Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Houston, We Have An Earmark Problem

Over at Tea in Space web site, the Senate Launch System earmark is explained:

Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about systems engineering than NASA employees and contractors? Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about acoustical flight dynamics of SRBs than NASA employees and contractors? Do the senators who authored this language have more knowledge about the inherent risks and safety of SRBs than NASA employees and contractors?

They’re no rocket scientists.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

How Far Is Egypt…

3 Comments

…from starving?

This isn’t going to end well. Revolutions in countries with large masses of illiterates rarely do, and the naive coverage of the situation, with hopeful talk of an “Arab spring,” has been appalling.

[Early afternoon update]

Things are falling apart in Egypt pretty rapidly. As Michael Totten says, the good guys are vastly outnumbered. And this administration has no plan.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Let’s Keep Our Focus Here, Folks

5 Comments

It’s the birthers that are crazy! Pay no attention to these people:

Rhodes is lecturing the conservatives that she has the “facts” that George W. Bush and his administration knew that Osama bin Laden was cooling his heels in Abbotabad for years. She’s embraced the full-crazy Michael Moore theory that Bush really had no interest in justice for Osama

Yes, the BusHitler wanted to make sure that his successor would get credit for the capture. Riiiiigggghhht.

[Update a few minutes later]

The reluctant president?

It’s not just his postmodern worldview that suggests this reluctance. It is the discombobulated aftermath of the killing, the weirdly botched reportage featuring such events as cabinet members in the situation room supposedly watching a (we learned) non-existent streaming video of the action and the statement that bin Laden — who had been under surveillance for months from a CIA safe house — was living in a million dollar mansion.

That was dialed down within a day or two to $250,000 and then revealed, in videos, to be close to a slum. In fact, OBL’s squalid living conditions made the hated Guantanamo seem like the Four Seasons. If the SEALs had taken him alive, it would have been an upgrade.

Indeed, it was those SEALs that were the only ones who performed their part with professionalism. Everything else seemed ad hoc, as if thrown together at the last moment after, one guesses, various parties finally convinced, or even forced, the president to act. There was no preparation for the aftermath, no apparent plan of how to inform or not inform the public of this cataclysmic event when such a decision was in many ways as important as the action itself. What resulted was an embarrassing blabbermouth display of public contradiction. Some of this can be justified by the fog of war, but not to the extent we saw. Something more was at work and I think it was a reluctant president.

It looks like it to me, too. And as noted, the death of bin Laden isn’t the end of the war, or the beginning of the end. At best, as Churchill said in a different context, it is the end of the beginning.