Andrew Moseman (my editor at Popular Mechanics) interviews Jonathan Card of the Space Frontier Foundation.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
President Strawman
I’m listening to Paul Ryan take it to him at the Heritage Foundation. I’d like to see him debate Obama instead of Biden. The Biden debate will probably have to be called for a mercy rule.
[Update early afternoon]
Katrina Trinko has some of the transcript:
Say things like this, and our opponents will quickly accuse you of being, quote, “anti-government.” President Obama frames the debate this way because, here again, it’s the only kind of debate he can win – against straw-man arguments.
No politician is more skilled at striking heroic poses against imaginary adversaries. Nobody is better at rebuking nonexistent opinions. Barack Obama does this all the time, and in this campaign we are calling him on it.
The President is given to lectures on all that we owe to government, as if anyone who opposes his reckless expansion of federal power is guilty of ingratitude and rank individualism.
More at the link.
[Bumped]
The Arab Street And The Mainstream Media
They are both shameful and shameless.
Libya Is Not Just A Tragedy
It’s just part of the larger war:
What are the Libyan government’s options? It can try to appease the opposition by more Islam. But that won’t work really. It can try to appease the opposition by distancing itself from the United States, but given its weakness that won’t work. And it can try to repress the rebels, but since it cannot depend on its own military forces — which are riddled with jihadists — that won’t work either.
That is the real lesson in Libya. For once, Obama took sides against the revolutionary Islamists. We are seeing in Egypt and the Gaza Strip that appeasement doesn’t work; we are seeing in Libya that engaging in conflict has its high costs, too. Obama claims to have “liberated” Libya, but to many Libyans he has enslaved it to infidels.
So what next? American military aid to the Libyan government and U.S. military advisors? An endless war against the jihadists? And what if the government in Libya, which is pretty fragile and cannot fully depend on its own military, starts to fall? In Somalia, the local al-Qaeda branch didn’t win only because Ethiopia and other African nations sent in thousands of troops. In Bahrain — a complicated situation in which there is a mistreated Shia population whose opposition has both moderates and radicals — the government was only saved by Saudi troops and against the will of the White House.
Treating what has happened in Libya as an isolated tragedy misses the point. Viewing it as generalized proof of Obama’s terrible policy doesn’t get us to the solution. There is a battle going on in the Middle East that will continue for decades. Obama has largely helped the enemy side. In Libya, while he gave some help to the Islamists, his basic policy supported the moderates for once. Now the price must be paid or one more country will fall to revolutionary Islamist rule and U.S. influence and credibility will decline even further.
This is a war, not a misunderstanding. It is a battle of ideologies and a struggle for control of state power, not hurt feelings over some obscure video.
And it’s a war that the administration pretends doesn’t exist, and (like all foreign wars) certainly doesn’t want to win.
Read all, it also has a well-justified criticism of our anti-Israel foreign service.
[Update a while later]
Mark Steyn: An act of war, not a movie protest.
The JournoList
…lives on.
I know it’s old news now, but I was busy earlier in the week. I’d like to know the name of every reporter Obama campaign surrogate involved.
Leaving A Mark
As Glenn Reynolds has said for years, a repeat of the Carter administration was a best-case scenario. Will this administration’s epitaph be bloody handprints?
[Update a while later]
Betraying Free Speech
…by standing up for it:
William Saletan, I am fairly confident, would be quite effusive in describing all the manifold ways in which the Christian mind is “closed” and “hidebound” and “haunted by superstition.” He would, I’m reasonably certain, be quite in favor of any artistic project which undermined the foundations of Christian thought.
And yet, when we turn to fundamentalist Islam, he becomes… a censor. He becomes not an agent of the Inquisition per se, but a bit of a fanboy of it.
And why? Why the anger directed towards someone who is doing what Saletan would almost certainly praise were it directed at any other religion?
I think I know. There is a line of magnificent wisdom in the film The Spanish Prisoner (by David Mamet). It is spot-on about human nature.
The circumstances of the quote are that a young financial wizard has created a “Process” which is worth, literally, trillions. However, it was created as work-for-hire. He created it, but the company owns it. And he’s wondering if the company will actually compensate him for it, as they have promised.
Steve Martin gives him the bad news (paraphrased): “I think if they have a moral obligation to you but not a legal one you will begin to find them behaving cruelly towards you. You will find them treating you poorly, isolating you, speaking badly about you when you are not present. Even as they decide to stiff you out of what they owe you, they will compound that with bad manners and worse intent. They will not be apologetic about it; they will become increasingly hateful towards you.”
The reason is this: When people know they have a moral obligation towards someone which they do not feel like honoring, for reasons of personal interest, or personal safety, or personal political agenda, they feel awfully bad about themselves for not honoring the moral obligation. They feel awfully bad that they are ignoring a moral obligation in favor of their own personal interests.
And people do not like feeling bad about themselves.
So what people do, is this: They begin demonizing the person to whom they have an inconvenient moral obligation, convincing themselves that he is in fact the Bad Guy because, hey, he makes them feel bad. So he must be the bad guy.
Put more simply, people like this are cowards. And the hypocrisy of these people who hate religion in all forms, other than Islam, is sickening.
Obama’s Touchdown Dance Over Osama
…is over. And the emperor is publicly defrocked just in time for the election.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“Good thing we don’t have that dumb cowboy in charge….”
[Update a while later]
Obama’s great Islamist delusion comes home to roost.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The Germans are on to the fraud, too:
US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins. Like no president before him, he tried to win over the Arab world. After some initial hesitation, he came out clearly on the side of the democratic revolutions. … In this context, he must accept the fact that he has snubbed old close allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military. And now parts of the freed societies are turning against the country which helped bring them into being. Anti-Americanism in the Arab world has even increased to levels greater than in the Bush era. It’s a bitter outcome for Obama.
Gee, some of us were saying that four years ago…
Pro-American Rallies
Lileks Weighs In
She doesn’t hate Jews. How could she? Nobody hates Jews. She just wants their homeland dismantled and its residents scattered to – well, somewhere. Take it up with Germany, she notes. Fiddle-de-dee.
Read the comments, as the right-thinking folk of the West line up to applaud her. No doubt some of these people posted it as a Facebook update, leaned back from the keyboard, and felt that rush you get when you know you’ve finally shed some archaic inhibition that kept you from doing what you wanted to do.
It’s okay. You were fooled. You were misled. No one hates the Jews. As for the Yids, the Queers, the lower forms of life known as women – it’ll all sort itself out once the millstone of Oppression is lifted from the breast of the Oppressed.
So that’s what we’re supposed to believe: good will abounds in the world. It flows from the human heart in unstanchable quantities, but now and then things happen. Bad things. Someone makes a movie. Someone dances in public. Someone sits with his wife in a Pakistan McDonald’s. The adults have to step in and make things clear. Calls have to be made. Speech has to be ceased; videos have to be blocked. If you don’t jazz the rabble they’ll come around. Any day now.
Any day.
But yesterday was not that day, and when the mob came to the embassy, it seems there were no Marines to defend the place. Perhaps that’s for the best. In the blinkered, jingo-sodden mindset of Red America, the Marines might have thought weapons free, and mowed the lot of them down. Among the dead would have been a young man – not particularly political, really, caught up in the excitement, really, righteously offended by the existence of a contrapositive argument existing in ones and zeroes on a server in America. His grieving parents would tell the world he had no weapon, he was not a terrorist. Yet they shot him down. Within hours the story would have the Marines outside the gates firing on people who had assembled to list a legitimate grievance – nevermind the security camera footage; the Jews are devilishly good at faking that – and the story would morph in a trice from an act of dogma-sodden barbarism to a tale of conflicting stories that underlines the difficulties of reconciling two sides.
Because the existence of two sides proves the equivalence of two sides. In the larger meta-sense of it all.
As always, read all.