I’m not sure that “seduced” is quite the right word. I agree with Instapundit:
Bending over for tyrants is a major aspect of today’s academic culture, even as the benders-over proclaim their own courage and independence, and demonstrate those by attacking those whom they need not fear, while fearing those whom they do not criticize.
Islamaphobes.
Remembered. It’s a shame that it was only forty-three years ago that he met his well-deserved fate — it should have happened sooner. And it’s appalling that it’s still socially acceptable to wear clothing with his image. It’s a fundamental symptom of the failure of our educational system and academia.
Kirsten Powers has noticed who really hates women. It’s nothing new. Seventies feminism was largely a reaction to the male chauvinist pigs among the campus left.
Red blood. More thoughts on the ecofascist snuff film, and the insularity of the politically correct:
This isn’t a joke for the benefit of you and me. No, this is a knee-slapper for those already committed to the cause. The subtext is, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just get rid of these tiresome, inconvenient people?” That’s why they’re blown up without anyone trying to change their minds. That’s the joke: “Enough with these idiots already.”
How else to explain the fact that this thing went through the entire pre-production and filming process, was undoubtedly screened by any number of people — most likely including sponsors and PR people — and none of them said, “Are you nuts? We can’t go public with this.”
That’s the outrage here: not that they thought normal people would find it funny, but that the producers and sponsors clearly did think it was funny. It’s like one of those ugly inside jokes high-school cliques share that instantly become horrendous when outsiders find out about them. In their arrogance and insularity, they didn’t realize that their inside joke wasn’t appropriate for mixed company. Imagine Curtis’s horror when he discovered no one was laughing outside the green bunker.
One wonders if he’s learned anything from it.
What is it with ecofascists and kids? Is there something Freudian going on there, or is it because they recognize that children are the future of humanity? And we can’t have that.
This is a sample of the kind of thing we’ll be working against next year: a Weekly Reader version of space policy, presumably from Representative Olson:
President George W. Bush inaugurated an ambitious and important plan to establish a base on the Moon by building much larger and safer rockets to take our astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. These rockets, called Ares I & Ares V, were part of a system called Constellation and they would be the backbone of a new system of vehicles capable of landing and supporting astronauts on the Moon or elsewhere in the solar system.
Mr. Obama, the candidate, announced he would cut the program and put the production of a heavy lift rocket for five years. But as the election approached, Obama changed his story to get elected and said not only had he always supported NASA & space flight but that he could and should do it better than the Republicans. Once elected Obama quickly returned to his original position and KILLED the program saying it would wait FIVE years.
Pete Olson has been working in Congress to save the space program and the jobs that go with it. Those jobs, filled by engineers, technicians, scientists and managers, are essential to the space program and if lost could never be recovered. This loss of personnel would be only a small part of the tremendous loss the entire nation would suffer as America would lose its lead in space flight. Pete Olson understands all this and working with the entire Houston delegation struggled to preserve what could be, but that was not enough.
I was, myself, dismayed to learn the program was greatly reduced in scope, but Olson explained as in a month when he expects Republicans to take the lead in the House again, that he and the others will be able to put more funding back into NASA to restore the mission. This is not the end. This is just the beginning Olson reported. I believe him.
What Pete Olson doesn’t understand about space space policy and technology would fill a middling-big library. No mention of the budget problems and schedule delays. No mention of the new technologies that will finally be funded. Nope, it’s the standard kindergarten treatment — George Bush had a wonderful plan for exploring the galaxy, bold and ambitious, and going along just swimmingly, and then that mean commie Barack Obama came along and Ended Our Space Program. It just makes you want to cry.
But will Democrats?
I love the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. It’s nice to see the country finally coming to its senses.
[Update a while later]
Related thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
Obama — egged on by obsequious advisers, an out-of-touch, hard-left base, and a toady media — decided that he had done what other Northern liberals had not, either because (a) the country was at last ready for European-style socialism, or (b) his singular charisma and talents could convince it that it was even when it was clearly not.
The result was that our Oedipus/Pentheus rushed headlong into socialized medicine, mega-deficits, needlessly polarizing appointments of the Van Jones type, and various federal takeovers, coupled with quite unnecessary editorializing about largely local matters — from the Skip Gates mess to the Arizona immigration law and Ground Zero mosque.
In each case, the supposed uniter deliberately weighed in on these controversies to quite unfairly demonize his opponents — “stupidly” acting police, Arizona xenophobes picking up children on the way to buy ice cream, Islamophobes wanting to deny religious liberty, etc. A thousand other nicks, from Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” to Obama’s musings that at some point one needs no more income, ensured continual bleeding as his poll numbers fell by nearly 30 points in just 20 months.
The result was that the president soon lost the moral capital to push through an unpopular agenda — to such a degree that his out-of-the-mainstream views and his polarizing style of governance might well destroy Democratic congressional majorities for a decade.
A decade, if they’re lucky.
I never bought the conventional wisdom that the Obama campaign was brilliantly run. He was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. With the right skin color.
…for Client Number Nine, at Eight. And this is a new low for Kathleen Parker, too.
What would possess CNN to think that people would want to watch as loathesome and hypocritical an individual as Elliot Spitzer?
ABC thinks that it’s a big deal that Rush Limbaugh is simply telling the truth:
The nation’s preeminent conservative talk radio host referred to Mr. Obama as a “jackass,” an “economic illiterate” and an “idiot, where capitalism is concerned.”
So, what’s the problem?
This reminds me of the old Soviet joke, about the guy who is arrested after walking down the street shouting “Brezhnev is an idiot.” He was sentenced to thirty-five years — five years for insulting the premier, and thirty for revealing a state secret.
In related news, the president stamped his hooves in petulant anger.
[Update a few minutes later]
It just occurs to me that it’s not a word with which the president is unfamiliar, or loathe to use himself. It’s what he called Kanye West.
You know, if you have questions about vehicle development costs, or propulsion issues, I guess it would be useful to have a discussion with Dave King, but I see nothing in his experience that would render him in any way knowledgable about markets for commercial spaceflight. But a lot of clueless people will read this and think that he knows what he’s talking about, and make policy and investment decisions on the basis of it. This is even worse than having Congress call Tom Young as a witness, just because he was head of Lockheed and worked at JPL, when he has no experience with human spaceflight.
Via Clark Lindsey, who has more thoughts:
I would hope that in the future, NASA’s top administrators hire human spaceflight program managers who actually believe that human spaceflight is worth buying and are devoted to lowering its cost so that more and more people can afford to buy it.
Dream on. Not part of the job description. Which is why space remains unaffordable fifty-three years after its dawn.