Category Archives: Political Commentary

General, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

“There’s Nothing Special About Britain”

32 Comments

I guess this is the kind of smarter diplomacy, and “reengaging with the world” that we were promised in the campaign. Of course, we were promised a lot of things in the campaign.

[Update Sunday night]

More smart diplomacy, with Russia.

[Monday morning update]

Gee, just what we want in an American Secretary of State:

Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering was effusive in his praise, saying that with the new administration, the United States and Europe once again “share the same values.”

“What you said mostly could have been said by a European,” he told Clinton after she fielded questions ranging from climate change to energy security and aid to Africa and one on gay rights from a participant wearing an “I love Hillary” t-shirt.

I suspect that, even more than is usually the case, she’s going to represent the world to America, rather than the other way around.

[Bumped]

[Monday afternoon update]

Gift-giving advice from Barack Obama:

With my busy schedule of entertaining foreign dignitaries and celebrities at the White House, I know how important a well chosen gift can be. Two weeks ago, for example, we received a visit from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department. You should have seen Mr. Brown light up when he opened that sack of classic titles like “Wizard of Oz” and “Baby Geniuses 2.” I like to think those DVDs helped cement our Anglo-American “special relationship” even if, as he mentioned to me, they probably wouldn’t work in his European player. Thinking quickly, I told the PM I would send him an American DVD player as soon as I earned enough cash-back points on my Costco card. Crisis averted, but that episode taught me a valuable lesson: always keep a stock of gifts handy in case some foreign poobah or supreme religious figure or failing industry pops by for coffee. As a result, I make sure the Oval Office closet is filled with pre-wrapped Sham-Wows and Snuggle blankets and trillion dollar bailout packages for whatever emergency might arise.

Why not? It makes as much sense as taking market advice from someone who doesn’t know what a P/E ratio is.

[Update late afternoon]

Here’s a completely plausible thesis on why the Obama administration dissed the UK:

The alliance that Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt crafted to win World War Two was more than just good strategy. They forged it in order to assert and defend an ideal which had fallen on hard times in the dark days of 1941, that of individual human liberty.

Originally born in Britain, this common ideal holds that human beings have a God-given natural right to arrange their lives as they see fit without interference from any authority, whether pope or king or government bureaucrat. The belief has always been America’s most precious historical legacy, and the rock on which our friendship with Great Britain is built.

It was that ideal which the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain, expressed as the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Our founders fought and nearly lost a war of independence against the British crown, and devised their own Constitution, to preserve the same ideal.

… Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship – one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

These critics don’t see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, but a white supremacist.

In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy.

Including that fuddy-duddy English common law, and particularly contract law. After all, dead white guys came up with it. And that Churchill guy was on the wrong side in Kenya.

I wonder if Barack and Michelle Obama know who it was who freed the slaves? And who it was who originally sold them into slavery? I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of actual historical knowledge from either of them.

Administrative, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Are We Serious About Space Policy?

2 Comments

Jeff Foust reports on a forum where that is the topic of discussion. The (unsurprising, or at least it should be to readers of this weblog) answer is, “no.”

Space, at least civil space, is not important, and has not been since the early 1960s. What is more dismaying, though, is that military space is not treated seriously, either, and that really should be considered important.

The panel also doesn’t think much of reviving the Space Council. I agree that the focal point should not be at OSTP, and that space does need a more serious advocate on the National Security Council.

I wonder why Jeff doesn’t quote anyone by name? Was he reporting under restrictions?

[Update in the afternoon]

Apparently, he was. He writes over at Space Politics:

Because of the ground rules of the discussion, none of the comments are attributed to any of the attendees.

I’d be curious to know at least who the attendees were, even if we can’t correlate specific statements with specific attendees. Is that a secret, too?

Also at The Space Review today, a good tutorial on how to tell a launch system from a ballistic missile.

I should note that one point not made here is that it’s actually easier to build a launch vehicle than an effective ballistic missile, if one defines “effective” as being able to hit a precise target, because the latter requires an entry vehicle. Getting into orbit, per se, does not require a precise injection, or heat shields, as long as the resulting trajectory doesn’t intercept the atmosphere.

Finally, Dwayne Day clears up (or at least attempts to clear up) media misconceptions about the Chinese space program.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Jeff provides the list of speakers, though it’s still not clear whether the quotes are from speakers or attendees.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

“The Malady Of Islam”

8 Comments

This seems to me a fundamental problem:

Modernity has multiple meanings: industrialization, urbanization, adoption of liberal values, women’s rights, elected governments, etc. I want to emphasize here the concept of citizenship as a core component of modernity. The idea of citizenship is linked to the idea of individuals in society possessing unalienable rights. The evolution of this idea has meant that even though society is a collection of individuals, individual rights override collective rights and distinguish modern society from mob rule. On this idea rests the modern democratic society, wherein political leaders are elected by citizens to whom they are accountable. They hold office with citizen approval; they make laws, but none might be passed that override the unalienable rights of citizens written into the constitution. They govern with support of the citizens and are replaced when they fail to meet the goals that saw them elected.

Let us now consider the malady of Islam given the above description of the problem as I see it. Modernity, and its concept of individual rights, is Western in origin. It evolved through centuries of philosophical and political debates, and then equally long periods of war to defeat those who opposed the principle of individual liberty. Eventually modernity and its off-shoot, citizenship, prevailed over the opposition and were more or less firmly established in the West and places beyond by the end of the last century.

Arabs were in close proximity to these ideas and the struggle that accompanied them. What, it might be asked of the Arabs, was their response to modernity? Even with all the apologia and obfuscation, the answer that cannot be evaded is that the collective Arab response has shown a preference for totalitarian ideology. In the period following the end of the World War II and European colonialism, there were three ideological responses that marked out the Arabs into three groups: secular Muslims, and orthodox Muslims divided into the majority Sunni and minority Shi’i sects.

Secular Muslims were mobilized by Arab nationalism embodied in the Ba’ath party. Sunni Muslims chose Wahhabism/Salafism embodied in the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban. Shi’i Muslims followed Khomeinism embodied in the politics of the clerical regime in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrists in Iraq.

All three ideologies and movements they spawned are totalitarian. For all their professed belief in Islam’s sacred scripture, Arabs — given their blood-soaked history of suppressing dissent and despite their close proximity to the evolution of liberal movements in Europe — have been engaged in suppressing or eradicating any form of individual liberty while making no allowance for their opponents. Arabs have shown by their conduct that tyranny is their preferred response to modernity.

I wish that I had any sense whatsoever that the current administration understands this problem.

Economics, Political Commentary

A Recipe For Ruin

17 Comments

Victor Davis Hanson:

With Clinton we got high taxes (bad) but balanced budgets imposed by the spending caps in Congress (good). With Bush we got tax cuts (good) but deficits (bad). With Obama we get tax hikes (bad) and astronomical deficits (bad).

Two notes: We are not going back to the Clinton tax hikes, but something far scarier, with states raising taxes, the fed doing the same, and new proposals to lift the caps on FICA payroll taxes. And these vast increases won’t go to pay for the deficit, but to fund new spending/borrowing plans that come on top of deficit spending.

Weimar, here we come.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Moral Bankruptcy

12 Comments

Some thoughts on the mortgage crisis and “cram downs,” from Megan McArdle.

There seems to be a push on by the left to completely destroy crucial Anglosphere institutions, including contract law, without which we would never have built the wealthiest nation in history. How easy or cheap do you think that it will be to get a mortgage when the lenders realize that their contracts can be whimsically rewritten by an unaccountable judge?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama’s Left Turn

7 Comments

Stuart Taylor:

…with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama’s proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.

All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn’t “believe in bigger government” and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

All this from a man who believes in the audacity of lies. I just don’t understand, though, how ostensibly smart people like Stuart Taylor let themselves be so willingly bamboozled.:

I still hold out hope that Obama is not irrevocably “casting his lot with collectivists and statists,” as asserted by Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide and a leading conservative intellectual now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Commentary magazine’s blog Contentions.

And I hope that the president ponders well Margaret Thatcher’s wise warning against some collectivist conceits, in a 1980 speech quoted by Wehner: “The illusion that government can be a universal provider, and yet society still stay free and prosperous…. The illusion that every loss can be covered by a subsidy. The illusion that we can break the link between reward and effort, and still get the effort.”

Unfortunately, hope has no power, though it was a powerful enough message for the mindless to get him elected.

[Update a few minutes later]

Neither moderate not centrist:

A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite.

Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.

Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. “Just what evidence do you have,” Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, “that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?”

The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind.

Let’s hope they won’t get fooled again.