Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Race Obsession

63 Comments

…of Judge Sotomayor:

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

I would not wish to be a member of what she termed in the speech the “old-boy network” in a case in her chambers pitted against a self-identified “Latina.” Indeed, if one were to substitute the word “white” for “Latina” in the speech, it would be rightly derided as a classical display of racialist chauvinism.

One of the many and enduring lies of the Obama campaign was that it was going to usher in a post-racial America.

[Update a few minutes later]

A relevant passage from the book about this kind of stuff:

You might say it’s outrageous to compare the current liberal program to help minorities with the poisonous ideology of fascism and Nazism. And I would agree if we were talking about things like the Holocaust or even Kristallnacht. But at the philosophical level, we are talking about categorical ways of thinking. To forgive something by saying “it’s a black thing” is philosophically no different from saying “it’s an Aryan thing.” The moral context matters a great deal. But the excuse is identical. Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment for “good” reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you’re standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it. One last point about diversity. Because liberals have what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision,” they assume everyone sees things through the same categorical prism. So once again, as with the left’s invention of social Darwinism, liberals assume their ideological opposites take the “bad” view to their good. If liberals assume blacks—or women, or gays—are inherently good, conservatives must think these same groups are inherently bad.

This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words— because there’s nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives—and other non-liberals—on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence is a case in point. The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright—they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency. If we maintain our understanding of political conservatism as the heir of classical liberal individualism, it is almost impossible for a fair-minded person to call it racist. And yet, according to liberals, race neutrality is itself racist. It harkens back to the “social Darwinism” of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the fittest.

The notion that it is “racist” to oppose quotas is a perfect example of this kind of doublethink.

[Tuesday morning update]

She’s not a racist, she’s a racialist. I agree that she shouldn’t be “borked,” but she has to be soberly questioned on this sort of thing. Republicans probably can’t stop the appointment, but they can make it very unpopular, and something that people will remember in the voting booth a year and a half from now.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

So How’s That “Stimulus” Working Out?

17 Comments

Like this:

…thanks to Barack Obama and democrats, the US Unemployment rate is worse today than if they never would have passed their stimulus package. The Obama Administration predicted the unemployment rate with and without President Obama’s stimulus package, the one that is supposed to “create or save” 3 million jobs.

Unfortunately, the red line shows the actual trend since the Stimulus was passed.

It wasn’t stimulus, it was scamulus. And it’s scandalous. Or it would be if we had a press that was a watchdog, rather than a lapdog, when Democrats are in power.

[Afternoon update]

Andy McCarthy noted Austan Goolsby’s dancing around this issue this morning, with two left feet:

I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee didn’t resort to the administrations’s blather about “saving or creating jobs,” but he did repeat its fustian about how last month’s loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don’t recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?

Because they’re economically clueless, and willing to drive the economy deeply into a ditch if it will expand and entrench their political power?

[Monday morning update]

More thoughts from Stephen Green:

Let’s pretend for a moment that, god forbid, you break your arm. And somehow you end up with a team of doctors all trained at Obama University. As you lie there on the table in the ER, one doctor treats your arm by banging on the unbroken one with a ball-peen hammer. The second doctor takes the unusual course of setting your hair on fire. And the third one uses leaches.

Undeterred by your arm’s stubborn refusal to set, soon the doctors start blaming one another. And even though all of them are doing nothing but compounding your injury, none will take any blame. In fact, the louder you scream, the harder they go to work on you.

That, apparently, is what’s going on in the West Wing these days. Our economy is being managed by Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard.

It’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

[Bumped]

General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

On Pseudonymity

21 Comments

There’s been a little kerfuffle in the “left-right” blogosphere this weekend over the “outing” of a pseudonymous blogger.

While I sympathize (or is the right word these days “empathize“?) with Ed Whelan’s frustration at being publicly attacked by someone who wants to lead a dual on-line/off-line life (and ignoring the incivil nature of many of the comments over at Obsidian Wings), I think that (former pseudonymous) blogger Jonathan Adler has the better part of the argument.

I would also say that I agree that there is an important distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous blogging. The former establishes an identity and a reputation that must be both established, and upheld. After a while, people will respect, or not, posts or comments from such a person, regardless of whether or not they know the real name/profession/location, etc. An anonymous commenter/blogger, on the other hand, has the potential to be a drive-by arsonist, and many are. In the space Internet world, Tommy Lee Elifritz is perhaps the best example of this, who changes his nom de plume more often than he probably changes his underwear, at places like Space Politics, NASA Watch and Rockets’n’Such. Of course, in his case, the vile style is quite distinctive.

Anyway, from a personal perspective, I’ve always blogged under my real name, for better or worse. In some cases, it’s been for the worse. I won’t name names, but I know for a fact that I have lost consulting work and been blackballed by parts of the industry because of my writing on the net under my own name (the proximate cause was the LA Times debate that I had with Homer Hickam), prominently noted to industry insiders, who might otherwise not have noticed it, by NASA Watch. Thanks, Keith…

Note that this wasn’t over my “right wing” (a phrase that never fails to amuse) politics, but specifically about my space policy blogging. This undoubtedly cost me many thousands of dollars in income since then, and ultimately resulted in a blogging plea for work last summer (one that ultimately resulted in consulting employment that undid at least some of the personal economic damage, so blogging has some value). This isn’t a complaint, but simply a statement of how the world works.

Perhaps, had I been blogging pseudonymously, this wouldn’t have happened. But as others in the most recent discussion have pointed out, one can only maintain pseudonymity for so long, until one is “outed,” because the more one reveals on the blog (and if one is a serious blogger, much is eventually revealed), diligent people can figure it out, and if they think it in their interest, reveal it to others. And of course, had I been a pseudonymous blogger, I wouldn’t have gotten the LA Times gig to begin with. Who wants to read Homer Hickam debating someone who won’t use their own name?

Anyway, when I started this endeavor, my motto was “to thine own self be true.” I’ve always tried to do that on this blog, consequences (apparently) be damned, and I’d like to assure what few readers I have that I’ll continue to do so.

[Monday morning update]

Heh. “I’ve looked at a bunch of the sites that have posted on the Blevins affair, and their anonymous commenters are running heavily against Ed for some reason.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hating Bush

15 Comments

…loving Castro. It’s all good:

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

So, who could blame him for spying for a communist dictator?

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

More History Lessons For The President

2 Comments

From Michael Barone and Frank Tipler.

It makes me all the more curious to see his college transcripts. Did he even take a course in history? And what’s really appalling is that it isn’t just him — there are apparently no fact checkers in the White House itself.

And Victor Davis Hanson says that the president reminds him of himself. A much younger, and more naive himself.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama’s message of weakness:

The speech…impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.'” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.

This reminds me of the old The Simpsons episode about the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way. There’s the Reagan way, the Carter way, and the Obama way. The latter is like the Carter way, but way faster. We’re not even half a year into the presidency.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Show Us How It Works

31 Comments

Virginia Postrel says do Medicare first:

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what “better management” looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it’s making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.

Because they think we’re rubes. And judging by the voting results last fall, many of us are.

This reminds me of the old Soviet joke (that I’m sure I’ve related at this blog, perhaps more than once, but it remains appropriate). A teacher is lecturing schoolchildren on the brilliance of Karl Marx. A kid raises his hand, and says, “Teacher, was Marx truly a great scientist?” She beams and nods, and declares him the greatest scientist in the history of mankind. “Well,” he went on, “then why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”

[Saturday afternoon update]

Peter Orszag has responded to Virginia’s question. Hail the blogosphere.

I find this quite telling:

Medicare First–changing Medicare and waiting to see how it works before messing around with the rest of the health care system–won’t work politically.

You don’t say…

Some people might think that cause to rethink. But not these people.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The First “Progressive” President

7 Comments

A warning to modern “progressives” to be careful what they wish for:

I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.

Oh, and I’m not thinking of George W. Bush, but another “W” – actually “WW”: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.

President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.

That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue – today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.

The record should give sober pause to anyone who’s mesmerized by the progressive promise.

But they don’t even understand their own intellectual history.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Thoughts On The Economy

5 Comments

Half full, or half empty?

I was surprised that no administration officials were on the business news channels this morning. That is highly unusual for Jobs Day. Maybe they are afraid of the following sequence of questions:

1. Is the economy recovering? (They would like to answer this one, “Tentatively yes. We’re seeing positive signs, but there’s a long way to go.”)
2. If so, is the economy recovering because of the stimulus? How can you claim that it is if only $40-ish billion has gone out the door so far?
3. Or are the green shoots growing just because it’s springtime? Is the less worse economic news primarily a result of financial institutions raising capital and the passage of time?

In addition to being inefficient and wasteful, the stimulus was poorly timed. By deferring to congressional desires to shovel taxpayer funds to slow-spending infrastructure projects, the administration got a stimulus law that isn’t helping GDP growth now, and won’t have a quantitatively significant effect until 2010. The administration is in a tough spot — if the economy is not healing, then at some point the president will take the blame. If instead the economy is healing before the stimulus takes effect, then maybe the stimulus was unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Gee, it’s not like nobody predicted this months ago when the fool bill was passed without anyone having a chance to read it.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

More On The “Student Of History”

5 Comments

Michael Ledeen points out more alternate history from the president’s speech:

On the other hand, there were so many errors of history that I was left wondering if there is anyone in the White House that checks facts. “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” But the Muslims had been driven out of Spain by the time of the Inquisition. The Inquisition was Catholic, after all. What was he thinking? And even if he was thinking about an earlier epoch, the so-called Golden Age, “tolerance” is hardly the right word. Yes, non-Muslims were permitted to live, provided that they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their rulers. Yes, Jews were better off in Muslim lands than in Christian areas during the Middle Ages. But “toleration” it wasn’t. One of my best professors used to argue that the word, in its contemporary sense, only began to make sense in the seventeenth century.

He credited Muslims for inventions of others, from the magnetic compass to algebra to pens, arches, and even to printing. It’s as if there were no ancient Chinese inventions, and the Romans had to await the Prophet before they could build the Pantheon. And someone really should tell him that printing came from the Orient, was rejected in Muslim domains, and then developed in Europe. It was introduced into the Middle East in the 15th century by Jews, who were not permitted to publish in Arabic. So the first printing press in the region was brought by Jews who then published in Hebrew.

The absolute worst part of the speech was the mush about Iran. He could have talked about the great Persian contributions to Western culture, or credited Cyrus the Great for issuing the first known document dealing with human rights. He didn’t do that (Cyrus wasn’t a Muslim, after all). Instead, he regretted American meddling in Iran in 1953, and then moved on to assure the mullahs that they were fully entitled to have a (peaceful) nuclear program. As if nobody knew (Bushitlercheney had made the same point, let us not forget). Not a word about Iranian killers around the world. Not a word about the dreadful repression of the Iranian people. Not a word about any possible consequences if, as everyone expects, Iran builds atomic bombs.

That’s because he expects there to be none. I suspect that the Israelis have a different idea.