Category Archives: Media Criticism

America Will Survive The Obama Debacle

October 6, 2010 Rand Simberg 25 Comments

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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Reviews Are In

October 5, 2010 Rand Simberg 25 Comments

…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?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

This Is News?

October 5, 2010 Rand Simberg 11 Comments

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.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Who Cares What He Thinks?

October 5, 2010 Rand Simberg 5 Comments

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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

An Amicus Brief

October 5, 2010 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

Supporting Virginia versus Sebelius:

If nothing else, I hope the brief will help dispel the myth that there is an expert consensus to the effect that the mandate is constitutional (see also here). It should by now be obvious that many well-known and highly respected scholars believe otherwise.

I think the notion that the mandate is constitutional is nonsense.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

IBOTUS

October 5, 2010 Rand Simberg

This is the blind leading the blind — political advice for Barack Obama from Fritz Mondale, the man who lost forty-nine states, and then lost his own in a Senate race.

That’s right, his problem is that he hasn’t connected with us enough. It has nothing to do with his economically inept policies, continuous apologetics for everyone but him, and Marxism.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

No Lost Moon

October 4, 2010 Rand Simberg 24 Comments

It’s probably pointless to point it out, but Mark Whittington once again demonstrates his profound inability to comprehend English:

…last April, President Barack Obama was quite specific that the Moon would be excluded from any program of space exploration.

“Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do”

Lori Garver herself pointedly excluded the Moon in a speech before a meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics about her vision for the next fifty years in space.

In Whittingtonworld, not going someplace first is an “exclusion” of it. No one familiar with logic would draw such a conclusion. No one in the administration has said that we are not going back to the moon. All that the new policy does is remove it as the first target (as the Augustine panel suggested last year, for good reason). In fact, that is the only significant difference between the new policy and the original VSE, which was distorted beyond recognition by Mike Griffin’s determination to redo Apollo. As for Lori neglecting to specifically mention the moon in her speech in Anaheim (for which I was present), that was also not a “pointed exclusion.” A “pointed exclusion” would have been something like, “We are going beyond earth orbit, to asteroids and Mars, but not the moon.”

And of course, Mark continues to delude himself that what any president (particularly a likely one termer) states as a goal in space is going to matter a decade later, and doesn’t realize that Americans are no better at ten-year plans than Lenin was.

But as I said, it’s fruitless to expect Mark to get simple things like this right.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

European Terror Threats

October 4, 2010 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

And a warning in Berlin, that the Europeans have been ignoring for far too long. The biggest problem that liberal societies face in this war is how to properly confront a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.

[Update a few minutes later]

Geert Wilders on trial. This is a travesty, and a display of the true Islamaphobes are — those who betray western liberal values by shutting down any criticism of the most intolerant religion of all.