Then and now. Unfortunately, the supply seems to be endless.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Having It Both Ways
I think that the administration’s position on DOMA is craven (so what else is new…?).
If they really believe that the law is unconstitutional (a position with which I don’t necessarily disagree), it’s nonsensical, and in fact a violation of the president’s oath of office to uphold the Constitution (which is the highest law in the land), to enforce it. I thought that George Bush should have been impeached not for signing McCain-Feingold, but for doing so while explicitly stating that he believed it to be unconstitutional. This was a blatant violation of his oath of office, though he obviously didn’t realize it. In both cases — this and the Obama DOMA position — it is trivializing the oath for the sake of pandering. In Bush’s case it was to the so-called “moderates” (i.e., mindless, or at least principleless) and in the current president’s case, to his base. It is not up to the other two branches to defer their judgment of constitutionality on untested law to the Supreme Court — they must follow it once such a judgment is rendered, but unless and until it is, they are obligated by their oath of office to follow their own. If the president really believes that DOMA is not only unconstitutional, but that there are really no reasonable arguments on the other side, then he is bound to not enforce it, and to get such a ruling as soon as possible (an eventuality that would be hastened by his inaction in enforcement).
And as is often the case, this is another example of the difficulty of many, even those who should know better, to distinguish between the concept of “constitutional” and “law I agree with.” Roe v. Wade was a judicial travesty, regardless of one’s views on abortion, and we should demand consistency from the administration regardless of our views on gay marriage. The president is bound by his oath to enforce, and even defend, bad laws, but not unconstitutional ones.
Which brings us back to Elena Kagan’s confusion on this issue, and why she was a frightening appointment to SCOTUS. She has it exactly backwards. It would actually be good law to force people to purchase and eat their vegetables, at least in terms of the public health, but it would be a law both totalitarian and tyrannical. And unconstitutional.
More thoughts from Jonah Goldberg (here and here), Shannen Coffen (here and here), and David Bernstein.
[Update a few minutes later]
More at Cato.
Impaired Vision
Paul Spudis doesn’t think much of NASA’s newest vision statement. Neither do I, but I’m unmoved by his replacement: “To explore the universe with people and machines.”
He’s thinking too much like a scientist. Exploration is a means, not an end. I’d say “To flower the universe with sapient life.”
The USDA
…continues its wholesale manslaughter of innocent Americans. The food pyramid isn’t as bad as it used to be, but it remains disastrous. It was exactly this kind of dietary advice that killed my father, over three decades ago.
Democracy In Egypt
Here’s an example of why there’s a lot more to democracy than voting:
Two million Egyptians jam Tahrir Square to chants of “To Jerusalem we are heading, martyrs in the millions.”
Goody.
You Don’t Say
Public unions force the taxpayers to fund Democrats:
Everyone has priorities. During the past week Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people.
But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”
Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.
Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.
Which is both why they need to be outlawed, and why the Democrats are fighting so hard, to the point of threatening blood in the streets, to protect them. It’s obviously part of that new civility we’ve been hearing so much about.
[Update a while later]
Time for public-employee unions to go, and end a half-century mistake.
[Early afternoon update]
Even FDR understood — there is no role for government unions.
He’ll Do That
Don Rumsfeld flummoxes Andrea Mitchell. There was nothing more entertaining during the war than Don Rumsfeld running circles around clueless reporters in the press conferences.
How Heinlein Became A Writer
An interesting anecdote from the thirties. I found this particularly interesting:
Political ignorance also may have hurt Heinlein’s campaign in two other ways. First, Heinlein believed that he was harmed by the fact that the Communist Party had endorsed him. Although a leftist himself at the time, Heinlein was very hostile to the communists in the 1930s, denouncing them as “red fascists” no better than the “brown fascists” of the far right.
As with Heinlein, it was clear to most at the time that fascism and communism were just two slightly different flavors of the same totalitarian political phenomenon, and much of the American left admired both. It’s only the modern left that has developed an amnesia about it (somewhat deliberately, by rewriting history in academia), declaring after the fact that they are political opposites on the simple-minded one-dimensional left-right spectrum.
I will say one thing that was worse, or at least different, about Nazism, though. This morning I heard someone from Libya saying that if reports coming out of there were accurate, that a “genocide” was going on.
No. That word has become devalued in recent decades (partly to minimize what happened to the Gypsies and Jews during the war, and as a way of reducing support for Israel). Killing lots of people is not genocide. Even ethnic cleansing in a region is not genocide. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire “race” of people (while race is largely a social construct, in this case use it as shorthand for “group of people sharing a large genetic heritage”). Hitler was, I think, unique in his desire to do this. Well, except for modern Islamists.
For Those Who Want A Flavor
A scene from the upcoming Atlas Shrugged movie.
They’re not going to pull any punches on the sanctimonious scum.
Yes, Marx Is Dead
But unfortunately, I disagree that the labor theory of value is. I wish that it were. It is, fundamentally, what the argument in Wisconsin (and really, the nation at large) is about. Isn’t, after all, one of the claims of the union workers that they deserve what they get because they work hard?