It’s not just Lois Lerner. Apparently, some of the State Department employees responsible for the Benghazi disaster have been punished with a paid vacation.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Stuxnet Leak
The trail leads to the White House.
I’m as shocked as you are, of course. They love to leak when it makes them look good. They only intimidate people into not talking (see Benghazi) when the opposite is the case.
We Need To Burn More Coal
At first glance, it would appear that the largest recent contribution to global warming is clean-air laws. Fortunately, China is continuing to help with their coal plants.
The Middle East
President Obama has had a rude awakening in the Middle East. The region he thought existed was an illusion built on American progressive assumptions about the way the world works. In the dream Middle East, democracy at least of a sort was just around the corner. Moderate Islamists would engage with the democratic process, and the experience would lead them to ever more moderate behavior. If America got itself on the “right side of history,” and supported this hopeful development, both America’s values and its interests would be served. Our relationships with the peoples of the Middle East would improve as they saw Washington supporting the emergence of democracy in the region, and Al Qaeda and the other violent groups would lose influence as moderate Islamist parties guided their countries to prosperity and democracy.
This vision, sadly, has turned out to be a mirage, and Washington is discovering that fact only after the administration followed the deceptive illusion out into the deep desert. The vultures are circling now as American policy crawls forlornly over the dunes; with both the New York Times and the Washington Post running “what went wrong” obituaries for the President’s efforts in Egypt, not even the MSM can avoid the harsh truth that President Obama’s Middle East policies have collapsed into an ugly and incoherent mess.
I wonder if Mead, usually a very measured man, realizes the irony that many of the president’s opponents have impolitely (but not inaccurately) nicknamed him “Bambi.”
And then there’s this, strongly related:
What is the common denominator of his failed foreign policy initiatives (reset with Russia, a new, kinder, gentler Middle East, supposed breakthroughs with China, outreach to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela) and his domestic catastrophes (Obamacare, deficits, huge debts, or chronic unemployment)? In a nutshell, he does not seem to know much about human nature, whether in the concrete or abstract sense. Obama either never held a menial job or ran a business. In lieu of education in the school of hard knocks, he read the wrong, if any, seminal texts at all.
That’s the fundamental problem with Marxists and leftists in general, all the way back to Rousseau. They either completely misunderstand human nature (“the noble savage”) or they completely deny its existence (“the New Soviet Man”).
A Libertarian Moment
Is America having one?
Let’s hope.
Soviet Espionage
…continuing denial, and maleducation, at The Nation.
Shale Gas
…is Rearden metal:
Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.
Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.
It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
We’re Losing The War On (Some) Drugs
Thoughts from George Schultz
Obama’s Unconstitutional Actions
…are worse than Nixon’s.
Yes. Much worse. And what’s even worse is that, unlike Nixon, the media support him in his lawless behavior.
Who Won The Cold War?
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:
Few people have read The Black Book of Communism – which should be taught in our schools, in every grade, in grade-appropriate chunks – but our highs chools boast Howard Zin’s People’s History which is the Soviet view of America; Young Hegelians clubs and hipsters decked in Che Guevara.
The “Well educated” are in fact indoctrinated, taught communist propaganda and syllogisms until they’re UNABLE to think. We now have an administration composed of people like this, who are unable to connect to reality. They might be our first Marxist administration, but they suffer from third generation blight, not having come to their opinions from their own mind, but having been browbeaten into them. They are the good kids, trapped in an illusion from which they can’t break out.
But the d*mned ineradicable fact about communism and its cousin “state capitalism” and the hellish hybrid they’re trying out here is that it doesn’t work. IT NEVER WORKS. It doesn’t work even when instituted by very bright psychopaths. It works even less when instituted by people so indoctrinated they can’t SEE reality.
And it will crash here – hard or soft, with a bang or a whimper. It will crash and it might drag the rest of the world with us into the endless night.
Perhaps liberty will re-arise amidst the wreckage, but I hope we don’t have to get that far.