…but I’ve never seen any and the notion that it never, ever works is stupid and delusional.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Space View From The Left
Over at Kos, “Darksyde” writes about the rocket to nowhere. Ignoring the comments about uteri and urine, I pretty much agree — pork is pork from either side of the aisle. I would point out, though that Constellation and Ares were not proposals by George Bush (though I can understand why he’d want to phrase them that way to his audience, to further demonize them). It was all Mike Griffin, and I’m sure that Bush had zero interest in the subject once he hired Mike.
Ding, Dong, Bin Laden’s Dead
OK, I’m going to throw some cold water here.
My immediate thoughts:
1) I was surprised, because I’d thought he was dead years ago, probably in Tora Bora, and the CIA was keeping him alive for political effect. He was such a camera hog prior to and immediately after 911, that the only reason that he was no longer sending out videos was either because he was dead, or in such a visibly weakened physical state that he didn’t want to be seen that way. Either way, I assumed that he as a real individual was no longer a consequential player in the war.
2) We were not at war with Osama bin Laden. Unlike Hitler, he did not invent the ideology. He merely took an existing one, and implemented it in a way unprecedented in modern times (though it had been in full force for centuries in the past — unfortunately, most people are unaware of history). He is not, and never was, essential to its survival. There was no signing of a surrender on the deck of the Missouri tonight. The troops cannot come home simply because we killed one guy who had been on the run for years.
3) I can readily understand why the administration wants to play this up as though (2) weren’t true. They are desperate for any news on the political front that can rally the people, and distract them from its disastrous policies, not just on the war and foreign policy in general, but on five-dollar gas, rising grocery prices, continuing lack of jobs, continuing plunging home prices and increasing foreclosures, etc. etc. etc. They hope that a faux war victory will boost the poll ratings of a president that, if the election were to be held today, to almost anyone, would lose by a landslide.
4) I fear that we will continue to ignore the real issues of this war, and how to win it, and how to confront the ugly reality of how hard it will be to win. And when I say hard, I mean much harder than WW II, with a casualty count that may be horrendous, even in comparison. Despite the jubilation among the nation, this event makes me more pessimistic about the future, because the reaction to it is an indication of the lack of sobriety and reason with which we approach this potentially existential war.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is the administration hoping that this will be their “Fall of Atlanta” moment as it was for Lincoln in 19864?
If so, they’re fooling themselves because 1) the election is a year and a half away, not a couple months and 2) the war is not the primary issue in the voters’ minds. But they will still attempt, however politically incompetently, to milk this “victory” for all it’s worth.
[Monday morning update]
If he was looking for peace and quiet, this guy sure picked the wrong week to move to Abbottabad.
[Update a few minutes later]
Claudia Rossett: This is a long war, and Al Qaeda is just a part of it. Yes. Long not just in the future, but going back many centuries.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Does the trail really end in Pakistan?
Ironically the circumstances surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden tends to confirm the theory that terrorism, rather than being a spontaneous meme that floats above the planet, is in fact deeply rooted in the intelligence agencies and regimes of certain states. Thus, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are creations of some kind of rage any more than than September 11 was wholly the result of some kind of amorphous resentment. Osama Bin Laden had backers; people with uniforms, ranks and the resources of bureaucracies behind them. Those who believe that the War on Terror is nothing but a law enforcement problem must ask themselves whether it is really rather larger than that.
Unfortunately, such feckless people are currently running the country.
[Update a while later, and welcome Instapundit readers]
I have a question about religious burials.
[Update a while later]
“Osama bin Laden is dead, and I blame George Bush.”
[Update another hour or so later]
Bin Laden is dead, and his cause goes marching on. And many in the West, including people at the highest levels of the US government, remain in denial.
[Update early afternoon]
I’m completely unsurprised to learn that he died while hiding behind a woman, using her as a shield. To call him a craven sack of scum is to insult craven sacks of scum everywhere.
It’s May First
Remember the victims of communism.
There were and are many millions of them.
Say It Ain’t So
Who knew that the anti-Whatshisname rebels in Libya are racist anti-semites? Well, no one, actually, if you leave it up to the mainstream media to report it.
I’m shocked, shocked.
Gene Cernan
…and his alternate reality. And sadly, it’s not just Gene Cernan. Many people who should know better are equally delusional. Though probably, some of them are just lying.
Of course, the media reporting on this subject over the last year (as it is on most subjects) has been abysmal.
Paula Deen’s Recipes
Maybe these are the reasons why she has diabetes, but there’s no explanation as to why. While a lot of the dishes are refined-carb intensive, there’s also an implication that fat is involved, but I’m not aware of any link between fat consumption and diabetes. I would think that the jalapeno poppers wouldn’t be that bad for you. I will say, though, that most of them look godawful. I wouldn’t want to eat them even if they didn’t wreck my body.
Emily Lakdawalla
An interview. I strongly agree with this advice:
…cultivate your ability to write, to express yourself with brevity and clarity. Writing is important not only for explaining your research, but also for applying for grants and jobs. People who write well, with an engaging voice and correct spelling and grammar, make a positive first impression, giving them a leg up over their competition. My advisor at Brown made all his students submit abstracts to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The struggle to write those abstracts helped us identify holes in our knowledge or in the completeness of our work; presenting our work in posters or talks gave us poise and confidence in intimidating situations. So keep a journal, or start a blog. Just write.
I also find that writing forces you to think about what you’re saying much more than just talking about it.
Take Down Of A Flim-Flam Man
I have to confess that before I read this devastating piece by Bruce Bawer, I had never heard of Greg Mortensen. So I guess his self promotion wasn’t universally effective.
In recent days many commentators have lamented that it is dismaying to know that Mortenson’s a phony. No, what’s dismaying is that so many people were taken in in the first place. What’s dismaying is that so many people don’t seem to recognize a huckster, a con artist, a flimflam man when they see one — and, by the same token, don’t seem to recognize authentic virtue, selflessness, and humility either. Have we become so coarsened by celebrity culture, so accustomed to slick showbiz packaging and self-promotion, so habituated to feeding the ravenous narcissism of the famous, that we’re no longer capable of detecting what Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof called “a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity”? Hemingway said that the one thing a writer needed most of all was a foolproof “bullshit detector”; are twenty-first-century Americans’ bullshit detectors hopelessly out of whack? Have the glossy, streamlined, highly polished and tidily ordered versions of human reality served up on all too many “reality” programs and Oprah-type talk shows destroyed our very ability to separate the genuine from the bogus, the real article from the counterfeit, and even caused us to turn our noses at the imperfect, unprocessed, clunky, smudged, and pockmarked real thing? Do we want to be fooled?
Like Bawer, I think it explains why Barack Obama is president as well.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Mark Steyn.
[Another update]
This seems related. Despite appearances, the administration isn’t deliberately trying to destroy the nation, it is simply ignorant and stupid:
With academia, mass media, most of the publishing industry, and Hollywood on their side, how would these policymakers know any better? Their professors told them they were brilliant; the books they read all tell them they’re right. Nobody corrects or criticizes them except those who they can rationalize are opponents — and evil people, too! — and thus these are partisan carpings to be disregarded.
If the critics can be described as conservatives, their views are discounted. If you are proven to be correct, that seems to have no effect on the powerful institutions and elite opinions.
In fact, the very fact of being a critic is used to disqualify criticism. When I wrote a detailed critique of Obama’s policies in a prestigious policy journal, the prestigious authors responded that what I said should be discounted — and my specific arguments need not be persuasively countered — because…I was critical of Obama’s policies!
I cannot imagine any other time in modern Western intellectual history when this kind of thing has happened.
So the usual corrective institutions aren’t functioning. If no one tells the emperor and his courtiers that they are under-dressed, such people are going to keep peeling off clothes confident of the fact that nobody (or at least anyone who counts) will tell them that they are naked. With so much insulation, they don’t feel the chill.
Those certain that Obama and his government — and I only speak of foreign policy here — must be acting deliberately out of malice generally have one thing in common: they have never actually dealt with high-level politicians and decisionmakers.
As someone who has, I have to agree. For instance, I know it looks like there’s been a massive government conspiracy to keep us from conquering space for the past half century, but there really isn’t. Ignorance and stupidity, in combination with public choice in the face of a topic of so little national importance, is a sufficient explanation. On the other hand, as J. Porter Clark noted (in reference to spammers), any sufficiently high level of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malevolence. It’s the other Clarke’s Law.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/truth-or-tea/238065/
[Update a couple minutes later]
I will note, and agree with, commenters at Rubin’s piece, with which he ends up agreeing himself, that the ideology at work is objectively anti-American. But in their warped view, it is good for America to weaken its power in the world.
[Update a while later]
Truth, or tea? That’s why they call it the “reality-based community.”
This Would Be Funny If It Weren’t Frightening
I’ve read this story twice now, and I can’t find any heroes in it. And of course, it comes from the most “transparent” administration in history.
They keep using that word. I don’t think it means what they think it means.