Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“The Great Vetting Disaster”

4 Comments

Well, this certainly inspires confidennce:

2009 is the anti-2008 for Team Obama. Whereas, last year, the Obama campaign was able to demonstrate its supreme competence at running a campaign, raising money, and using technology to further Barack Obama’s political goals and personal ambitions, once Team Obama moved into the White House, it seemed that its hold on managerial competence disappeared. Thus, we have a Treasury Secretary whose tax delinquencies were not discovered by the Obama vetting system, and who is Home Alone at the Treasury Department because the White House can’t get its nominees confirmed quickly enough to provide the Treasury Secretary the personnel support he needs to deal with the greatest economic crisis since the recession of the early 1980s. The White House’s initial choice for HHS Secretary, Tom Daschle, was himself eliminated because of tax delinquencies. Because of the multiple problems with nominees running into tax problems, the responsibility for vetting over tax issues became concentrated in the White House Counsel’s Office . . . only to discover that White House Counsel Greg Craig has his own tax problems. Two Commerce Secretaries have been forced to withdraw their nominations. Only now is the Senate turning its attention to confirming the nomination of Ron Kirk as U.S. Trade Representative. And in the latest personnel snafu, the selection of Charles Freeman as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Counsel has been withdrawn.

Well, as that astute Chicago politician, Jesse Jackson, said, “Barack ain’t ever run anything but his mouth.”

[Update a few minutes later]

“No one wants to be Obama’s Brownie.”

It’s not surprise that he can’t get good help. I sure wouldn’t want to be part of the team that will be blamed for the disaster that is inevitable from these policies.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s another explanation, from the same comments section (read the post, too) — ethics bends:

He’s a Chicago machine politician, used to associating with the likes of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, and nobody complaining about it. And he got catapulted into the highest office of the land in an unnaturally short time, with a media so in the tank that he wasn’t vetted himself.

Give the guy a break, he’s suffering from the “ethics bends”, all that corruption is coming out in great painful bubbles, instead of gradually seeping out over the course of a long political career.

Seriously, had he reached the White House after a normal political trajectory, as the capstone of a long, long career, he’d have had time to adjust himself to the differing expectations at the federal level, and to shed a lot of baggage. He must be very disoriented right now.

It’s not just a lack of experience. It’s an overabundance of bad experience.

It also means that it may be very tough to find a good NASA administrator (not that it’s ever easy).

[Update a few minutes later]

A crisis of competence. Well, some of us aren’t surprised.

[Update a couple minutes later, from comments at the link.]

His statement about “profit-to-earnings ratios” comes from that same well of ignorance.

Actually, it was even worse than that. The moron said “profits AND earnings ratio”. Not only didn’t the idiot know what a P/E ratio is, he doesn’t know how to translate mathematical operations to English. I’m betting that the idiot messiah was pretty darned awful at mathematical word problems. Frankly, I’d be surprised if the fool understood any math beyond some basic arithmetic.

I’d be willing to bet that’s right. Actually, with all the trillions being tossed around, I wonder even about the basic arithmetic. Of course, it’s hard to know, because he refuses to release his transcripts. There’s certainly no available evidence that he understands anything about business, or math.

But he wants us to take stock advice from him. Because he talks pretty.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Even ObamaweekNewsweek’s Howard Fineman is taking a break from his usual Obama tongue bath, except this part is nuts:

The center usually is the safest, most productive place in politics, but perhaps not now, not in a once-in-a-century economic crisis.

Swimming in the middle, he’s denounced as a socialist by conservatives, criticized as a polite accommodationist by government-is-the-answer liberals, and increasingly, dismissed as being in over his head by technocrats.

“Swimming in the middle”? “Swimming in the freakin’ middle?!“

Only on planet Leftist.

[Update a few minutes later]

And why does Fineman feel a need to declare that The One isn’t a socialist? Methinks the sycophant doth protest too much.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Missed Opportunity

4 Comments

If the Republicans were on the ball, and had the money in the bank, they should look up the parents of the kids who are about to get kicked out of the school that the president’s kids are attending as a result of the Omnibus Bill, and have them plead for a veto of it in front of the camera. Then run the ads.

[Update late evening]

For those who don’t want to follow all the links in the linked article, here is the relevant one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Deconstructing Rush

5 Comments

Jeff Goldstein, on how he learned to stop worrying and love the f-bomb:

if, as I’ve argued, political realism as a strategy is doomed — not because we can’t be more careful with our words, but rather because it is not always rhetorically effective to do so, nor does such care prevent us from being misrepresented, no matter how precise we try to be — what is the alternative? As many pundits will patiently explain to you, ideological purity and idealism doesn’t win elections, so if not pragmatism, what?

To which I reply, pragmatism is fine. But why not use our idealism pragmatically — which is to say, why not make it our strategy to use idealism as our cudgel against the media and the left in such a way that their tactic of misrepresentation and outrage no longer pays dividends? Why not make it our strategy to destroy their tactics — and in so doing, reaffirm the very principles at the heart of classical liberalism?

The fact of the matter is, for all of Limbaugh’s provocation, his statement, having been carefully and purposely misrepresented by the media as a way to demonize him and drive a divide between conservatives and more moderates within the party, has had the rather happy effect of getting us talking and arguing about what we as a movement should do next. And it was precisely his choice of language that baited the press and the left (and, more frightening even, the White House) to engage him, and to force the ideas of conservatism center stage.

We have to continue to fight to take back the media, and the language, regardless of the demagogues, semioticians and word twisters.

[Tuesday morning update]

More lies about Limbaugh. This is as stupid as Harry Reid’s continuing moronic accusations that he disrespected the troops. Kaus offers some advice, which they’ll be too stupid to take:

The whole Begala-Carville coordinated campaign against Limbaugh seems misguided when Obama is supposed to be leading the nation out of crisis (see Warren Buffett’s comments, below). Quite apart from whether it’s a good idea to take one of your smarter opponents and build him up, the campaign seems petty, partisan and poll-driven — not designed to produce any kind of national pulling-together. If Begala weren’t around I’d suspect Chris Lehane of thinking it up.

I too am shocked, shocked, that when Warren Buffet is critical of The One, suddenly no one in the media is interested.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Logical Disconnect

62 Comments

Some of my commenters attempt to make the illogical argument that because the top marginal income tax rate was almost forty percent during the Clinton era that there is no harm in raising it back to that now. Jim Manzi dissects this foolishness. I doubt if they’ll understand it, though.

[Update a few minutes later]

Victor Davis Hanson — Oh What Debts We Will See:

Athens in the fourth century B.C. chose to mint “redheads”, silver coins with bronze cores that were quickly exposed once the patina around the coins’ imprinted busts wore off. Rome did the same thing, and by the fourth century AD simply flooded its provinces with money of little real value. Germany paid off its war debts to France in the 1920s, with deliberately inflated German marks. I lived in Greece during the oil-embargo hyperinflation of 1973, and remember buying individual eggs with three or four inked-in price figures crossed out, as the store-keeper kept upping the price each day. (And I remember farming in the early 1980s when full-strength Roundup herbicide seemed to go from $60 to $70 to $100 a gallon in a single year).

I don’t think any one knows what is quite going on. I recently gave a lecture, and a Wall Street grandee afterwards approached the dais, asking me for advice (me, who could not even turn a profit growing raisins, and was a lousy peddler of family fruit for years at Farmers’ Markets), saying in effect something like the following: “Mr. Hanson—Consider: Real estate bad—not going to put money there when I’m not sure where the bottom is. Stocks worse—had I got out at New Year’s, I’d have thousands more than I do now. Cash pathetic—the interest doesn’t even cover what’s lost to inflation. So what’s left—the dole?”

I had no advice, of course, other than some vague warning that we are in a war against capital, sort of similar to what Sallust and Cicero claim that Catiline and his band of dissolute and broke aristocrats were planning, with his calls for cancellation of debts and redistribution of property.

It seems less than vague to me.

[Evening update]

How to wage a war on business. Any resemblance to current administration policies are purely coincidental, of course.

Administrative, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Are We Serious About Space Policy?

2 Comments

Jeff Foust reports on a forum where that is the topic of discussion. The (unsurprising, or at least it should be to readers of this weblog) answer is, “no.”

Space, at least civil space, is not important, and has not been since the early 1960s. What is more dismaying, though, is that military space is not treated seriously, either, and that really should be considered important.

The panel also doesn’t think much of reviving the Space Council. I agree that the focal point should not be at OSTP, and that space does need a more serious advocate on the National Security Council.

I wonder why Jeff doesn’t quote anyone by name? Was he reporting under restrictions?

[Update in the afternoon]

Apparently, he was. He writes over at Space Politics:

Because of the ground rules of the discussion, none of the comments are attributed to any of the attendees.

I’d be curious to know at least who the attendees were, even if we can’t correlate specific statements with specific attendees. Is that a secret, too?

Also at The Space Review today, a good tutorial on how to tell a launch system from a ballistic missile.

I should note that one point not made here is that it’s actually easier to build a launch vehicle than an effective ballistic missile, if one defines “effective” as being able to hit a precise target, because the latter requires an entry vehicle. Getting into orbit, per se, does not require a precise injection, or heat shields, as long as the resulting trajectory doesn’t intercept the atmosphere.

Finally, Dwayne Day clears up (or at least attempts to clear up) media misconceptions about the Chinese space program.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Jeff provides the list of speakers, though it’s still not clear whether the quotes are from speakers or attendees.