That’s the word from Michael Yon, reporting from Baghdad.
No thanks to the Democrats, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who tried to keep it from happening. I see that they still can’t bring themselves to utter the word “win” with respect to the war. They continue to talk about “ending” it. Well, it looks like George Bush did that for them, and he won it as well. But winning wars is bad, you see, because it just encourages the warmongers.
Vice-President-Elect Hairplugs wants to be a hands-on VP:
Biden has said he’d like to use his 36 years of experience in the Senate, including leadership of the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees, to help push Obama’s agenda in Congress. It’s longtime insider’s experience that Obama lacks and a role that has not been Cheney’s focus.
I’m having trouble thinking of a single foreign policy issue in his career on which Joe Biden has been right.
It’s also kind of frightening to think of him as responsible for space policy, as veeps have traditionally been. Particularly milspace.
Stephen Green says that President-Elect Obama isn’t off to a very good start.
And Brian Doherty is concerned about the cult of personality. Really? He just noticed?
Iowahawk has become Internationalhawk, perturbing Anglo-American relations with a new column on a British web site:
In the matter of politics you have “Tories” and “Labour” where we have “Republicans” and “Democrats”; just as our “lawyers” must pass the “bar exam,” I’m sure your “barristers” must pass some sort of “pub quiz.” In America we call our stupid white racists “crackers,” where I believe you refer to them as “scones” or “crisps” or something. But these minor language quirks are nothing compared to the many things we have in common. For example, did you know we also have a new Stalinist dictator, and he also turns out to be Brown?
Politically incorrect, as always.
Rich Lowry has been talking to Rick Davis:
The split over Palin, of course, poisoned everything at the end. One of the dividing lines was between her communications team and the policy advisers. The communications team seemed to consider her a dolt, while the policy people–like Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann–were impressed with her and her potential. As one McCain aide told me, “It’s the difference between considering her someone who lacks knowledge and someone who is incompetent, and they [the communications aides] treated her as the latter.”
By many accounts, the relationship between Palin and the staff assigned by the campaign to travel with her on her plane was dysfunctional and even hostile from the beginning. “She would have been better served if she had asked a couple of people to be removed from her traveling staff,” says one McCain aide.
Some McCain loyalists think the Bushies assigned to Palin let her down and then turned on her. This is a representative quote from someone from McCain world holding that view: “Look, she wasn’t ready for this, obviously. Their job was to make her ready for this and they failed. So they unloaded on her. If they had an iota of loyalty to John McCain, they wouldn’t have done it.”
It was a mistake to bring “Bushies” into the campaign, given the competence level of “Bushies” as a general rule (unfortunately, the president seemed to value loyalty over competence, though there were notable exceptions). Yes, they won a couple previous campaigns, but only barely. Of course, there was something dysfunctional about a McCain campaign that didn’t see this happening and do something about it. And then there’s this:
On putting Palin out in big, hostile network interviews at the beginning: “Our assumption was people would not let us release her on Fox or local TV.”
On the Couric interview, which Davis says Palin thought would be softer because she was being interviewed by a woman: “She was under the impression the Couric thing was going to be easier than it was. Everyone’s guard was down for the Couric interview.”
On the clothes fiasco: “We flew her out from Alaska to Arizona to Ohio to introduce her to the world and take control of her life. She didn’t think ‘dress for the convention’, because it might have just been a nice day trip to Arizona if she didn’t click with John. Very little prep had been done and if it had, we might have gotten picked off by the press. We were under incredible scrutiny. We got her a gal from New York and we thought, ‘Let’s get some clothes for her and the family.’ It was a failure of management not to get better control and track of that. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, what it was worth or where it was going. No one knew how much that stuff was worth. It was more our responsibility than hers.”
What does that first graf mean? What “people” did they think wouldn’t let them release her on Fox or local television? And as to the second, all I can say is…WHERE DID THEY FIND THESE IDIOTS?! They thought that hyperliberal hyperNOWist hyperidiot Katie Couric was going to be “soft” on her? In a taped, easily edited interview that could be dribbled out over days? On what planet have they been living? These are people who are supposed to understand media relations?
They deserved to lose, and as I’ve said before, I’m not unhappy that they did. But I’m quite unhappy that Senator Obama didn’t.
Here’s a cure for that. Let’s hope he’s wrong. Part of the problem is that, because panics like this are to some degree psychological, pieces like this don’t help, even if they’re valid. It’s sort of like the Heisenberg principle–the very act of diagnosing the problem can exacerbate it.
Never before have so many been so proud of so little:
The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study’s co-author said.
“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence,” said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.
“High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,” Twenge said.
Don’t they realize that half of them are below median intelligence? Probably not, because they got an “A” in math, even though they didn’t understand it.
One of the perverse and tragic problems with incompetence is that it generally includes an inability to recognize it.
I don’t generally think much of Chris Hedges, and the comments are nutty, but I largely agree with this piece:
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.
Can democracy survive for long, with such an electorate? Of course, he doesn’t finger the primary culprit–our fascist public school system which manufactures exactly the sort of people who will keep it in power.
[Late afternoon update]
Are individualists losing the IQ war with the left?
George Abbey as NASA administrator? If that were to happen, it would be one of the worst effects of the Obama win, at least for those who care about our future in space.
[Update early afternoon]
Here was my take on the Abbey/Lane paper at the time it was first published, over three years ago:
I’m reading the space policy paper by (former JSC Director George) Abbey and (former Clinton Science Advisor Neal) Lane.
It gets off on the wrong foot, in my opinion, right in the preface:
Space exploration on the scale envisioned in the president’s plan is by necessity a cooperative international venture.
I know that this is an article of faith with many, but simply stating it doesn’t make it an incontrovertible fact. In reality, this is a political decision. If it became important to the nation to become spacefaring, and seriously move out into space, there’s no reason that we couldn’t afford to do it ourselves. The amount of money that we spend on space is a trivially small part of the discretionary budget, and even smaller part of the total federal budget, and a drop in the bucket when looking at the GDP. Even ignoring the fact that we could be getting much more for our money if relieved of political constraints, we could easily double the current budget.
The statement also ignores the fact that international cooperation in fact tends to increase costs, and there’s little good evidence that it even saves money. It’s something that we tend to do simply for the sake of international cooperation, and we actually pay a price for it.
Neither the president’s plan nor the prevailing thrust of existing U.S. space policies encourages the type of international partnerships that are needed. Indeed there is much about U.S. space policy and plans–particularly those pertaining to the possible deployment of weapons in space–that even our closest allies find objectionable.
While I don’t favor doing things just because other countries find them objectionable (with the exception of France), this issue should not be driving our space policy, as I pointed out almost exactly three years ago. What the authors think is a bug, I consider a feature.
In the introduction itself, I found this an interesting misdiagnosis:
In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced a plan
to return humans to the Moon by 2020, suggesting that this time U.S. astronauts
would make the journey as a part of an international partnership.
However, the recent history of the U.S. space program–the tragic Columbia
accident, a squeezing of the NASA budget over many years, the cancellation
of the Hubble Space Telescope upgrade mission, a go-it-alone approach to
space activities, the near demise of the U.S. satellite industry due to U.S. policy
on export controls, and international concern about U.S. intentions
regarding the military use of space–points to serious obstacles that stand in
the way of moving forward.Again, they state this as though it was obviously true (and perhaps it is, to them). But they don’t actually explain how any of these things present obstacles to returning to the moon. The loss of Columbia was actually, despite the tragedy to the friends and families of the lost astronauts, a blessing, to the degree that it forced the nation to take a realistic reassessment of the Shuttle program. We aren’t going to use Shuttle to go back to the moon, so how can they argue that its loss is an obstacle to that goal?
Similarly, how does squeezing of past NASA budgets prevent future intelligent spending in furtherance of the president’s goal? While lamentable if it doesn’t occur, repairing Hubble was not going to make any contribution to the Vision for Space Exploration. And while the state of the satellite industry is troubling, again, there’s no direct connection between this and human exploration. I’ve already dealt with the spuriousness of the complaints about international cooperation. In short, this statement is simply a lot of unsubstantiated air, but it probably sounds good to policy makers who haven’t given it much thought.
They sum it up here:
U.S. policy makers must confront four looming barriers that threaten continued U.S. leadership in space: export regulations that stifle the growth of the commercial space industry, the projected shortfall in the U.S. science and engineering workforce, inadequate planning for robust scientific advancement in NASA, and an erosion of international cooperation in space.
There are some barriers to carrying out the president’s vision, but so far, with the exception of the export-control issue, these aren’t them, and they don’t seem to have identified any of the other actual ones.
From there, they go on to give a brief history of the space program, with its supposed benefits to the nation. They then go on to laud the international nature of it. When I got to this sentence, I was struck by the irony:
The International Space Station best portrays the international character of space today.
If that’s true, it should be taken as a loud and clear warning that we should be running as far, and and as fast, from “international cooperation” as we possibly can.
The largest cooperative scientific and technological program in history, the space station draws on the resources and technical capabilities of nations around the world. It has brought the two Cold War adversaries together to work for a common cause, and arguably has done more to further understanding and cooperation between the two nations than many comparable programs.
What they don’t note is that it is years behind schedule, billions over budget, and still accomplishes little of value to actually advancing us in space, other than continuing to keep many people employed at Mr. Abbey’s former center, and other places. But, hey…it promotes international cooperation, so that’s all right. Right?
The piece goes on to describe the four “barriers,” of which only one (export control) really is. While it’s troubling that not as many native-born are getting advanced science and engineering degrees as there used to be, there will be no shortage of engineers, since the foreign born will more than pick up the slack. It’s perhaps a relevant public policy issue, but it’s not a “barrier” to our sending people back to the moon.
The most tendentious “barrier” is what the authors claim is inadequate planning and budgets for the vision:
President George W. Bush’s NASA Plan, which echoed that of President George H. W. Bush over a decade before, is bold by any measure. It is also incomplete and unrealistic. It is incomplete, in part, because it raises serious questions about the future commitment of the United States to astronomy and to planetary, earth, and space science. It is unrealistic from the perspectives of cost, timetable, and technological capability. It raises expectations that are not matched by the Administration’s commitments. Indeed, pursuit of the NASA Plan, as formulated, is likely to result in substantial harm to the U.S. space program.
Even if one buys their premise–that expectations don’t match commitments, that all depends on what means by the “U.S. space program,” doesn’t it? They seem (like many space policy analysts) to be hung up on science, as though that’s the raison d’être of the program. Leaving that aside, they (disingenuously, in my opinion) attempt to back up this statement:
The first part of the NASA Plan, as proposed, was to be funded by adding $1 billion to the NASA budget over five years, and reallocating $11 billion from within the NASA budget during the same time frame. These amounts were within the annual 5 percent increase the current Administration planned to add to the NASA base budget (approximately $15 billion) starting in fiscal year 2005. This budget, however, was very small in comparison to the cost of going to the Moon with the Apollo program. The cost of the Apollo program was approximately $25 billion in 1960 dollars or $125 billion in 2004 dollars, and the objectives of the NASA Plan are, in many ways, no less challenging.
This is a very misleading comparison, for two reasons.
First, as the president himself said, this is not a race, but a vision. Apollo was a race. Money was essentially no object, as long as we beat the Soviets to the moon. The vision will be budget constrained. NASA’s (and Mike Griffin’s) challenge is to accomplish those few milestones that were laid out in the president’s plan within those constraints. It will cost that much, and no more, by definition.
Second, simply stating that the goals of the plan are no less challenging than Apollo doesn’t make it so. While the goal of establishing a permanent lunar presence is more of a challenge, it’s not that much more of one, and we know much more about the moon now than we did in 1961, and we have much more technology in hand, and experience in development than we did then. In short, any comparison between what Apollo cost and what the vision will cost is utterly spurious. The only way to get an estimate for the latter is to define how it will be done, and then do parametric costing, using 21st-century cost-estimating relationships, on the systems so defined (a process which is occurring, and is one not informed in any way by Apollo budgets).
The U.S. Congress has made clear with its NASA appropriation for fiscal year 2005 that it has serious questions about the NASA Plan.
No surprise there. But that’s merely a reflection of specific items (i.e., pork for their districts) that were cut, and says nothing in particular about the overall ability of NASA to achieve the plan with the budget. In fact, an annual appropriation is just that–it provides no insight whatsoever into what Congress might think is required in the out years, when the real budgetary issues would emerge, if they do at all.
Overall, this section strikes me as less a serious policy discussion than a political slap at the administration, by one of the first high-level NASA officials to be canned by it, and by a disgruntled physicist (and science advisor from the previous administration) unhappy that science is not the be-all of the program.
I’ve glanced through the rest of the thing, but I think I’ve covered the major flaws in it already. What’s actually most notable to me is that they completely ignore the potential for private passenger flight, and commercial space in general (other than bemoaning the impact to the satellite industry of export restrictions). Given how badly they’ve misdiagnosed the problems, their prescriptions have little value. In terms of providing a basis for administration policy, my own recommendation is that it be simply filed away–in a circular receptacle.
I see little reason to revise that review today. George Abbey shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near space policy (though perhaps, at seventy six years of age, it’s not something that he wants, or could handle at this point). It certainly wouldn’t be change we can believe in. Or change at all.
That’s how Beldar describes John McCain’s post-election behavior:
John McCain has failed this test of his own character.
The would-be commander-in-chief surely still had the clout to summon the top twenty-five or so campaign aides into a room for a “Come to Jesus” meeting, a “we aren’t any of us leaving this room until I know who leaked those comments” meeting, a “you aren’t any of you ever going to work in politics again until we find out who’s to blame for this” meeting.
Instead, he goes on Lenno and shrugs his shoulders, minimizing the whole episode. That didn’t make anyone famous. That affirmatively encouraged this crap to continue, not just in this campaign but in future ones.
I practice a profession in which secrets are important. I understand the concept of fiduciary duty. I’ve employed people, professionals and staff alike, who — simply by virtue of working for me — have been made subject to the same bright-line, absolute standards that I’m subject to. Very, very rarely, someone in my employment has breached that trust — and my reaction has been ruthless and thorough and instantaneous. Yes, there have been a few times when I’ve enjoyed firing someone, and have gone out of my way to make sure that anyone who cared to make future inquiries about hiring that person would find out exactly why they were fired.
McCain’s background as a military officer ought to have acquainted him with high ethical standards and the need for their consistent and vigorous enforcement. He almost flunked out of the Naval Academy at the end of every year he spent there, based on conduct demerits, but he never once had an Honor Code violation.
Senator, this was an Honor Code violation by someone on your staff. And you just blew it off. There was no shame in losing the election. But there is definitely shame in this.
Also, thoughts on the willful gullibility of people who believe the idiotic lies about Sarah Palin:
People joked about “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” and about “Palin Derangement Syndrome” as its successor. But at some point this kind of thing stops being a joke and becomes a genuine cognative disability — an inability to process and deal in a rational fashion with objective data because of a bias that is so intense that it blocks out reality.
I can’t explain it. I just hope it’s a temporary, acute problem rather than something long-term or possibly organic, like the sort of brain tumors or lesions of which Dr. Oliver Sachs writes in his book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” I’m not being at all snarky here. Rather, I’m entirely serious, because I have considered Dr. Joyner a friend, and I am genuinely concerned for his mental health. He, Andrew Sullivan, and others in their camp are completely persuaded that they can see a degree of ignorance in Gov. Palin which is utterly inconsistent with anyone’s ability to function as the governor of any state, but to which hundreds of thousands of Alaskans were absolutely blind for many years despite a much better opportunity to assess Gov. Palin first-hand. That kind of thinking represents a break with reality, one that’s not funny at all, but genuinely sad.
[Via David Blue, who has a number of other reasons to be glad that John McCain didn’t win the election. But they don’t, unfortunately, constitute reasons to be happy that Barack Obama did. We were screwed either way, primarily because the media selected both candidates.]
[Update a few minutes later]
I wonder how many people actually voted for John McCain (that is, voted for him because they liked him, and thought he would be a good president)? I suspect that the vast majority of McCain voters were either voting against Obama, or for Palin, or both, but they weren’t voting for McCain. It seems to me that those people who actually like McCain, either personally, or on his eclectic policies, probably like Obama even more (e.g., many in the media). So hardly anyone voted for him. And this is also the reason that the Republican turnout was relatively low. The candidate had no attraction to them.