Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Radical Islam

7 Comments

Why Barack Obama still refuses to name it:

I don’t believe for a minute his (and Hillary Clinton’s) professed explanation—that naming our adversaries would only inflame them. How much more inflamed could they get? This weekend’s horrific event in Orlando is only the tip of a global iceberg. Not including the 50 (so far) dead from the Pulse gay bar shooting, there have been 60 documented attacks during this year’s Ramadan alone with 472 dead—and Ramadan is only seven days old (eight with Orlando). Total deadly terror attacks in the name of Allah since 9/11 now stand at 28,576 with who-knows-how-many corpses.

Nor, of course, do I think Obama was trying to do me a favor by promoting my book on moral narcissism coming out Tuesday, although the president is possibly the most morally narcissistic individual ever to inhabit the White House. He thinks he knows better than all of us—and the fruits of his moral narcissism are on the bloody floor of Pulse. (Gays should remember how Obama and Clinton “evolved” to favoring gay marriage, ten years or more after such Republicans as Arnold Schwarzenegger and, yes, Donald Trump. Knowing who your friends are is not always simple.)

No, Obama’s refusal to name radical Islam stems from two closely entwined factors—an enduring distaste for American power and deep personal shame (not that buried, but buried enough) of his own profound childhood connection to Islam. Not to get too psychoanalytic, to Obama, if there is something wrong with Islam, there is something wrong with him. Better to think there is something wrong with us.

Yup. Glenn Reynolds has related thoughts:

To prevent this sort of event in the future, we need to do several things.

First, interrupt the flow of radicalizing propaganda at the source: ISIL and various other jihadist outfits need to be neutralized or destroyed. These organizations pursue a deliberate strategy of radicalizing Muslims in Western countries to turn them into terrorists, and they operate networks of sympathizers throughout the USA. We used to cozy up to the Saudis, but thanks to hydraulic fracturing we don’t really need their oil anymore, so they need to be told to put a stop to this sort of support or else. We likely could have nipped ISIL in the bud a few years ago at minimal cost — or kept it from sprouting in the first place by maintaining a presence in Iraq — but it needs to be brought down now.

We also need to be clear about what it is we’re fighting. We’re not fighting Islam as such. Many good Muslims are horrified by this violence. But we are fighting the jihadist strain of Islam, and unfortunately quite a few Muslims view that strain as legitimate.

Yes. Millions of them. And as he notes, gun control, to the degree that it’s a solution at all, is a peacetime one. We are at war. And we’re all in the army now.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Memo to the gay community: ISIS is coming for us.

Yes. Which is one of the reasons it’s so stupid for the LGBTs so support “Palestinians” (who’d be happy to shove them into the sea with the Jews) over Israel.

[Update a while later]

First link was wrong, fixed now. Sorry!

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

“The Worst Mass Shooting In History”

46 Comments

Yes, stop saying that, media idiots:

Will you people quit keeping a leaderboard? There are sick f***s watching you that take that as some sort of challenge as they update their .xls spreadsheets.

[Update a few minutes later]

I knew they were racists, but why do Democrats hate gay people so much they want to shoot up their nightclubs?

[Update a while later]

Log Cabin Republicans: The problem isn’t homophobia, or guns, but the homophobia of Islam. The Pink Pistols agree that it’s not about the guns. FWIW.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Trump’s GOP Endorsers

75 Comments

Rich Lowry has no sympathy for them:

The Republican establishment has reacted in shock and dismay at Trump’s attacks on the judge hearing the Trump University case, as if it were unaware the party had nominated a man whose calling card has been out-of-bounds, highly charged personal attacks on his opponents.

It must have missed it when he took shots at Ben Carson’s Seventh Day Adventism. It wasn’t watching TV that time when he doubted that Mitt Romney is a Mormon. It put it out of its mind that one of his main arguments against Cruz was that he was a Canadian ineligible for the presidency, and that he liked to sneeringly let it drop every now and then that Cruz’s real name is Rafael. Trump’s suggestion that Cruz couldn’t be an evangelical Christian because of his Cuban ancestry and his Dad might have been involved in the Kennedy assassination must have been similarly memory-holed. And Trump’s birtherism? Hey, who hasn’t harbored suspicions that the president might have been born in Kenya and covered up his secret with a fraudulent birth certificate?

If Trump didn’t call Curiel a Mexican unworthy of hearing his case, you’d almost wonder what had knocked the candidate off his game. But the Republican establishment seems to have believed that it had an implicit pact (unbeknownst to Trump) that he could have the party so long as he didn’t embarrass it too badly.

The breach in this imaginary agreement has occasioned epic ducking and covering. The new equivalent of medieval scholastic philosophers are the Republican senators insisting on heretofore unnoticed distinctions between different levels of support for a presidential candidate.

I share his lack of sympathy.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hillary Clinton

27 Comments

She’s the candidate that the Democrats, the party of lies, criminality and corruption, deserve:

She enters the general election stage of the campaign as one of the most disliked and distrusted political figures in America, and one of the least popular presidential nominees of all time. Despite his even uglier public image and endless parade of divisiveness and insults, the Republican nominee-in-waiting only trails her by an average of two percentage points at this stage of the race, inside the margin of error. Several weeks ago, a Democratic operative basked in the afterglow of Donald Trump’s effective nomination victory, crowing on Fox News that the GOP had selected “exactly the candidate they deserve.” Ironically, both Trump’s strong backers and detractors on the right would likely agree with this statement, albeit for different reasons. This week, the same formulation applies to the Democrats. They’ve chosen the corrupt, opaque, power hungry, self-serving, aloof, greedy, politically soulless, congenital liar they so richly deserve.

In case it wasn’t sufficiently beaten into your psyche with a rhetorical two-by-four last night, Hillary Clinton has made history. Indeed. She has become the first presidential candidate of either gender to clinch a major party’s nomination while under active FBI investigation. That criminal probe — not a “security review” as she and her campaign have wrongly claimed — continues to produce serious new developments. Based on her deliberate, national security-endangering conduct, as well as a string of clues and actions by federal investigators, it is entirely possible that a recommendation for criminal prosecution will be handed down in the coming weeks. As America’s top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton ordered the implementation of an improper email scheme that predictably culminated in the compromising of thousands of classified documents, including top secret and ‘beyond top secret’ material. She ignored specific, personal warnings from State Department security officials about her reckless arrangement in 2009 and 2011, using her shockingly unsecure system throughout her four-year tenure as a means of thwarting public records requests and wielding total control over her correspondence. When the existence of her private server was revealed, Clinton and her attorneys unilaterally deleted tens of thousands of messages, falsely stating that none of them were work-related. She has verifiably and flagrantly lied about virtually every aspect of this scandal from the very beginning.

But other than that, she’s great.

The 90s and the Clintons were the last straw for me and Democrats.

[Thursday-morning update]

Hillary Clinton’s truth problem:

Reading through the interview transcripts and stories, I found nuggets buried deep in the coverage that offer a less flattering portrait of Clinton—that would suggest her presidency might lack transparency, candor, and accountability.

Gee, Ron, ya think?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Obama Space Doctrine

12 Comments

Congress recognizes that it’s coming to an end:

Although the House language must still go to conference with the Senate, it seems unlikely anyone in that body will fight too hard to save the asteroid mission, Capitol Hill sources told Ars. Even if the administration vetoes the bill, it doesn’t really matter to Congress, because key members of Obama’s leadership team, including NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, will probably be gone next year. This year’s legislation effectively lays down a marker for negotiations with the new occupant of the White House in 2017.

The key legislators behind the new exploration approach for NASA, California Democrat Mike Honda and Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine, at first blush seem an unlikely pair. Honda consistently ranks among the most liberal House members and Bridenstine among the most conservative. But with this new legislation, they have come together out of a desire for NASA to reconsider the Moon as a pragmatic interim destination before going to Mars.

“There is no better proving ground than the Moon for NASA to test the technologies and techniques needed to successfully meet the goal of sending humans to Mars by the mid 2030s,” Honda told Ars. “I am proud to lead the Congressional effort to ensure that NASA develops a plan to fully take advantage of potential partnerships with commercial industry, academia, and international space agencies to send affordable missions to explore and characterize the lunar surface.”

Loren Grush similarly writes that abandoning the moon was a mistake. I think she misses a key point here, though:

…perhaps the biggest strength of a Moon colony is how quickly NASA could pull it off. Studies have suggested that a crewed mission to the lunar surface could be done with existing rockets, such as the Falcon 9 or the Atlas and Delta rockets from United Launch Alliance, at a relatively low cost.

This is true of Mars, as well, at least if we consider Falcon Heavy. In fact, it’s the only affordable way to do it, given that Congress isn’t going to raise NASA’s budget to fund Mars hardware in the face of the continuation of the unneeded SLS.

Finally, Keith Cowing notes that the Planetary Society has an ulterior motive in continuing to support ARM:

The real reason why the Planetary Society supports ARM is that it delays sending humans to Mars. One look at their Humans Orbiting Mars report and you’ll see that they want to take longer to get to Mars and only play around on Phobos when they get there. Their own staff overtly state their reluctance to send humans to the surface.

Friedman’s statement that ARM cancellation would mean that “there will be no human space exploration earlier than 2030” demonstrates a certain level of cluelessness on his part. I guess he missed all of that SLS/Orion-based Deep Space Habitat goodness that was all over the news a month ago.

Lou Friedman wants us all to think that dire consequences will result if ARM is cancelled. I’d suggest the opposite: by focusing NASA’s limited resources on the things that actually get humans to Mars sooner – we will actually get humans to Mars – sooner.

I don’t care about Mars, but people who do should be loudly opposing SLS.