Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

All For Show

4 Comments

I’ve no idea whether or not this is true:

Hello everyone, As you know, I am not a very political person. I just wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to “The War Zone.” I wanted to share with you what happened. He got off the plane and got into bullet proof vehicle, got to the area to meet with the Major General (2 Star) who is the commander here at Bagram. As the Soldiers lined up to shake his hand, he blew them off and didn’t say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the General.

As he finished, the vehicles took him to the Clamshell (pretty much a big top tent that military personnel can play basketball or work out in with weights) so he could take his publicity pictures playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk to soldiers to thank them for their service. So really he was just here to make a showing for the Americans back home that he is their candidate for president.

It seems as well sourced as the dirt being dished about Sarah Palin. And more credible.

I’ll be amused to see what happens the first time someone salutes him as Commander-in-Chief. (Draft dodger) Bill Clinton was an instant joke to military insiders when he ineptly returned his first one. If the Obama campaign is smart, they’ll know about that history, and have him practice beforehand. Not that there’s any requirement to return it, of course. But Reagan seems to have started a presidential tradition. Obama can end (or at least deviate from) it if he wants. But would it be politically wise?

[Update early evening]

Mea culpa maxima. I should have checked Snopes before posting.

Nonetheless, everything else I wrote stands. It was more credible than the Sarah Palin dirt, and I still await the first salute.

And I also await Snopes’ investigation of the Sarah Palin smears.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Buyer’s Remorse?

25 Comments

Some thoughts on Obama, Weatherpeople, and Sarah Palin, from Camille Paglia:

…my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been “pallin’ around” with Ayers, in Sarah Palin’s memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed…

…Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I think she gives the press too much credit for their ability to wake up.

[Update late morning]

It may have been politically incorrect for Michael Barone to say it, but I think he’s right when he points to Palin’s greatest sin in the eyes of much of the media and the left:

“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby,” Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. “They wanted her to kill that child. … I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.”

Barone, a popular speaker on the paid lecture circuit, is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal coauthor of “The Almanac of American Politics.”

About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Guess the truth hurts. That was obvious to me at the time as well, with all of the criticism of her for having the baby. She was a huge threat to the pro-abortion (and yes, that’s what much of it is) movement.

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary

Hoover, Or Reagan?

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Which president will Barack Obama want to emulate? He has said that he admires Reagan, but only for his transformational qualities, not for his political beliefs. But if he persists in his apparent desire to implement some combination of Hoover and FDR policies (raising taxes on the productive, protectionism, enforcing high wages), he’ll end up making a bad situation much worse, and end up being a one-termer for sure.

History, Political Commentary, War Commentary

An Extinct Species?

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Would that it had been so. In honor of Veterans’ Day, here’s an interesting story of a recording captured to preserve the memory of the war that was to end all wars. Unfortunately, that part didn’t work out.

[Update mid morning]

On the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, three British veterans are still alive. The oldest is 112, the oldest man in the country. Did he ever imagine, in the midst of the war, that he would survive another nine tenths of a century beyond its end?

Political Commentary, Space

The Military Space Mess

7 Comments

The other day I pointed out a report on the general military acquisition problems. Today at The Space Review, Dwayne Day discusses the military space problem in particular. As he notes, Pentagon space makes NASA look like a model of efficiency. NASA at least has the excuse that what it does isn’t really important. The same is not true of our defense systems, but the bureaucracy and porkmeisters act as though it is.

Political Commentary

“When Good Men Did Nothing”

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It’s the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht.

While many Americans would also claim they were unaware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, the events of November 9-10 were well documented. The New York Times ran a front-page story on November 11: “A wave of destruction, looting and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist Revolution swept over Great Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops, offices and synagogues for the murder by a young Polish Jew of Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris.” Another Times story was headlined, “All Vienna’s synagogues attacked.”

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT made no immediate comment after Kristallnacht, referring questions about it to the State Department. Only after five days of widespread public outrage did he take any action: recalling the US ambassador from Germany and stating in a press conference, “The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the US. Such news from any part of the world would inevitably produce a similar profound reaction among American people in every part of the nation. I myself could scarcely believe that such things could happen in a 20th century civilization…”

Roosevelt agreed to allow 15,000 German Jews already in the United States to remain, but resisted all calls to increase the overall quota of immigrants from Nazi-occupied countries. Equally significant, his failure to take any action against Germany, or to mobilize an international coalition to challenge Hitler, sent the message that the world would not intervene to save the Jews. How much he could have done given the isolationist and xenophobic mood of the American public at that time is debatable, but the consequences of his inaction were catastrophic.

If President Obama continues to show signs of coddling Ahmajinedad and the Iranian mullahs, he will be sending a similar signal. If this history ever repeats itself, it won’t be farce–it will be tragedy anew, because we inexcusably forgot it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Synagogues around the world are being asked to keep their lights on tonight, in remembrance.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Goodie

7 Comments

Senator Nelson is urging Barack Obama to keep Mike Griffin on:

“He called Lori Garver and said that until they had a surefire choice, they should continue with Griffin. And he thinks Griffin is doing a good job,” said Bryan Gulley, a Nelson spokesman. Gulley would not say who Nelson would support if or when Obama picks a new NASA administrator.

Well, obviously, you don’t want to leave the post vacant, or put in a loser. But it should be a high priority to find a good replacement for him, not to mention come up with a new policy (the two will no doubt go together). The Ares/Orion debacle is entirely Mike Griffin’s baby at this point. I know that if I were named the new administrator, I’d can Ares, ramp up COTS and COTS D, and get started on R&T, and then (not much later) RDT&E for a propellant depot, and let ULA, SpaceX and others worry about earth to orbit. With a prop depot, the weight margins on Orion and Altair become essentially unlimited, so I’d start designs over from there.

But for many reasons, I’m not going to be named administrator. I just hope that whoever is has their head screwed on right.

Oh, and I should also add (as I commented over at Bobby Block’s site) that people who should know better (like Senators who have actually flown in space) seem to continue to ignore the reality that extending Shuttle doesn’t give us independence from the Russians, because the Shuttle can’t act as an ISS lifeboat. All it does is cost billions more while putting crew at high risk. Until they get Dragon or Orion, or something else, we are going to have to continue buying Soyuz if we want to continue to have US astronauts at ISS.

[Saturday morning update]

There’s more discussion on this topic over at Space Politics.