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.
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.
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.
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?
…and women. Thoughts from Iowahawk about the ecofascists.
[Afternoon update]
We’ve reached the point in this cycle of humanity to where if you aren’t part of Groupthink, you are to be eliminated.
Fortunately, their fantasy red button doesn’t exist, and the folks with the guns will keep them from getting it, at least here.
[Sunday morning update]
The inevitable remix.
[Bumped]
…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).
I can’t tell you how amazed I am to read an editorial in the Gray Lady on space policy that actually makes sense.
Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg, on the ridiculous notion that the left has that only the courts can or should assess constitutionality:
Newsweek’s Ben Adler was aghast at the clause in the GOP’s Pledge to America that Republicans will provide a “citation of constitutional authority” for every proposed piece of legislation. “We have a mechanism for assessing the constitutionality of legislation, which is the independent judiciary,” Adler wrote. “An extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress is dangerous even as a mere suggestion, and it constitutes an encroachment on the judiciary.”
A progressive blogger, meanwhile, writes in U.S. News & World Report that such talk of requiring constitutionality is “just wacky.”
Before we get to the historical niceties, a question.
Does anyone, anywhere, think legislators should vote for legislation they think is unconstitutional? Anyone? Anyone?
How about presidents? Should they sign such legislation into law?
Yet, according to this creepy logic, there’s no reason for congressmen to pass, obey, or even consider the supreme law of the land. Reimpose slavery? Sure! Let’s see if we can catch the Supreme Court asleep at the switch. Nationalize the TV stations? Establish a king? Kill every first-born child? Why not? It ain’t unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so!
And of course, that means the president can’t veto legislation because it’s unconstitutional, because that’s apparently not his job. Wouldn’t want to “encroach” on the judiciary!
Of course, reasonable people understand how absurd all of this is.
Sadly, the country is not run by (nor is the media staffed with) reasonable people.
People are making too big a deal of Lori’s statement yesterday that we are not abandoning the moon. This is not any different than NASA has been saying since February, though the message has been badly garbled, and the president didn’t help with his flip and foolish comment about how “Buzz has already been there.”
Flexible Path always meant just that — flexible, and that flexibility included the ability, eventually, to go to the lunar surface, just not as a first destination.
Now, as it happens, I don’t think that it’s as expensive to build a lander as NASA and the Augustine panel seemed to think, particularly if you have a depot at L1 or L2, and we could have even retained the VSE plan of return to the moon first, but it doesn’t really matter now, because some future administration and Congress is going to make that decision. The important thing for now is to focus on developing the technology and building the hardware that’s necessary for all BEO missions, regardless of ultimate destination, while the opportunity exists. And one thing that doesn’t include is a heavy-lift vehicle, but at least until we can get a sensible Congress (perhaps next year, but there’s a lot of education to be done on that front), we will have to waste money on it. But as long as there’s enough left over to do the things that do need doing, and we don’t starve them for funds (Mike Griffin’s greatest sin), at least we won’t have to waste any more time.
What were they thinking? It’s amazing to see them so willing to show their true totalitarian nature so blatantly. And it’s too late to pull it, despite the attempts. That’s the magic of the Internet.
[Update a few minutes later]
A comment that Iowahawk left at the Youtube page (and reposted on his FB page):
In order for your “No Pressure” advert to have been made, I am assuming several writers pitched a professionally-prepared storyboard to a committee, detailing shot-by-shot each second of …the film. The committee approved it, along with a minimum $250,000 budget to hire actors, director, & crew. Each scene probably took 3-10 takes, and weeks of post production by special effects wizards.
At no time did a single person involved in this clusterf**k say, “hey, maybe it isn’t the best PR to air our fantasies about detonating the people who don’t agree with us into a mist of blood meat and bone fragments.”
This has got to be the biggest FAIL in the entire history of the internet. Anyone remotely associated with the production of this film should forever be banished from any public institution in the English speaking world, and immediately referred for psychiatric evaluation.
I know what my evaluation would be.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from a James Delingpole:
With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.
Again, what were they thinking?
They were thinking something like the things these people (who were finally brought to justice) were thinking. Because they’re all children of the first totalitarian, Rousseau. It’s what the left does.
[Update a few minutes later]
Spring time for Al Gore — the eco-Anschluss.