As a commenter there notes, in its early days, it was a cheerleader for Mussolini and other fascists. So nothing has changed.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Science Is Settled
Environmentalists are sanctimonious moral midgets. Like Treacher, I am unsurprised.
How Ignorant Are Journalists?
This ignorant.
As is pointed out in comments, it’s probably partly a generational thing. The generation that fought that war is dying and almost gone. But it’s also a consequence of how awful the teaching of history is in the public school system and universities.
And these are the people who are supposed to be informing the rest of us? No wonder Obama was elected.
Destroying A Brand
If this rumor is true, ABC will have completed the destruction of a respected Sunday-morning news show that started with the late great David Brinkley:
If Amanpour does accept, the long-running Sunday show could he shaken up, according to the report.
Amanpour said she wants to make “This Week” more about foreign affairs and less focused on domestic American politics. If she takes the job, her desire is to do a number of shows each year outside the country. If she takes the post, sources say this would be a complete remaking on the show, a program much more focused on international affairs. What’s more, Amanpour is telling colleagues that she does not wish to move to Washington, D.C., that she’d prefer to remain in New York and travel for the job should she decide to take it.
Given that Amanpour’s career has focused more on international news than Beltway politics, it makes sense that there could be format changes that play upon her strengths.
Since Brinkley’s retirement, it’s been all downhill, starting with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, then Stephanopolous. They’ve been trying out a few others since the latter left, including Jake Tapper, who (in my opinion) would have reelevated it significantly. If Amanpour takes over, I know I’ll never watch it again.
An Alternate Reality
Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on NASA (and particularly Constellation) supporters’ apparent complete indifference to cost. I find this staggering as well, and a cause of much of the program’s political woes. But hey, it’s not their money, right?
Dispatch From Some Alternate Universe
John Judis has some advice for Barack Obama, including the following paragraph, which makes it difficult to take the rest seriously:
Reagan and the Republicans ran against Carter and the Democrats in the same way as Roosevelt ran against Hoover. Baker and Atwater had studied Roosevelt’s and the Democrats’ 1934 campaign. (They even swiped “stay the course” from FDR.) But Obama and his advisors have been reluctant to stigmatize George W. Bush and the Republicans–perhaps out of a spirit of bipartisanship.That’s a mistake, as Obama seems finally to have realized.
Emphasis mine. Is this man insane? Or is this some new meaning of the word “reluctant” with which I was previously unfamiliar? Perhaps he means they’ve been doing it 24/7/365 “reluctantly”?
Schoolhouse
Barak. The old civics course updated for the modern era. Who cares about that musty old constitution, anyway?
Is The “Slaughter Rule” Constitutional?
I don’t think so. A lot of discussion over at Volokh’s place. I’m pretty sure that if they do this, the courts will get involved.
I Won’t Miss The Bomber
But I hope there’s not a lot of collateral damage.
Gotta love Ramirez. I was always amazed that he lasted at the LA Times as long as he did.
[Via Hot Air]
Woodrow Wilson’s Third Term
Thoughts from George Will on the parallels between Wilson and the current president.
How gripped was Wilson by what Beinart calls “the hubris of reason”? Beinart writes: “He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let’s write down the basic rules, he suggested; ‘then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.’ It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn’t get you very far, where reason could never be king.”
Professor Obama, who will seek re-election on the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said: “I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive” solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health care system is like a Calder mobile — touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.
So note also Obama’s yearning for something “academically approved” rather than something resulting from “a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people,” aka politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit of the U.S. President who first was president of the American Political Science Association.
It’s worth noting that Wilson was the first fascist dictator we ever had as president, and a model for much of Mussolini’s program. We’ll never know what he might have done had he failed in his bid for a third term — the nation was saved by his stroke.