Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A Roundup Of Reaction

48 Comments

…to the Augustine summary, over at NASA Watch.

[Early morning/late evening update]

I haven’t read the whole thing, but I’ve scanned the intro, to take a break from doing triage on my office before packing it up tomorrow. Two things jump out at me. First:

Can we explore with reasonable assurances of human safety? Human space travel has many benefits, but it is an inherently dangerous endeavor. Human safety can never be absolutely ssured, but throughout this report, it is treated as a sine qua non. It is not discussed in extensive detail because any concepts falling short in human safety have simply been eliminated from consideration.

If the sine qua non of the opening of the New World had been human safety, we would still be in Europe, wondering why we couldn’t return to the Caribbean forty years after Columbus’ first voyage. We would never have opened up the western United States, and we would not have settled California and built an aerospace industry that ultimately got us to the moon. This is a major fail on the part of the panel, for politically correct reasons.

Second, in the “five key questions to guide human spaceflight”:

3. On what should the next heavy-lift launch vehicle be based?

This, to me, is tragic. It is the primary reason that we remain stuck in LEO, forty years after Apollo. Note that the assumption is how should we build, not if we should build, a heavy lifter.

Norm (and I am assuming, based on comments he made in the public hearings, that this was driven by him), you disappoint me. But perhaps I shouldn’t have expected better from the old guard. This flawed assumption lies at the heart of the recommendations. I hope it won’t continue to be a stake in the heart of progress in human spaceflight, but I suspect it will. At least for government human spaceflight. Fortunately, others, who are spending their own money, won’t succumb to this continuing disastrous conventional wisdom.

We’ll see in good time what the administration’s response is.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Green Jobs Illusion

20 Comments

Why Van Jones was the right man for the job:

…let’s not miss the opportunity to point out that Jones’s promotion of “green jobs” was just as dubious, if not as reviled, as his dabblings in 9/11 Trutherism. As James Pethokoukis tweeted: “having a truther in charge of green jobs is a good fit… you need a certain willing suspension of disbelief for both”

To buy into the “green jobs” scam, you must have an unshakeable faith in the ability of the government to create a viable industry from whole cloth, because there is no commercial demand for the services these green-collar workers would provide. We don’t have to guess about the future of green jobs; we can look to the ethanol industry.

They never learn.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The End Of The Soviet Union

11 Comments

…was not the end of communism

It should be apparent by now that Communism never died. The Soviet Union died. Being a Communist, or a neocommunist, is not an intellectual anachronism at all — it is quite the fashion in the academy and our other institutions. Does Charles not realize, for example, that Obama’s friend Bill Ayers — who proudly calls himself “a small ‘c’ communist” — was in 2008 elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of education professors and researchers? (See Sol Stern’s profile of Ayers and education, here). I’m not sure “pathetic” is the right word, but what is a perilous intellectual anachronism is the belief that the communist threat ended 18 years ago.

The Jones incident, moreover, does not indicate that “we had a communist in the U.S. government.” To the contrary, as I argued last night, we have a U.S. government in which Van Jones was quite consciously selected because his views are representative of the president who made him the “green jobs czar.” Van Jones isn’t Alger Hiss. There’s nothing covert about him. He didn’t snooker Obama into bringing him aboard. He is who he is, and that’s why Obama wanted him. Having a Communist in that job was perfect since the “green jobs” initiative is an important part of the hard Left’s agenda to use environmentalism as an additional justification for usurping command of the economy.

In fact, the death of the Soviet Union has actually been a boon for neocommunists. Now, Obama and his fellow travelers like Jones, Ayers, Wright, Klonsky, and ACORN, can spout all the same totalitarian, anti-American, central-planning ideas the hard Left has always pushed, but in the abstract — under such mushy labels as “social justice” and “green jobs.” That is, they are liberated from having to defend the Soviet Empire, which, until 1991, was a living, breathing, concrete example of how horrific these ideas are when put in practice.

Yes, the superficially attractive (to those unfamiliar with human nature or economics) but ultimately disastrous idea lives on in the academy, and now in Washington. And our wonderful media, of course, thinks it’s no big deal, or are even attracted to it, not recognizing it for what it is.

Business, Media Criticism

A Lie Gets Halfway Around The World

5 Comments

Mark Steyn is the victim of shoddy reporting:

As I understand it, what we’re supposed to miss about US newspapers will be the “layers of fact-checking” and rigorous editing. In reality, a significant percentage of American newspapering is little more than provincial wannabes doing New York Times karaoke – which might have made more sense before young Sulzberger drove his paper to junk stock and into the arms of its unlikely Mexican benefactor. Meanwhile, tens of millions of real people hear Rush’s show, but any similarity between the audio and the version that appears in the “newspaper of record” is entirely coincidental.

As for my former colleague in Dublin, too many overseas “bureaus” in Washington boil down to paying someone to relocate halfway round the world, sit in an office at the National Press Building and transcribe The New York Times and Wolf Blitzer’s “Situation Room” all day long. An expensive business model.

Expensive, with a crappy product.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related thoughts from Kaus:

I’ve been waiting for the day when a prominent pol resigns and for print MSM readers it appears to be out-of-the-blue, though everyone on the Web knows the whole story. But for WaPo’s Franke-Ruta and Kornblut, this would be that case. … In any case, more evidence that you can’t find out whats going on by reading the Times.

But you can find out things that aren’t going on, like Mark Steyn saying that Obama is like Saddam and the Dear Leader.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

And He’s Outta There

10 Comments

Right in the middle of holiday weekend. Does this mean that the story goes away with him, or will some intrepid reporter have the temerity to ask the White House on Tuesday how he got there in the first place, and how the vetting process broke down? If it did?

I think that it simply didn’t occur to these creatures like Valerie Jarrett that his viewpoints would be controversial. After all, it’s probably what they believe themselves.

[Update mid morning]

More thoughts from Maguire. And from Scott Johnson:

Jones claimed to have been the victim of a “vicious smear campaign.” Why cave in to such a campaign? In his resignation letter Jones explains: “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” Jones was of course “smeared” with his own words, which proved indeed to be vicious, voluminous and damning.

Jones said he had received encouragement from across the political spectrum to “stay and fight.” I doubt it, but I will concede that I had meant to urge him to stick around and defend himself.

Yes, I’ll miss him now. He was a poster child for this administration.

[Late morning update]

More thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:

Van Jones’ views are now widely known. And as far as anyone can tell reading the newspapers this morning or watching the Sunday shows, this White House and this President have nothing but praise for Jones and think he’s a fine, self-sacrificing, public servant who simply took one for the team.

I can’t think of a more succinct, discrete, example illuminating why Obama’s claims to centrism are a fraud.

It is quite striking.

[Update early afternoon]

A lot of links from Ed Driscoll: Van Goes Under The Bus. I’m sure that the president will say that this isn’t the Van that he knew.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

At Least Discussing Sane Campus Gun Policy

…in my home town of Flint, Michigan. Unfortunately, the usual stupidity prevails.

It’s an interesting marketing issue. Flint has been trying to rise from the GM ashes by becoming a college town, so which policy will attract more students, and their parents? Michigan is (and has been for a few years) a “shall issue” state, and the predictions of the hysterical gun grabbers haven’t panned out. So it will be interesting to see how it all comes out.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The (Non)Feeding Frenzy

25 Comments

…in the media over Van Jones. As someone notes in comments over there, imagine if George Bush had appointed a Klansman who spouted conspiracy theories about the Clintons and called Democrats anal orifices, and put him in charge of thirty billion dollars worth of federal activity, with no confirmation hearings.

[Late afternoon update]

Mickey thinks that the bus is revving its engine. It makes sense for him to be gone on a Friday before a holiday weekend. That will help bury the news.

[Update a few minutes later]

Does Barack Obama understand the odiousness of Trutherism? I’m not sure that he does, or that Democrats do in general. After all, Howard Dean called it “an interesting theory.” And it wasn’t that long ago (and may still be true today) that a majority of Democrats either believed that George Bush knew about the attacks ahead of time, or aren’t sure. Why would he think that a belief that is mainstream in his own party was particularly odious? In fact, I’m sure, given the “progressive” bubble in which he’s spent his entire life, he’s a little perplexed what the big deal is about Van Jones. None of this is news to him, any more than Reverend Wright’s views were. The only thing that shocks him is that anyone else would object.

[Late evening update]

Mark Steyn has some useful thoughts on Truther chique:

Is Van Jones a real Truther or a faux Truther? The White House position is that he’s the latter – hey, he just glanced at it, saw it was some routine impeach-Bush-for-killing-thousands-of-his-fellow-Americans thing, and signed it without reading it; we’ve all been there, right?

Van Jones Trutherism, like Van Jones Communism and Van Jones Eco-Racism Theory, is a kind of decadence: If you really believed 9/11 was an inside job, you’d be in fear of your life. Instead, for a cutting-edge poseur like Jones, it’s a marketing niche, one that gives you a certain cachet with the right kind of people – like, apparently, Barack Obama.

Indeed.