Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Here We Go Again

56 Comments

Doug McKinnon is the latest “conservative” to bash American industry, complete with the now-standard out-of-context Rutan quote:

For the past five decades, the United States has held that title. With his decision to cancel NASA’s human spaceflight program and outsource it to private industry, Mr. Obama has now ensured that the People’s Republic of China with its military run program or Russia, will now wrest the title from us and hold it for decades or more.

I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole.

Hint: NASA’s human spaceflight program has not been cancelled. All that was cancelled was their bloated, unnecessary new rocket. And the notion that China is ever going to be ahead of us in this area, let alone “for decades or more,” when there are superior rockets to theirs sitting on the pad in Florida right now, is ludicrous.

And then we have this bit of sophistry, from the smartest guy in the room.

Michael Griffin, the former administrator of NASA and himself a strong advocate of true “commercial” space, feels the president is misreading private sector capabilities as well as long-term viability. Griffin said to me, “Suborbital flight takes about 2 percent of the energy needed for orbital flight. Understanding that, the reality is that the commercial space industry is a number of years away from fielding economical, capable, reliable, and logistically dependable transportation just for cargo. With human spaceflight being harder yet.”

Nice diversion from the topic. No suborbital flight producer is contemplating going after this market any time soon. And yes, it is a “number of years away,” if that number is “one” or “two.” How economical, or logistically dependable was the Shuttle? How “economical, and logistically dependable” would Ares have been?

I used to think that he had convinced himself that what he was saying was true, but now I just think that he’s a deliberate liar, perfectly willing to gull the gullible.

[Update a couple minutes later]

You’ve gotta love the failed irony sensor here:

Neither space nor our future in it should be a partisan issue driven by politics of the moment.

I sure wish that these folks really believed that. If he’s really a “long-time consultant on space,” it’s kind of frightening, but it would explain why the policy is such a mess.

[Update a minute or two later]

And of course, the first commenter credits NASA with teflon. The myths that just won’t die.

[One more update]

OK, I see that this isn’t a new piece, just new to me. It was from the week of the Florida speech. I wonder if anyone has responded it to it over there yet?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

A Green Tea Party

16 Comments

That’s what Pulitzer-Prize-winning authoritarian-government admirer Tom Friedman thinks the Tea Partiers should form. I always love this:

I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years.

They were there all along, and few of them were very happy about the spending, but they weren’t idiotic enough to think that the Democrats would be better. And sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.

Anyway, I think that what Beijing Tom really wants is a watermelon tea party.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Paranoid Style

…of American “liberalism”:

Liberals, to put it mildly, are not dealing well with their declining political fortunes. For some reason, liberals seem surprised that Americans have not warmed to the Obama administration’s policies, like government takeover of health care; bailouts and government ownership in multiple industries; wasteful and ineffective “stimulus” spending; unheard of deficits; massive tax increases slated for next year; and a foreign policy that perversely alienates our allies and caters to our enemies. There has never been a time in our history when most Americans would have approved of such policies, yet liberals are somehow convinced that today’s manifestation of longstanding voter attitudes represents a unique and sinister animus against Barack Obama and his administration.

As he goes on, Joe Klein is a poster boy for this.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Not So Hip And Edgy

6 Comments

Thoughts on Bill Clinton and Comedy Central, from Mark Steyn:

Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesman’s dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing tea partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the tea partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends. Also, both “Tim” and “Tea” are three-letter words beginning with “T”: Picture him upon your knee, just Tea for Tim and Tim for Tea, you’re for him and he’s for thee, completely interchangeable. To lend the point more gravitas, President Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he’s trying to determine whether that’s his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.

Will it work? For a long time, tea partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending,” that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.” Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the tea-party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare’s opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank’s sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank’s sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time’s Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was “seditious,” because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to “educator” William Ayers’s education reforms, nobody knows what “seditious” means anymore.

It’s all like that. Few people can write so entertainingly about such serious subjects (though Lileks can give him a run for his money).