Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

This Is News?

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?

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, Space

No Lost Moon

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

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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Tale Of Two Rallies

19 Comments

I’d also like to see a compare and contrast between the mess left behind by both crowds. It’s a striking metaphor: the vast majority that wants peace and freedom to live their lives, and the small tyranny whose main goal seems to be to deliberately increase societal entropy. There are never as many of them as they want us to think there are — it’s why they come up with duplicitous names like “Bolsheviks.” Or “progressives.”

[Update a few minutes later]

I asked, and via Charlie Martin, we have received:

The bottom line is this–while it’s amusing to look at the pictures of all the trash left behind by the labor unions and left wing socialists, they aren’t going to give up their efforts to win on November 2 just because we’ve proven we are much neater than they are at rallies. Depending on which count you pay attention to, they did manage to persuade somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 or so to come out on a Saturday. If you look closely, you’ll note that many of the attendees arrived on buses paid for by SEIU and other labor unions. You can bet that these groups will be throwing money around “like drunken sailors” over the next 30 days to get the crowd that littered the Mall Saturday to show up at the polls on November 2. We would be unwise to take our eye off the ball now.

Yes, clearly, neatness is not a value with them. Power is.

[Update late Sunday evening]

Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?

Appropriate, considering it’s from a site called Crooks and Liars…

[Monday morning update]

High-school students received class credit for attending the rally.

Did anyone attend this mini rent-a-mob who wasn’t bribed or coerced? And why do I suspect that they wouldn’t have gotten similar treatment for Glenn Beck’s rally?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

We’re Not As Dumb As You Want Us To Be

18 Comments

…and you’re not as smart as you think you are.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is worth repeating:

If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too — about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.

I wouldn’t mind this rule by the “elites” quite as much if they really were elite, and not just graduates of grade-inflated Ivy-League schools who apparently never learned much of use in the real world, (assuming that they even had the cerebral propensity to do so).