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Category Archives: Media Criticism
Rachel Maddow, Space Policy Analyst
I’m not sure what she’s saying here:
We didn’t put a man on the moon because some company thought they might be able to make a profit doing it. It takes vision to involve the common good of the American people without regard for profit. If you’re charting a course for this country and your big idea is “NO WE CAN’T”, then I don’t want you leading this country.
No, Rachel, we put a man on the moon because we wanted to show that a democratic socialist space program was superior to a totalitarian socialist space program. If we’d done it for profit, it would have taken a lot longer, but we’d still be doing it.
The Latest Warm-Monger Tactic
Scaring us with bad science fiction isn’t going to work, either:
Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.
Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.
It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.
A Presage Of Things To Come?
Rick Perry shows Michele Bachmann how it’s done in her birth state.
I haven’t formed much of an opinion of Perry yet, other than that he can’t possibly be worse than Barack Obama. Am I put off by his religiosity? Sure, but that’s something that I’ve gotten used to, and I accept that I’m not going to get a serious presidential candidate in my lifetime who doesn’t at least pretend to be religious (though Barack Obama really pushed the envelope, and only survived the Reverend Wright affair because the press did everything it could to cover for him). Fellow agnostic Roger Simon agrees with me.
More thoughts on the Perry candidacy:
Perry is an exceedingly successful Texas politician. He comes from a place that is self-regarding in the extreme (I speak as a native of Oklahoma) and inward-looking. He has never operated outside its borders, and he may be unaware of its parochial character. If he is, he needs to wake up right away – and Mitt Romney is perfectly situated to give him that wake-up call.
Here is what Perry needs to do. He needs to anticipate the assault.
For example, if Obama’s people play anti-Texas prejudice against him, he should mock their advertisements. Indeed, he might do well to hit them hard the day they play this card – by preparing humorous advertisements ahead of time comparing Texas . . . with Chicago. They could touch on corruption, gangsters, population explosion and population implosion, political practices. And it could all be done with a light touch.
He has some other good advice as well.
“The Filthy Thing They Have Created”
Peter Hitchens pulls no punches:
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Unfortunately, we have the same problem in this country. Fortunately, we’re not quite as far gone, at least in many states.
More (depressing) thoughts from Mark Steyn and Charles Crawford.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on “liberal” psychoses.
TPIS In The News
Doug Mohney has noticed that Tea Party in Space has outed Orrin Hatch and other ATK senators.
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.