The Secretary of Health and Human Services says that Republicans want you to die quickly, just like that fun-loving former Congressman from Orlando. Of course, it’s hard to know why she would object to that, given that (as Ed Driscoll notes) other administration members seem to be all in favor of people dying quickly.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Our Robot Overlords
This is frighteningly funny.
The Great Irish Hunger
Lessons learned. Hint: it wasn’t a failure of the free market.
Hollywood Versus Reality
Two new biographies dethrone “liberal” icons. I think that most people have known for a while what a thug Malcolm X was, but it’s definitely past time to demystify Gandhi.
How Far Is Egypt…
…from starving?
This isn’t going to end well. Revolutions in countries with large masses of illiterates rarely do, and the naive coverage of the situation, with hopeful talk of an “Arab spring,” has been appalling.
[Early afternoon update]
Things are falling apart in Egypt pretty rapidly. As Michael Totten says, the good guys are vastly outnumbered. And this administration has no plan.
Let’s Keep Our Focus Here, Folks
It’s the birthers that are crazy! Pay no attention to these people:
Rhodes is lecturing the conservatives that she has the “facts” that George W. Bush and his administration knew that Osama bin Laden was cooling his heels in Abbotabad for years. She’s embraced the full-crazy Michael Moore theory that Bush really had no interest in justice for Osama
Yes, the BusHitler wanted to make sure that his successor would get credit for the capture. Riiiiigggghhht.
[Update a few minutes later]
The reluctant president?
It’s not just his postmodern worldview that suggests this reluctance. It is the discombobulated aftermath of the killing, the weirdly botched reportage featuring such events as cabinet members in the situation room supposedly watching a (we learned) non-existent streaming video of the action and the statement that bin Laden — who had been under surveillance for months from a CIA safe house — was living in a million dollar mansion.
That was dialed down within a day or two to $250,000 and then revealed, in videos, to be close to a slum. In fact, OBL’s squalid living conditions made the hated Guantanamo seem like the Four Seasons. If the SEALs had taken him alive, it would have been an upgrade.
Indeed, it was those SEALs that were the only ones who performed their part with professionalism. Everything else seemed ad hoc, as if thrown together at the last moment after, one guesses, various parties finally convinced, or even forced, the president to act. There was no preparation for the aftermath, no apparent plan of how to inform or not inform the public of this cataclysmic event when such a decision was in many ways as important as the action itself. What resulted was an embarrassing blabbermouth display of public contradiction. Some of this can be justified by the fog of war, but not to the extent we saw. Something more was at work and I think it was a reluctant president.
It looks like it to me, too. And as noted, the death of bin Laden isn’t the end of the war, or the beginning of the end. At best, as Churchill said in a different context, it is the end of the beginning.
A Surreal Depression
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson. I think we’re about the same age, and I have similar memories of being told about the Depression by my parents and grandparents who lived through it. I don’t know what we’re in, but it isn’t (at least yet) a depression, though it seems as though the government is doing everything possible to get us there.
Nobel-Prize Winning Novels
Will they change public attitudes on global warming?
I predict no. I suspect that most people who read that kind of thing are have already drunk the koolaid. This is lunacy, really:
“A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which tells the story of people connected by the music business, bounces back and forth over time. When it flashes forward two decades, it shows a world that has been altered by climate change. Trees bloom in January. A February day hits 89 degrees.
No one is predicting those kinds of changes that fast. All this does is destroy their credibility.
Though it would be nice to get people reading this book
Lanny Friedlander
RIP. Like other Reason devotees, I had never met him or even heard of him, though I’m sure that my friend Bob Poole, who took over from him, must have known him. As Virginia Postrel notes over at Facebook, this is probably the most coverage that the New York Times has ever given Reason magazine.
Lara Logan
…and the Muslim rape culture. This is a very politically incorrect article.
And in related news, here comes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This may be playing out as Israel’s nightmare.
[Update a while later]
Will the Muslim Brotherhood succeed where bin Laden failed? As Michael Totten writes, “The gradualists–not moderates, but gradualists–in the Brotherhood do have a greater chance of success. Unlike the vicious psychotics of Al Qaeda in Iraq, they won’t alienate their soft supporters until it’s too late.”