Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

America In Retreat

4 Comments

Charles Krauthammer:

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture — a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam — is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there’s no cost in lining up with America’s enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

Proving once again that incentives work.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Thought For The Day

On the pretzel logic of the politically correct moral midgets currently running the country:

We forget that it is the sworn duty of every Political Correct Person to not only get everything wrong, but to get everything exactly backwards.

So they’ve hit on this fine matching set of absurdities: On the one hand they insist that no terrorist is a (real) Muslim. On the other, they insist that the violent puritanism of a minority Sunni sect absolutely represents the deeply held beliefs of all Muslims.

That would seem to match the Attorney General to a tee.

Political Commentary

We’ll Enforce The Laws We Want To Enforce

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Apparently, in the president’s words, federal immigration law has the potential for discrimination:

John Morton, who heads U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said his agency will not necessarily process illegal immigrants
referred to them by Arizona officials. The best way to reduce illegal immigration is through a comprehensive federal approach, not a patchwork of state laws, he said.

“I don’t think the Arizona law, or laws like it, are the solution,” Morton said during a visit to the Chicago Tribune editorial board.

If you’re worried about a law having the potential for discrimination, you might as well throw out the entire federal code. I don’t see a clamor among the Dems for that, though.

Political Commentary, Satire, War Commentary

Useful Advice For The Obama Administration

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How to identify “moderate” terrorists.

[Update a few minutes later]

The administration is joining with the “moderates”:

Fresh from announcing his quest for moderate Hezbos, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for homeland security, John Brennan, has given a speech in which — after the usual pandering to, among other things, Islam’s purported dedication to the “aspiration” that we should all be able to “practice our faith freely” — he referred to his favorite city as “al-Quds, Jerusalem, where three great faiths come together.” Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has the clip, here. As explained by the link Hoft provides, “al-Quds Day,” which is now cause for anti-Israeli demonstrations throughout the world, was actually started by Ayatollah Khomeini 27 years ago — as the “Day of the Oppressed.” (The real nasties in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps are called the “al-Quds” forces.)

This administration certainly does go out of its way to give our Israeli allies that warm feeling, doesn’t it.

Indeed. But I think that some of the rubes are starting to catch on.

[Early afternoon update]

Michael Totten explains why the search for “moderate terrorists” is a complete waste of time. Don’t expect tools like Brennan to get it, though.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Day Has Arrived

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Time for solidarity in defense of enlightenment values.

Brendan O’Neill says, though, that we’re missing the real point — that the real cultural enemy isn’t extremist Islam, but the multiculturalists within. But Nick Gillespie explains why it’s important nonetheless. And Mark Steyn has more thoughts.

[Update a few minutes later]

People will see what they want to see.

[Update a while later]

Who decides what is provocative?

Political Commentary, Space

If Not Now, When?

42 Comments

A worker on the program says that now is no time to retire Shuttle.

It’s very appealing to imagine continuing the program, but it’s just not realistic. The decision was really made on February 1st, 2003, when the fleet size went (once again) from four to three, and this time there were no structural spares from which to build a replacement, as we did after the Challenger loss. As former Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale has explained, it is simply not practical to continue to fly. And since he wrote that, almost two years ago, it has gotten progressively more difficult to resurrect the program, with the ongoing shutdowns of second- and third-tier suppliers, who are no longer in business. The time to argue against this was six years ago, after the VSE was announced, because the decision was part and parcel of it, and while some politicians have made noise about trying to keep the program alive, nothing has ever happened to allow it. The Gap always existed, and a responsible NASA administrator would have done everything in his power to minimize it, and things could have been done to do so (for instance, allowing the original CEV flyoff scheduled for 2006 to go forward, and pick one to fly on an Atlas). Instead, Mike Griffin wasted billions on a flawed program that has expanded it, almost a year per year.

When you keep heading in a direction, eventually you get where you are going, and here we are. Space policy has, in general, been a slow-motion train wreck for decades, and now we’re watching the locomotive start to head over the cliff. It is the result of a lot of flawed policy decisions made over the years, almost all of whose consequences were perfectly predictable, and the piper has finally come to receive his wages for the clumsy dancing. Because space policy, at least human spaceflight policy, isn’t important, and hasn’t been since the early sixties. All that has ever mattered is the jobs, and now, even many of those will be gone. It’s time to grow up, and understand that you are never going to get good policy from a democracy on matters like this. Those who want to see us go into space are going to have to accept that the only route is one that provides a real return, that people are willing to pay for. Flawed and problematic as the new direction is, it at least offers some small amount of hope that we will be able to transition to such an environment. But the days of monolithic NASA monopoly programs for humans in space are over.