Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Shooting Gallery

25 Comments

More thoughts on the nuttiness of not allowing weapons on base:

“It’s a tragedy to lose soldiers overseas and even more horrifying when they come under fire at an Army base on U.S. soil,” said President Obama.

Indeed. How ironic: Survive Iraq or Afghanistan then get picked off like a game bird in a bland, institutional “Soldier Readiness Center” in Texas.

Soldiers in other countries are allowed to carry arms on base and even when they are off-duty. In Israel, for instance, soldiers are issued a rifle and then . . . it’s theirs. One sees slender 18-year-old girls, traveling from base, home to the suburbs for Shabbat dinner, still slung with a massive M-16 rifle almost as big as they are. The prevelance of arms doesn’t mean the country experiences the kind of random mass murders seen in the United States. It means that the few times someone has gone crazy with a gun in a city street, he was taken down fast by bystanders.

But not American soldiers. When asked if ordinary soldiers nearby had been carrying their service weapons, Fort Hood spokesman Lt. Gen Robert Cone said piously, “We do not carry weapons. This is our home.” Defense is out-sourced to military police, or even — oh the indignity! — to civilian policemen.

More dips for the tar and feathers.

Gee, why aren’t there ever mass shootings at gun shows?

Read the whole thing. There’s also an appalling story about the USS Cole bombing that I hadn’t heard before.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Continuing To Ignore The Problem

3 Comments

Andy McCarthy expands on some Fort Hood thoughts that I had in comments yesterday:

The depth of the challenge we face is daunting. Hatred for America and the West is rampant in the Islamic world. We are not merely willfully blind to it. Our government, wittingly or not, is endorsing it, and not just by Obama’s apology tours. At his ballyhooed Cairo speech on Islam and the West, the president insisted — over the objections of the Mubarak government — on inviting members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom administration insiders view as Islamists we can work with. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto remains “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” It is the same Muslim Brotherhood that encourages suicide bombings and other terrorizing of Israelis (i.e., “resistance”) in the Palestinian territories. It is the same Muslim Brotherhood for which Qaradawi — who has promised that Islam will “conquer America” — speaks.

Islamism is about a lot more than al Qaeda. Nidal Malik Hasan committed a mass-murder under the influence of principles held by a disturbingly large percentage of the world’s billion-plus Muslims. Rather than condemning those principles as barbaric, it is the policy of our government either (a) to pretend that those principles do not exist, (b) to pretend that they are held only by a teeny-tiny handful of extremists who have “hijacked” Islam, or (c) to encourage the Muslims who hold them by engaging, embracing and legitimizing the leaders who preach them. Under these circumstances, I think Victor’s three-to-six-month timeline is not only sensible; it’s the best we can hope for — and the atrocities are going to get worse.

You can’t win a war when a) the country’s leadership refuses to recognize that we are in one and b) the country’s leadership doesn’t even believe in the concept of victory. At least when it comes to non-domestic enemies.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

One Of The Great Flukes Of American History

3 Comments

Dr. K. says that Obamaism is over:

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.

November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

One of the reasons that I called it wrong last year was that it was such a perfect storm of unforeseeable events. In 2012 (or even next year), the president won’t be able to repeat his Rorschach act, and be all things to all people. He’s now a much better-known quantity and a lot of people aren’t liking what they’ve learned, and what the press did such a good job of hiding from them last year. Plus, the voters have assuaged their racial guilt by voting for him once, and will now feel no need to continue the punishment by doing so again.

[Update a few minutes later]

Barack Obama’s mandate gap.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

None Of The Above

8 Comments

NASA Watch has a poll up on what kind of heavy lifter NASA should build. I’ve decided to do my own, proper poll:

Which Heavy Lifter Should NASA Build?
Ares V
Ares V Lite
SDLV Sidemount
DIRECT
EELV Heavy
NASA doesn’t need a heavy lifter

  
pollcode.com free polls

[Mid-afternoon update]

Wow, not much love for either flavor of Ares, at least from my readers. So far, the vast majority goes for “none of the above.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Free-Market Party?

2 Comments

What a concept:

The rise of free-market populism in this country finally has manifested in an election. And judging from the hyperbolic reactions, you know it’s a political movement with staying power.

When tepid, traditional conservative candidate Doug Hoffman knocked off liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava—a candidate who was supported by nearly every boogeyman in the GOP handbook—you might have thought that the rabble had stormed the Bastille.

Sophisticated New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the event “a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war” and compared the conservative surge to a murderous Stalinist purge. (Remarkably, the esteemed wordsmith failed to unleash similar histrionic language when one-time-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman met the same fate.)

Purging moderates is indeed a self-destructive strategy for any national party. But running a party without any litmus tests on the central issue of the economy seems to be similarly self-defeating.

The most impressive trick played by Rich and other liberals, though, is creating a narrative wherein the ones attempting to fundamentally reconfigure the American economy are cast as the moderates.

The nearly powerless who stand in their way? Well, they play the part of Stalinists.

But of course, as Orwell pointed out, the real Stalinists are the people who torture the language like Frank Rich does.

Media Criticism, Space

Harvard Idiocy

8 Comments

Check out this editorial at The Crimson on Ares I-X:

Such an achievement augurs well: The new moon program is a shining rebuttal to detractors of America’s math and science programs as well as a promise for progress in American space exploration in the future.

To begin with, the rocket’s technical specifications are astounding. Thirty-two stories high, the Ares 1-X towers as the tallest rocket in the world. And the sight of the launch was no less spectacular than the rocket itself. The first stage of the engine brought the rocket 25 miles into the air until its fuel ran out and parachuted it into the ocean.

When Clark wrote the other day that the Ares was really tall, it was completely tongue-in-cheek, but this editorial writer seems to seriously believe that rocket height is a useful technical metric. And 25 whole miles in the air? What a spectacular achievement, fifty-plus years after the first orbital launch. But wait, it gets better:

But the true triumph of the Ares rocket doesn’t lie in its physical properties alone. It’s the less tangible inspiration the rocket will provide to future generations of American mathematicians, scientists, and engineers that makes it so important. Education reformers working with students from kindergarten through 12th grade will now be able to look to the rocket as a symbol of hope and inspiration. The Ares will encourage them to imagine even more fantastic goals and products that will be achieved after America repairs its education problem.

Yes, only the Corndog, flying a few times a year at billions per flight, will inspire the Young Pioneers, and fill them with hope. Hundreds or thousands of people going to and from orbit with their own money, reusable tugs fueled in LEO, or at the Lagrange points, on the moon, with orbital and lunar hotels? Boooorrring.

Sigh.