Egypt is looking more like it every day.
Smart diplomacy.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Ghost Steel
…in China. This seems kind of bad to me.
Obama’s Leadership Vacuum
As revealed by Bob Woodward’s book.
Woodward also reveals the degree to which the White House confounded its allies. (Rep.Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) was nonplussed when he discovered that the “administration didn’t seem to have a strategy. It was unbelievable. There didn’t seem to be any core principles.”) This is a man who creates chaos by creating a leadership vacuum.
Third, the degree to which Obama frustrated his main negotiating partner, Boehner, is rather breath-taking. One minute he dangles Medicare reform (including increasing the retirement age) and assures Boehner that he understands tax reform for structural entitlement reforms are the heart of the deal ( “I got it. I hear it.”) The next he is striding into the press room to excoriate the Republicans. (Woodward notes that for all his purported public speaking prowess he spewed a great deal of double-talk. On the July 11 press conference, Woodward writes, “It was classic Obama. You had to listen very carefully and read the transcript several times to spot the inconsistencies.” )
Even Negotiations 101 were beyond Obama’s comprehension. Boehner was flabbergasted Obama insisted on daily meetings, “All we were going to do was nick everybody and irritate everyone and not accomplish anything.”
And Bob Woodward is no conservative.
How Gaia Replaced God
A review of a new book on the global warming fraud:
What will especially raise readers’ ethical hackles are his disclosures of duplicity at what should be the most credible institutional levels in ensuring that counter-claims to the received wisdom are suppressed.
For a particularly egregious example of bad faith in communicating with the public, Solway cites a 2009 University of Illinois survey concluding that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. But the methodology of the survey was grossly corrupt. Of the 10,257 respondents, 10,180 demurred from the consensus. They were summarily rejected, even though included amongst them were solar scientists, meteorologists, physicists, and other scientific experts. Seventy-five of the remaining 77 respondents agreed with the proposition that global warming is caused by humans and voilà! That equals 97.4%. In fact, only .008% of the respondents concurred with the hypothesis. This is intellectual fraud of breathtaking arrogance, yet it is only one of a slew of truth-traducing offenses Solway has amassed.
How do academics and other global-warming stakeholders justify their complicity in manufacturing consent? Solway explains it as a form of cognitive dissonance of the type one often finds in religions and triumphalist ideologies, where ends are privileged over means. In his chapter on environmentalism as religion, Solway explains how Gaia, the earth’s divine avatar, replaced God in our secular age.
Environmentalism has been transmogrified from a wholesome movement to make the earth a healthier and cleaner habitat for human beings into an antihumanist, eco-worshipping cult, where man’s footprint anywhere at all is perceived as inherently toxic.
Yup. And the public schools are propagandizing our kids in this new religion.
Our President’s Priorities
The Mad Tea Party
A justifiably harsh review of the latest space-policy antics on Capitol Hill.
Romney’s Latest “Gaffe”
Like many, I can’t figure out what was so terrible about Romney speaking the truth about the mooching class. Most of them don’t even vote (fortunately).
[Update a while later]
More crazy talk from Mitt Romney:
Concluding that the Palestinians remain “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel,” the US presidential candidate endorsed a strategy of maintaining the status quo. “You move things along the best way you can,” he said. “You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem.”
As long as we’re releasing video of candid candidates, I’m still curious to know what the LA Times is hiding about Khalidi’s birthday party. Perhaps a toast to the “destruction and elimination of Israel”?
The Difference Between Libya And Egypt
This makes sense:
Let’s be clear. Libya was the only Arabic-speaking country — maybe Iraq a few months ago — where the United States could have taken over protection without any political consequences. It is a real client state. And its security forces, being so new and so fully penetrated by the enemy, are probably the least competent. In contrast, when they let you get beaten up or overrun in Egypt, that’s on purpose.
So I wonder whether a serious investigation would discover that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided to show trust in Muslim allies — make them feel better about themselves, prove the United States wasn’t a bully but a real nice friend — and that led to the deaths of the Americans.
I don’t wonder much at all. And yes, the president did inadvertently speak the truth; Egypt is no longer an ally in any useful sense of the word. Thanks to him.
But if he’s reelected, they’ll continue to get their hundreds of millions in aid.
A Candidate Who Made Political Attacks Hours After Islamist Violence
Back in 2007. I don’t recall the press deciding that the story was Obama “jumping the gun.”
Comparing Barack Obama To Margaret Thatcher
the Egyptian president demands the arrest of an obscure American who made an unseen film. And whaddayaknow? Next thing that happens, back in the land of the free, a large posse of heavily armed officers descends on his apartment at midnight so that he can be “voluntarily” taken into custody for alleged “probation violations” – because, as everyone knows, in civilized societies breach-of-probation orders are always served at midnight on a weekend when the dark is so much more conducive to persuading householders to “volunteer”.
Look at Jonah’s post immediately below; look at the picture. What a pity Ambassador Stevens didn’t enjoy the same level of “protection” as Mr Nakoula. Why, if only the United States could bring the same amount of firepower to bear in its Benghazi compound as it brings to a probation-violation arrest in Cerritos. But it’s all about priorities, isn’t it?
Any curiosity about that? Apparently not, judging from Scarborough’s nothing-to-see-here tweets.
Jim Bennett compares Mrs Thatcher’s response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Rushdie fatwa with Obama’s to the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands. Salman Rushdie had been a vicious critic of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister – he called her “Mrs Torture” – but Her Majesty’s Government has provided him with safe houses and Special Branch protection for almost a quarter-century. By contrast, within 72 hours of Morsi’s demands, Mr Nakoula is in a jail cell – “rounded up at midnight by brownshirted men for making a movie that embarrasses El Presidente“.
I want to know who ordered the FBI to the house.
[Update a few minutes later]
An evil errand:
The essential task of diplomacy is to preserve the security and stability of the international system. By affirming that the “trigger” for the violence in Muslim countries was the conduct of private people in the United States, what the administration has done is to make its international relations officially subject to private conduct. But few principles could be more dangerous for the international system.
A main reason we maintain diplomatic practice is precisely to immunize international relations from popular disruptions. The wall between the U.S. government and protected speech here at home must be as inviolable as the wall between U.S. embassies and the Arab street. Indeed, they are the same wall, meant to accomplish the same separation.
For the U.S. government to try to manage the social psychology of perpetually aggrieved Arabs by interfering in constitutionally protected private conduct is not just a fool’s errand. It is an evil errand, for it makes our government the tool of enemies who seek our submission. And it ignores the very dangerous development we are witnessing, which is the apparent breakdown of our ability to maintain safe embassies in the Muslim world. That breakdown is an institutional failure of other governments, and of our own. It has absolutely nothing to do with any spoofs of any deity, nor with whatever dumb reason may be motivating hateful people to get violent on the Arab street.
Appalling.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Middle East’s peculiar institution:
The past week’s unrest (and the earlier Mohammed-cartoon riots and all the rest) represent the Islamic attempt at a Dred Scott decision — i.e., in both cases sweeping away rules (whether the Missouri Compromise prohibitions on slavery or the First Amendment guarantee of free speech) that seek to limit the spread of the peculiar institution in question. The analogy would appear pretty strong: Just as post offices in the South were prohibited from distributing anti-slavery material, web sites in the Middle East may not question the historicity of the Koran. Just as a mob murdered abolitionist publisher Elijah P. Lovejoy in a free state, filmamker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim in Amsterdam.
And it’s no coincidence that the partisan reactions to these challenges are the same. On the Republican side, minority factions want rollback, while the dominant share want containment, secure “in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Likewise, a faction of Democrats actively promotes or promoted slavery and Islamism, while the rest were/are clueless appeasers, failing to understand that eventually we had to become all one thing, or all the other.
An interesting analogy.