Details here. I’m sure that the howls from the left will start any minute.
[Crickets chirping]
Category Archives: Media Criticism
It Makes Them Nuts
…that Cheney was right:
There is a principled human-rights position on all this. You can say: “No one wants to see bad things happen to people, but I honestly believe abusive tactics are so corrosive of our society’s principles that it would be better for 10,000 Americans to be killed in a terrorist attack than for us to prevent the attack by subjecting a morally culpable terrorist to non-lethal forms of coercion that cause no lasting physical or mental harm.”
That would be the honest argument, but it is not going to persuade many people. Thus the continued pretense, against all evidence and logic, that the tactics don’t work. Fewer and fewer people are fooled.
No, this administration and its enablers (including some in my comments section) is having trouble continuing to fool us on many fronts.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thoughts on “the Narrative,” and the lies of both commission and omission of the leftist media.
[Update another few minutes later]
Fouad Ajami — Obama’s summer of discontent:
A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.
It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.
So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without “loud voices.” It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.
We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country’s institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.
I think the spell is finally breaking. The polls would certainly indicate it. And without his charisma, he is truly an empty suit.
Read the whole thing.
On Ted Kennedy
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
I have nothing else to say.
The Kael Syndrome
Charles Murray thinks that the White House is extremely prone to it:
The graph is based exclusively on non-Latino whites (because that’s who the book is about). If you want to see a visual representation of the development of the bubble that Barack Obama has been living in since he left Hawaii, that graph is it. Judging from the GSS data, every white socioeconomic class in America has become more conservative in the last four decades, with the Traditional Middles moving the most decisively rightward. But the Intellectual Uppers have not just moved slightly in the other direction, they have careened in the other direction.
They won the election with a candidate who sounded centrist running against an exceptionally weak Republican opponent. But they’ve been in the bubble too long. They really think that the rest of America thinks as they do. Nothing but the Pauline Kael syndrome can explain the political idiocy of letting Attorney General Eric Holder go after the interrogators.
On a related note, polls like the one he’s describing make me crazy. When someone asks how liberal or conservative I am, the answer is no. None of the above. I wouldn’t know how to characterize myself on that simplistic one-dimensional axis. But I don’t know how typical I am in that regard. Apparently they get a lot of people to provide an answer. And it’s not a good answer for the Democrats.
You know, this reminds me a lot of Iran-Contra. For those unfamiliar, that was the affair in which the Reagan administration was doing deals with the Iranians, giving them arms in exchange for hostages and providing financial support to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. Sensible people were upset over the trading arms for hostages, but the loony Dems were outraged that we were helping defeat communism in Central America, and fantasized that the American people shared their love of Danny Ortega. It blew up in their collective face in the Congressional hearings with Ollie North.
The same thing seems to be happening here. The radical left insists on prosecuting people who got valuable intelligence that probably saved American lives, destroying morale at the CIA, and probably putting us at greater risk. And they imagine that the American people share their outrage over “torture” of terrorists, and hope that they will finally get their great white whale, Dick Cheney. But the notion that waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed outrages Americans is nutty. If they persist in this nonsense, the political blowback may make Iran-Contra look like a Sunday picnic. The Republican ads will almost write themselves next fall.
[Late afternoon update]
Charles Murray has a clarification of his post.
[Early evening update]
Andy McCarthy says that no one should be surprised the Holder has politicized the Justice Department:
Lots of indignation out there about Attorney General Holder’s appointment of a prosecutor to go after the CIA. Disgruntled folks include many who voted to confirm him despite the politicized Rich pardon and the politicized FALN pardons and the politicized recommendation against an independent counsel for Gore’s indefensible campaign-finance violation, etc. Lots of quiet, meanwhile, from the Republican cheering section that helped steer the attorney-general to confirmation. Put me in mind of something I wrote weeks before that happened…
Read the whole thing.
[Another update a few minutes later]
Victoria Toensing explains why it’s such awful policy:
“All volunteers step forward. We have a person in custody who is high-ranking al-Qaeda. He taunts that an attack on United States soil is imminent but laughs mockingly when we ask for specifics. We need interrogators.” Such was the threat in the summer of 2002 when the CIA asked the Justice Department for guidance on what its personnel could do to get such information from captured al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah.
Since then, the lawyers who stepped forward to provide carefully structured counsel have been criminally investigated and told that, even if they are not prosecuted, their conduct will be turned over to their state bars. The interrogators who stepped forward were promised in early spring by President Obama that, even if they erred in judgment while protecting our country, the president would rather “move forward.” However, in late summer, they are under criminal scrutiny.
Even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors reviewed the same conduct and refused prosecution of all but one contract employee who was brought to trial in 2007. Even though congressional leaders had knowledge of the interrogation techniques and made no attempt to stop them. Even though the conduct is more than six years old. Even though the CIA has taken administrative action against some of the personnel involved in the interrogations. Even though being just a target of a criminal investigation costs thousands of dollars in legal fees. Even though being just a target of a criminal investigation takes a horrendous mental toll. Even though the morale of the CIA will plunge to the depths it did in the wake of the Church Committee attacks. Even though the release of the names of those being scrutinized will make them terrorist targets for the rest of their lives. Even if they are cleared.
The next time our government employees are asked to step forward to get information of a possible, even probable, imminent attack, no one will. Even though…
No good will come of this.
The End Of Liberal Fascism
Alas, the only thing that is ending is the blog of that name — I’m sure that the ideology itself will persist and continue to have adherents. Jonah has a farewell post, with some thoughts on the book and current events:
…in the current issue of NR I have a short item on the recent spate of “Obama as Hitler” epithets being thrown around by a few people on the Right (and a lot of idiot Larouchies). A link is unavailable but here’s the relevant passage:
The simple truth is that I do not think it is in the cards for America to go down a Nazi path. I never said otherwise in Liberal Fascism, either….
….Indeed, while I don’t think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi (if by that you mean to say he’s a would-be Hitler), the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen may have overstated his case in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, but he was certainly right that the German people were Hitler’s willing enablers. The overwhelming majority of the American people — in their history, culture, bones, hearts, souls, DNA, and carbon molecules — are not like that. That goes for American liberals and leftists too. The extent and depth of liberalism’s obtuseness on the subject of fascism (and much else) stews my bowels, but American liberals are still Americans, and Americans will not goose-step behind a Hitler, period.
As I make clear in Liberal Fascism, the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hitlerite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce Americans into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making. Yes, there’s a danger that such a society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that (“U.N. District 12” has a nice ring to it).
I should note that I am not quite agreeing with David Frum’s recent broadside against conservatives who find relevance in fascism and Nazism. David writes “can we get a grip here” and I certainly agree that if people think Obama will become a Hitler, or even a Mussolini, they need to do some more thinking. But I think this bit from David is a sort of sleight-of-hand I’ve encountered many times before. He writes:
Contra Rush Limbaugh, history’s actual fascists were not primarily known for their anti-smoking policies or generous social welfare programs. Fascism celebrated violence, anti-rationalism and hysterical devotion to an authoritarian leader.
That’s all true, but misses an important point. What the fascists were or are primarily known for is not necessarily dispositive to the question of what they actually were. Speaking for myself, the relevance of the generous social welfare programs and anti-smoking programs is to point out that the Nazis weren’t exactly what we’ve been told they were. Sure, they were violent and hysterically devoted to an authoritarian leader, but they were also more than that and their popularity with the German people cannot be easily chalked up to those features either.
The Nazis did not rise to power on the promise of bringing war and violence. They just didn’t. They rose to power by promising national restoration, peace, pride, dignity, unity and generous social welfare programs among other things including, of course, scapegoating Jews. People forget how Hitler successfully fashioned himself a champion of peace for quite a while. Limbaugh’s counter-attack on liberals, specifically Pelosi, is exactly that, a counter-attack. He was saying that if liberals are going to call conservatives Nazis for opposing nationalized healthcare maybe they should at least account for the fact that Nazis agreed with them on the issue, not conservatives. If liberals want to have a fight over who is closer to fascism, I see no reason why conservatives should cower from that argument, particularly since the facts are on our side. But I reject entirely the idea that liberals today are literally Nazi-like, particularly if we are going to define Nazism by what “they were known for.” Liberals don’t want to invade Poland or round up Jews. As I’ve said many times, one naive hope I had for my book was that it would remove the word “fascist” from popular discourse, not expand its franchise. Alas, on that score the book is a complete failure.
As I’ve said many times, all Nazis are fascists, but not all fascists are Nazis.
Single Payer
…the musical.
Did He Or Didn’t He?
Keith Cowing can’t find anyone to corroborate rumors that Bolden questioned the Ares 1X flight at Michoud, as reported at Rockets’n’Such. FWIW.
The Need For Actual Human Rights Advocates
From now on, every HRW report on Israel is going to be greeted with “you mean the Saudi-funded HRW,” or “you mean the report written by the woman [HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson] who is a great admirer of Norman Finkelstein and lobbied Kofi Annan against Israel in the middle of the Second Intifada” or “you mean the report written by the guy [Stork] who supports the anti-Israel boycott movement and has been venting his hostility to Israel for almost forty years” or “you mean HRW, the organization that fails to take down from its website anti-Israel reports even when it has admitted they are inaccurate,” and so on.
A housecleaning is needed. Transfer Stork, Whitson, and the rest of the current crew to an area in which they don’t have strong ideological priors, and bring in some real human rights advocates to replace the anti-Israel propagandists. Or just preach to the leftist, anti-Israel choir, but don’t expect anyone else to pay attention.
Unfortunately, too many will continue to do so.
Matthew Yglesias
…meets Public Choice 101. I think that, more than anything, this demonstrates the potential for utter worthlessness of a Harvard degree. As Joe Katzman notes:
That’s what happens when you take classes in theoretics where critical thinking is actively expunged, and pay $100k+ for the privilege. It’s an extremely common way to be uneducated these days.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I went over and read Joe’s link on theoretics (by Orson Scott Card), and it turned out to be a lot more than that. It’s a piece about groupthink, and how it has poisoned the theoretical physics community with string theory. It actually reminded me a lot of the conventional wisdom of space policy and launch costs.
Ignorance On Space Power
I found the comments in this piece more interesting than the article itself. Power from space may or may not make economic sense, and there are valid arguments against it, but the opposition to it displayed here is typical, and ignorant, and one of the reasons that proponents persist. From what I can see, what was being proposed was simply to revive the small-scale test using power from the ISS that was cancelled this year. But instead, we get things like this:
Why does the proposer think that it would be more efficient to beam energy from the international space station when sun beams are directly bombarding the surface of the earth already? He needs to be able to explain the physics and the economics and he apparently failed. The money needs to go to proposals that can realize fruition in 10-20 years, not some pie in the sky experiments that makes no economic sense.
…The experimental packages carried by Apollo astronauts took years to develop at great expense to meet NASA’s high standards of light weight, reliability and safety in the harsh conditions of space. You don’t just hand NASA a laser and solar cell you bought off the shelf and assembled into a crude prototype and tell them to aim it at a village in Africa during the 5 minutes a day that ISS might be overhead, assuming it’s not cloudy, assuming the villagers all wear safety laser goggles not to go blind, and so forth.
The benefits of beaming from space (though not the ISS) have been explained many times, and yet people persist in asking such foolish questions.
And then we have this:
there is NO way that any non-telecom based orbital outerspace project will be PRIVATE- COMMERCIALLY viable and self sustaining (creating a net economic surplus sufficient enough to pay down the costs of financing the project over time) until the cost of putting payload in orbit comes below 1000$ a pound. This isn’t even a discussion. Do your homework.
First off, there are already non-telecom-based projects that are viable and self sustaining (e.g., remote sensing) at current launch costs. But beyond that, the implication here is that $1000/lb is some sort of unachievable holy grail, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who understands the economics and technology that if one were in the business of launching powersats into orbit, the sheer economies of scale would drive it far below that. Not that this means that it will be economically viable, of course, but any argument against SPS that involves current high launch costs is fundamentally flawed. Then, along those lines, we get this:
Last time I looked into it, even if launch costs are assumed to be $0 space-based solar power isn’t economical.
Again, that would depend entirely on the assumptions in the analysis. And then we get this from someone claiming to be a physics professor:
Energy from space has been discussed since the 1970’s. It is a thoroughly crazy idea. The cost of putting anything (Solar cells in this case) in space is “astronomical”. The resulting microwave beam at the ground would exceed radiation standards over the wide area needed to collect it, and a buffer zone outside. If the beam ever went astray, large numbers of people would be exposed to forbidden levels of microwaves, without their knowing (until later, too late to do anything about it) they were being irradiated.
“…astronomical…” Sigh…
And the beam can’t “go astray.” This professor of physics is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of phased arrays. And who knows what a “forbidden” level is?
The saddest thing, though, is the degree to which NASA has screwed up public perceptions about this kind of thing, as demonstrated by this comment:
As cool as it would be to get solar stations up in space, NASA can barely focus itself enough to get us to the Moon, a feat we accomplished forty years ago. What chance do we even have of this working at all, regardless of the technological barriers?
Note the twin assumptions, commonly held: that NASA would do it, and that NASA can’t do it any more.