense, and in contradiction to what President Obama said. He lied in the service of passing a bill that a majority opposed and which is helping sink the US economy.
Hey, the ends justify the means.
[Update mid morning]
The growing bipartisan consensus on Obama:
My favorite panegyric to Obama comes from the Times’s columnist David Brooks, recalling his first interview with then Senator Obama. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” says Brooks, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense that he knew both better than me.” Brooks went on to make this invaluable observation, “I remember distinctly an image — we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, (a) he’s going to be president and (b) he’ll be a very good president.” What would this precious Washington insider have reported if Senator Obama had been wearing pantyhose?
There are several things that the president could do to save both the country and his presidency. In no particular order, they would be: 1) Agree that the health-care bill is both unconstitutional and a mistake, and offer to sign a repeal; 2) Do the same for Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley; 3) Come up with a serious proposal to reform Medicare and Social Security to put it on a sound footing; 4) Come up with a serious proposal to reform the tax code, eliminating subsidies, the AMT and flattening the rate structure; 5) Sign an executive order ending all federal restrictions on the exploration and production of energy — in the Gulf, in Alaska and in the Mountain West; 6) Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency on carbon emissions; 7) Conduct a serious review of federal regulations in general, using Iain Murray’s book
He could do those things, but he can’t, because he is too bound to his ideology. And so the country will continue to suffer another year and a half of his lack of leadership, and he will go down in history as a presidential failure on a monumental scale.