Category Archives: Political Commentary

The King Of False Choices

Some thoughts on one of the president’s more duplicitous rhetorical tactics:

I thought of a few of Obama’s statements along these lines. We choose either his entire program of massive deficit spending or we choose “an economy built on reckless speculation, inflated home prices, and maxed-out credit cards.” We either choose his budget, which is “inseparable from this recovery,” or we go back to “the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt.”

Obama frames himself as the man with all of the solutions. Even if America has experienced noteworthy bubbles and busts of some kind in nearly every decade of its existence, we’ve never had a leader like Barack Obama before, so maybe we can prevent it from ever happening again:

[T]he most critical part of our strategy is to ensure that we do not return to an economic cycle of bubble and bust in this country…The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation so that we don’t face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now.

Those who have other ideas, who worry about nationalization of the economy, the doubling of the national debt in six years, and who fear that they are watching the nation collectively drink Drano to fix its stomach-ache — we call them “nay-sayers.”

And haters. And racists.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Only peripherally related, but here’s someone diagramming an Obama sentence.

Unlike the blogger and commenter, I never enjoyed, or was very good at, diagramming sentences. Fortunately, though, like spelling, I seem to have a good innate sense of English grammar.

The Other “Racism”

[Update and Wednesday morning bump]

Gay Patriot notes that Congressman Frank is a serial offender in smearing those with whom he disagrees, including the “R” word:

Last fall, he accused conservatives of racism for linking the financial meltdown to the Community Reinvestment Act and the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

When, on the campaign trail, then-Republican presidential nominee John McCain made an issue of the Massachusetts Democrat’s proposals to raise taxes, increase domestic spending and gut the defense budget,* Barney called the attack on his statements, “an appeal to prejudice.”

Smart as Barney is, he has shown little capacity to understand conservative ideas, smearing his ideological adversaries rather than countering their arguments. Is this the kind of man we want as the “most prominent openly gay politician in America”?

I wouldn’t think so, but you’ve got him.

[Update mid morning]

Ann Althouse says that Barney Frank can’t read:

That’s plain old deference to the democratic process and a resistance to creative interpretation of constitutional text. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — to support the proposition that Scalia thinks it’s a good idea to lock up gay people. It’s the usual notion that judges shouldn’t be basing their decisions on whether they think a statute is a good idea or not. It’s the same point made by Justice Thomas (who, Frank says, is not a homophobe).

As her first commenter says, Barney Frank should be as big an embarrassment to the gay community as David Duke was to the white community.

[Here’s yesterday’s post.]

My disgust at Congressman Frank knows no bounds, and it’s not because I’m a “homophobe.” It’s because he’s an arrogant power-hungry corrupt demagogue. In his vile ad hominem attack on Justice Scalia, calling him a homophobe, he attempts to delegitimize his arguments, just as he and others attempt to shut down other debates by calling those who disagree with them “racists,” or “haters” (as one foolish commenter did here the other day).

Part of the mendacity of their argument, of course, is to blur the distinction between process and result. My understanding of Justice Scalia’s position is not that he is personally opposed to gay marriage (though he may well be, perhaps is likely to be). It is that there is no intrinsic right to it in the Constitution, and if proponents want there to be, they have to amend the Constitution. What he personally thinks about it, or whether or not he is truly homophobic (I doubt that, at least by any sane definition of that word, as opposed to “being opposed to changing the long-understood definition of marriage”) is completely irrelevant, and orthogonal to the Constitutional validity of his position.

It is similar to Roe, in which many (perhaps even most) believe that if you favor Roe you favor abortion on demand and if you oppose it, you oppose that. But as I’ve noted in the past, one can be pro-choice, or indifferent to it as a matter of law (which is pretty much my position) and still think Roe a Constitutional atrocity, because it granted a right not to be found there, other than in emanations of shadows of penumbras. Similarly, one could (in theory) be morally opposed to abortion, but think Roe rightly decided (though there are very few actual people who would take such a position).

As Ed Whelan notes, Scalia’s position was not about whether or not he likes the Defense of Marriage Act, but whether or not it is Constitutional. And if he is a homophobe, he’s in pretty good company:

The Defense of Marriage Act was approved by overwhelming majorities in each House of Congress (85-14 in the Senate, 342-67 in the House) in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton. Senators in favor of DOMA included Biden, Bradley, Daschle, Kohl, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Mikulski, Murray, Reid, Sarbanes, and Wellstone. Millions and millions of voters in state after state have acted to preserve traditional marriage. Does Frank regard all these Americans as “homophobes”?

Scalia’s position is based on his view of originalism, not on his view of gay marriage, just as are his positions on numerous other issues for which fascists like Barney Frank revile him. My reading of him is that he, more than probably any other sitting member of the court, pretty thoroughly divorces his views of the issues from his assessment of their Constitutionality, which is what a justice is supposed to do. Which of course is exactly why the Franks of the world slander him:

Frank wants liberal activist justices who will indulge his and the Left’s own policy preferences on homosexual matters (and so much more). That’s his real beef with Scalia, and he’s masquerading it under the “homophobe” label.

I’ll leave to others whether Frank’s name-calling is a tactic designed to distract attention from his role in causing the ongoing financial crisis.

I wouldn’t argue with the proposition.

[Afternoon update]

Heh. Scalia urges patience with Barney Frank’s heterophobia.

Recognizing Reality

Astrium has officially shelved its nutty suborbital project:

“The world economic situation has created a difficult near term environment in which to finalise ongoing discussions with investors. Astrium is to temporarily slow down the technical activities focusing on core risk mitigation for the project. The [space jet] team achieved impressive results in the pre-development phase particularly in the field of propulsion technology. Astrium sees suborbital flight as a promising area because of the emerging space tourism market.”

They had no sensible business case even in a booming economy. There was never any way that a vehicle with a billion-dollar development cost was going to compete with the other players.

Unless, of course, they were hoping to pull a Concorde, and have the taxpayers pick up the tab.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Doug Messier, with a roundup of the competition.

Some Good News About The New Brown Shirts

They’re not very effective:

Trying to mobilize voters to rally behind a complex, multi-trillion dollar budget that Congress will take months to enact is a different task from winning votes for a presidential candidate.

“You live in Terre Haute, Indiana, or suburban Denver, and someone you don’t know knocks on the door and talks politics — the election is over,” said Peter Brown, the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Connecticut. “I’m not sure if it will make a big difference.”

Still, Brown concedes that it’s early enough in Obama’s presidency and he’s still popular enough that some people will listen and give Obama “the benefit of the doubt” on his agenda.

“They’re scared about their income future,” Brown said.

Well, I’m scared as hell as hell about my income future, too, because Obama wants to tax the hell out of it. It doesn’t make him popular with me. And whatever “benefit of the doubt” he had with me ended last spring, after the duplicity about Reverend Wright.

The Truth, At Last

Why we haven’t been back to the moon:

The former head of the US lunar program, Wernher von Braun, said in one of his interviews several years later that certain extraterrestrial forces were even more powerful that humans could ever imagine. The scientist said that someone or something was watching every US-led flight to the Moon.

According to one of the versions, which seems to be rather unreal, all lunar programs were shut down 30 years ago because of the fear to encounter extraterrestrial beings and their immense power. Both the USSR and the USA realized that their presence on the Moon was not desirable at all.

The Earth’s natural satellite is a perfect platform for aliens and their spaceships. The Moon is not far from the Earth and it faces the planet with only one part, which means that aliens can rest safely on the other side of the Moon and they do not have to worry about telescopes. Ufologists say that there is quite a number of alien bases on the dark side of the Moon.

Well, if Ufologists say so, it must be true.

Actually if it were the deliberate policy to not have returned to the moon for the past thirty-seven years, but not explain why, I’m not sure what the government would have done or be doing differently.

[Via email from ]

The Teleprompter Addiction

Neoneocon has some thoughts:

Barnett noticed—as many had, even at the time—the enormous difference in articulateness between Teleprompter-Obama and Obama unplugged (the latter is the title of Barnett’s article). That was the easy part. The more discriminating observation Barnett made was between the message of Teleprompter Obama and the message of ad-lib Obama. The two were not just different in degree—they were profoundly opposite in tone and essence. Ad-lib Obama was far more angry and more radical—indeed, although Barnett doesn’t mention it, this Obama resembled the angrier and more radical Michelle Obama, in her earlier campaign remarks that drew so much controversy.

Obama is addicted to his Teleprompter not only because he knows he sounds better—smoother and smarter—with it than without. The deeper reason for his reliance on it may just be that he differs so profoundly from the persona he wishes to convey that he quite literally cannot trust himself to speak without it. Shorn of the Teleprompter, he not only runs the risk of revealing a disfluency that could rival (or even exceed?) that of his reviled predecessor George Bush—he may reveal who he truly is, an angry man with a profoundly radical agenda for America.

No surprise to those of us who paid attention all last year.