Category Archives: Media Criticism

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

A Deadly Outbreak Of Scrutiny

And the president’s team can’t contain it:

While Smith and others work around the clock to quarantine the virus, Axlerod and his team remain deep beneath the White House in a specially constructed containment laboratory, racing to find a cure before it has a chance to wipe out Washington as we know it. Although all their experiments have thus far proven unsuccessful, Axlerod refuses to concede.

“If I’ve learned anything in this job, it’s that hope is a strategy,” he said, wiping flopsweat from his combover.

“For instance, maybe Joe Biden will find a cure Wednesday night,” he added.

Hope springs eternal.

Business, Media Criticism, Space

More On The SpaceX Anomaly

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…from Alan Boyle. I don’t think this is quite right, though:

What caused the engine’s sudden pressure release, which was apparently strong enough to blow off the fairing?

I think this is a misstatement of the issue. I could be wrong, because we’re still awaiting clarification from SpaceX, but my understanding is that when they shut the engine down, and there was no pressure field coming from the nozzle, the differential pressure resulting from Max Q resulted in it “imploding” inward and breaking off (and perhaps taking the nozzle with it, but that’s less clear). All that is clear is that SpaceX claims that the powerhead itself wasn’t damaged, because they continued to receive telemetry from it.

I should note that if this is the case, it eliminates any earlier concerns about the upper-stage engine causing a catastrophic failure, though questions remain about about why Orbcomm is in the wrong orbit. This is clearly a second-stage issue.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s the current story from Joe Pappalardo at Popular Mechanics. I’ll probably be elaborating on it after getting more info from SpaceX.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Is it the end, after four and a half long years, and not just a midsummer night?

You may remember the plot. Titania, queen of the fairies, has been placed under a spell by Oberon with the help of the mischievous Puck. It has caused her to fall in love with a cloddish man named Bottom, who has in turn been placed under a spell that has turned his head into that of an ass. Later on she receives the antidote that magically undoes the spell. Looking at the creature she formerly adored, she is now not only repelled, she wonders how it was that she could have ever been so thoroughly fooled:

TITANIA: My Oberon! what visions have I seen! Methought I was enamour’d of an ass.

OBERON: There lies your love.

TITANIA: How came these things to pass? O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!

We in this country have had many kinds of presidents, good and bad, beloved and detested. But have we ever before had a president whose career and persona have been based to such an enormous extent on a carefully constructed narrative that in turn rests on weaving a spell over a charmed public? And was the antidote finally administered last Wednesday night, at the hands of that not-so-very-Puckish guy, Mitt Romney?

Let’s hope so. For those of us never bought in, it’s been a long nightmare.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Ruh Roh

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GM may yet have to go through a real bankruptcy:

Well, what do you know, the Obama Administration didn’t reveal all the details to the judge. Is anyone surprised that this gang of Chicago thugs decided that the judge didn’t need to know the sweetheart deal that would save their union buddies?

It sounds like Judge Gerber is ready to reopen the whole thing, essentially forcing GM into a real bankruptcy, including having to pay back the $27 billion to the Treasury… which, given that they only have about $30 billion on hand, could spell the end of GM.

Or at least the end of the sweetheart deal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Journalistic Hate Speech

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…from Lara Logan:

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

There’s an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Guess that a brutal gang rape can have the same effect.

But hey, it’s not the Muslims’ fault they’re so misogynistic and rapey and stuff. It’s just the way they were raised. We have to have sympathy for them.

Seriously, this should be serious debate fodder for Romney, in both debates, but particularly the final one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Problem With The Dems’ Post-Debate Spin

9 Comments

This has struck me as bizarre as well:

The Democrats also don’t seem to have fully considered what their excuses are communicating about Romney’s agenda. Romney advanced a series of principles and policies in the debate, and rather than argue that these are bad for the country, the Democrats are basically arguing that Romney’s ideas are too good to be true—so good, moderate, and sensible that they couldn’t really be Mitt Romney’s, and therefore that Romney is not telling the truth about his agenda. These charges of dishonesty aren’t just false (though they are false), they’re also downright strange. A Republican candidate stands before 60 million voters and commits to an agenda and his opponent responds that this isn’t really his agenda, and that voters should instead look to Democratic attack ads and liberal think-tank papers to learn what the Republican is proposing. That’s the strategy?

One explanation for this bizarre (though surely temporary) breakdown on the left would have to be what psychologists call projection. On Face the Nation, David Axelrod said Romney “walked away from his record” in the debate. On Thursday, the president himself said “The man onstage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year, and that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year.” Walking away from his record and trying not to be held accountable for his unpopular decisions—does that sound like anyone you know?

The real devastation to the Democrats’ campaign from the debate was that it not only blew up their strategy (on which they spent many months and millions of Chinese campaign donations over the summer) of portraying Romney as a coal-miners’-wife-killing, likes-to-fire-people, dog-torturing plutocrat, and spinning tall tales about his proposals, but it also destroyed both their and the media’s credibility. Axelrod is basically saying at this point, “Who do you believe about Mitt Romney, us, or your lying eyes”? Some in the media will try to continue to help them, but they know that their own credibility is finally at stake in a very real way. They’ve reached the point at which they have to come up for a little air from the Obama tank if they don’t want to lose whatever little semblance of objectivity they might still have among the low-attention types.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Obama campaign’s post-debate negativity shows that he has nothing to say. And they’ll say it loudly no doubt, on Thursday and at the next debate with Romney.