Category Archives: Political Commentary

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

It’s Definitely Hitler

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Richard Littlejohn tries his hand at my game:

This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for today, May 1st, 1945, read by Alvar Liddell. Confusion continues to surround the last moments of Adolf Hitler, who died yesterday in his bunker in Berlin.

Incredibly, the world’s most-wanted man had been living in the heart of the capital of the Third Reich, in plain sight of millions of Germans who maintain they were not supporters of the Nazis and had no knowledge of the Fuhrer’s crimes again humanity.

It’s not bad, but the biggest problem with it is that we actually had no knowledge of Hitler’s fate that early. I don’t think that the west discovered what had happened to him until November, and in the interim there were many rumors that he was alive and regrouping with other diehards in some last bastions in Germany (this also helped feed the Werwolf movement). My version has the history much more accurately.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Does Eric Holder Still Have His Job?

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The gun running scandal in Mexico just gets worse and worse. Of course, I’m amazed that he was confirmed in the first place. The Republicans shouldn’t have rolled over the way they did, even if they didn’t have the votes.

[Late morning update]

Here’s more from Michelle Malkin.

Also, what did he know, and when did he know it? Just how much damage could this do to the administration?

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Honoring Osama

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The Washington Times is wondering the same thing I did:

All of this goes to show that President Obama is walking a fine line in what he wants two different groups to understand about bin Laden’s burial. There are those who question why a millionaire mass murderer who was disavowed as practicing a reputedly inauthentic version of Islam received an Islamic funeral. Sea burial itself is an American honor for which only service members, their dependents or outstanding U.S. citizens are eligible. This group is to trust that the decisions made by the Obama administration are the correct, “appropriate” ones and stop asking impertinent questions.

Meanwhile, the other group is subtly being courted with the emphasis on “conformance to Islamic requirements” throughout administration briefings. By reiterating, as Mr. Brennan did at least seven times in his Monday briefing, that the burial was done according to Islamic requirements, he has communicated that the President is more concerned about placating the feelings of Muslim extremists than closure for the American people. Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks who want to see photos of bin Laden’s corpse must be satisfied with a presidential victory lap at Ground Zero, while radical Islamists can be comforted by Mr. Brennan’s repetitive assurances that the burial was conducted according to rites with which they’re familiar—ones which inherently confer dignity and respect to the dead.

I’ve had three radio interviews on this subject this week (including one at 6 AM this morning).

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society

From One Economic Lunacy To Another

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Jeffrey Immelt doesn’t seem to know much about business:

“If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green,” Immelt said at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science … it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too precious and it let opponents think that if you had a green initiative, you didn’t care about jobs. I’m a businessman. That’s all I care about, is jobs.”

Hate to break it to you, but if you’re a real businessman, what you care about is profits, and not pandering to the politically correct by declaring your fealty to the planet, or job creation. The purpose of a business is not to create jobs, and if you think it is, then the business is likely to suffer, particularly if it’s all that you care about. Immelt seems like a character right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

In Which The Moonbat Gets It Right

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…and by “right,” I mean sort of:

The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much. As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they’ll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world’s surface. We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.

And even if there were an immediate economic cataclysm, it’s not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for destruction. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.

All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.

What he understands: there is no crisis in terms of abundant cheap energy.

What he doesn’t understand, and this is understandable, because it would require a renunciation of everything that he’s thought and known for decades, is that this is a good, not a bad thing.

Given that he was one of the first to understand the implications of Climaquiddick, maybe there’s hope that he’ll come the rest of the way over to the side of the light.