Category Archives: Media Criticism

Good News And Bad News

From Carolyn Glick, who was never fooled by the Obama administration:

If the Palestinians follow through with their threat to renew their terror war against Israel it will be quite bad. This is so not because Israel will be unable to defend itself. Israel has the means to defend itself. It will be quite bad because, in light of the hostile treatment Israel is suffering at the hands of the Obama administration, and given the central role the U.S. under Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton is playing in arming and training the Palestinian army that will likely be attacking Israeli targets in Judea and Samaria, the U.S. may well side with the Arabs against Israel. The administration is already placing limitations on arms sales to Israel. In this event, Israel will have to move quickly to find other suppliers.

It is unlikely today that Arab states will go to war with Israel, although that could change quickly if Iran acquires nuclear weapons. In that event, the Iranians will be in a position to blackmail Arab states like Egypt and Jordan into abrogating their peace treaties with Israel and opening hostilities against it. Iran would accomplish this task by threatening to overthrow the Mubarak regime and the Hashemite Kingdom. It is this specter — along with the specter of nuclear attack and chronic terror violence conducted under Iran’s nuclear umbrella — that makes it essential for Israel to move quickly to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

LOPEZ: How nervous is Israel about Ahmadinejad’s “reelection”?

GLICK: In a round about sort of way, Ahmadinejad’s “reelection” empowers Israel to take the necessary action. By stealing the election, Ahmadinejad now stands in open opposition to the Iranian people. This decreases the likelihood that the public will rally around the regime in the event of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.

Ahmadinejad’s open hatred of the U.S. and his humiliation of the Obama administration will similarly make it more difficult politically for the administration to prevent Israel from striking Iran. If before the Iranian elections it was easy to see the administration signing on to U.N. Security Council sanctions against Israel in the event of an Israeli strike against Iran, or even shooting down Israeli aircraft en route to Iran, in their aftermath, such prospects seem more unlikely.

Emphasis mine. I wish that it were unthinkable, but it’s not.

All In The Family

“Seeking Answers on IG Firing, Sen. Grassley Asks About Possible Role of First Lady’s Office.”

Why should we be surprised? She’s from Chicago, too.

And of course, if a Republican president had fired an IG who was getting too close to a campaign contributor, it would be a huge scandal. But it wasn’t, so it’s not.

If true, this would be Michelle’s Travelgate. Except Hillary didn’t actually suffer that much from Travelgate. Because…you know…she wasn’t a Republican. Of course, it also helped that there were a lot of other Hillary scandals to distract from that one.

No, He Didn’t

Yes, he survived the meteorite hit, but there’s no way that it was going that fast when it hit him:

This 14-year-old boy is Gerrit Blank, and he is probably smiling because he survived a 30,000 mph meteorite hit.

This is annoying, and misleading. Julie Banderas was discussing this on the Fox Report last night, as well, and it’s clear that everyone in the media believes that the object was going that fast when it hit him.

But that was its speed prior to entering the atmosphere, not at the end of its trajectory. Much of it was burned up, and the bit that remained was slowed tremendously from air drag by the time it got down to ground level. It might even have been at terminal velocity by that point, depending on how much energy it lost, which would probably only be a few hundred feet per second at most (depending on the density and size). If it had really been going that fast when it hit him, it would have been a kinetic-energy bomb, and blown his hand off, if not his arm and destroying the rest of his body. Anyway, there’s no way for anyone to know how fast it was really going, though one could make a crude guess if they had the piece and looked at the nature of the injury.

Lacking A Sense Of Irony

A Canadian government censor censors herself:

Any guest who pulls such a stunt deserves to be exposed for it. But a censor like Lynch, claiming to respect free speech and claiming to want a debate? Well the Orwellian hypocrisy was just too delicious for CTV to ignore. Clark opened with a powerful — but professional — timeline of Lynch’s bad behaviour. And he ended his interview with Dufresne with a pretty basic question: would you ever debate Levant? Dufresne pretended he didn’t hear the question — but tens of thousands of CTV viewers did.

The CHRC’s media magic at work!

I don’t understand why Harper’s government tolerates this. Doesn’t she work for him?

Defining Terrorism Down

Well, now we know who the administration considers “terrorists:”

The important part comes at the end: an email exchange between Matthew Feldman, attorney on the President’s Auto Task Force, and Robert Manzo, Chrysler restructuring expert. Manzo is basically pleading to further negotiate to prevent bankruptcy, but Feldman is having none of it. Here is the exchange:

Robert Manzo, Chrysler restructuring expert: “I hope you think it’s worth giving this one more shot.”

Matthew Feldman, attorney on the President’s Auto Task Force: “I’m now not talking to you. You went where you shouldn’t.”

Manzo: “Sorry. I didnt’ mean to say the wrong thing and I obviously did. I was trying oto make sure that if we had to contribute to the solution you knew we had some room. Sorry I did not realize the mistake!!”

Feldman: “It’s over. The President doesn’t negotiate second rounds. We’ve given and lent billions of dollars so your team could manage this properly….And now you’re telling me to bend over to a terrorist like Lauria? That’s B.S.”

A terrorist like Lauria? Lauria represented a teacher’s pension fund in Indiana (among other bondholders), and had the temerity to insist that the government follow contract law.

Yeah, how dare he? And on top of that he had the audacity to point out that he was being muscled by thugs, Chicago style.

Meanwhile, the new director of the DHS says that terrorism doesn’t really exist — its just “human-caused disasters.”

“Retreat Into Apathy”

Mark Steyn:

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” — which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System — or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

And it’s an awfully hard process to reverse, once it “progresses” far enough.

When You’ve Lost Ted Rall, Roseanne Barr

…and Bill Maher, you’ve truly lost un-America:

Obama needs to start putting it on the line in fights against the banks, the energy companies and the healthcare industry. I never thought I’d say this, but he needs to be more like George W. Bush. Bush was all about, “You’re with us or against us.”

Obama’s more like, “You’re either with us, or you obviously need to see another picture of this adorable puppy!”

Can he win re-election without the leftist douchebag vote? The most annoying thing about Maher, of course, is that he slanders libertarians by calling himself one.

Sixty Years

…since 1984:

The Left has tried, and still does spasmodically, to pretend that the novel is not really anti-Soviet. But 1984’s Big Brother is undoubtedly Stalin, and the figure of Goldstein is Trotsky. Orwell had lived through such murderous events as the Communists turning on the Trotskyists and anarchists in the Spanish civil war, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is particularly penetrating to have invented the phrase of the Two Minute Hate to describe the totalitarian mechanism for falsifying public opinion to suit the ends of power. Two Minute Hates occur all the time. Just look at the way the Left switched from supporting Israel to lambasting it, or how the Shah’s pro-American Iran converted overnight into Khomeini’s anti-American Iran.

To travel in old days in Soviet Russia and the Soviet bloc was to find oneself deep in 1984. The hopelessness of daily life was exactly as Orwell had captured it. How sinister it was too, how thoroughly Orwellian. Everyone was against everyone else; under the all-encompassing propaganda about progressiveness there was no communal or social spirit, only the Party. One of the compulsory Intourist or KGB guides once told me proudly that she had renounced her mother for failing to be a Communist. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” Orwell’s imagination had been exactly right.

In light of contemporary events, it’s worth rereading.

The Obama Surprise

Who were the rubes? They were the rubes:

The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be. Candidate Obama looked like a high tech executive – smart, hip, a gadget freak – and he certainly talked pro-entrepreneur. But the reality of the last six months has been very different. One might have predicted that he would use the best tool in his economic arsenal – new company creation and the millions of new jobs those firms in turn create – to fight this recession. But President Obama has instead appeared to be almost exclusively interested in Big Business as the key to economy recovery.

By comparison, almost every move the new Administration has made regarding entrepreneurship seems to be targeting at destroying it in this country. It has left Sarbanes-Oxley intact, added ever-greater burdens on small business owners, called for increasing capital gains taxes, and is now preparing to pile on cap-and-trade, double taxation on offshore earnings, and a host of other new costs. Even Obamacare seems likely to land unfairly on small companies.

Entrepreneurship has been the single most important contributor to the economic health of this country for at least a century now – and if you were going to systematically destroy that vitality, you couldn’t come up with a better strategy than the one Washington has put in place over the last six months. Indeed, you can make the case that the sole contribution the Obama administration has made to entrepreneurship in America to date is to force all of those millions of unemployed people to desperately set up their own businesses in order to survive.

But as he points out (and it’s a long-standing truism), big business has no interest in free markets:

…you may think that the competitive challenge that big tech companies fear most is from other big tech companies. You know: Apple v. Microsoft, HP v. Dell, Cisco v. Juniper, MySpace v. Facebook. But in fact, that isn’t the case. Sure, those are dangerous competitors; but far more threatening is that clever new start-up that seems to appear out of nowhere. That’s the threat that wakes up Fortune 500 tech CEOs at 3 a.m. That little start-up not only competes with you, it can render your entire business – even your entire industry – obsolete and you don’t even see it coming. Think desktop publishing and the printing industry, the iPod and the music industry – and just look at the terror that Twitter seems to be creating at Google and Facebook these days.

Once you understand this dynamic, a lot of the paradoxical recent business behavior in high tech suddenly becomes explicable. For example, why did the big tech companies embrace such regulations as Sarbanes and stock options expensing – even though they would cost them billions of dollars with no obvious gain? And why would they support a Presidential candidate who seemed to have little understanding of, or sympathy for, market capitalism and business?

Because it was the best strategy to crush the start-ups.

And for the most part, that strategy has worked. High tech has only seen a handful of new companies go public in the last five years – compared to hundreds per year before that. Less noticed is that this means most hot new start-up companies, instead of enjoying an IPO and becoming rich enough to compete full-on against the big boys, now can only grow to a certain size then offer themselves up to be bought by the giants. What had once been hugely valuable competition has now been reduced to a farm system for acquisitive mature companies. [And a side benefit has been the near-destruction of the venture capital industry, which big business always described as ‘vulture’ capital because it drew away their most talented employees.]

Now you see why the tech world joined the Obama team early on in the campaign. Not only did Senator Obama seem like their kind of guy, but each camp saw in him the President they wanted. The entrepreneurs thought they were getting a fellow entrepreneur, and big business thought they get a confederate in taking out the competition.

The entrepreneurs were suckers, but this is going to hurt the big guys, too.

ITAR is another example of this phenomenon. It really hurts the small companies disproportionately, because the big companies, like Boeing and Lockmart have a small army of compliance people in place who know how to work the system, and the costs of whom can simply get charged against their government contracts. This is in fact a big advantage of established aerospace contractors in general — that they have ongoing cost-plus contracts against which they can charge for the bureaucracy made necessary by government regulations, whether ITAR, or simply enforcing the FAR, plus they get an IR&D budget funded by the taxpayers. This makes being a startup all the harder, and this administration looks unlikely to do anything to make it any easier.