Category Archives: Social Commentary

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Heckling Hillary

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Katherine Prudhomme explains why she did it:

The next thing I heard about Hillary Clinton and sexual assault was in December, when a questioner asked Hillary if Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones should be believed. Hillary responded that, “everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence.” What evidence is now out there that would cause us to disbelieve them? Why didn’t the media ask her about it afterwards? I’ve watched this story more closely than most since 1999 and I didn’t know what evidence Hillary was talking about.

On New Year’s Day, I found out the Clinton campaign was going to be in my town that Sunday. I signed up using my real name, got a confirmation number, and thought all day about whether yelling out these questions at Hillary Clinton, which I’d asked so many times and heard so many dismissive answers to, was the right thing to do.

The only other option I faced was accepting that the people of this country and our leaders don’t care about rape and sexual assault victims when a powerful man is accused of them. That man is then above the law. When the woman closest to him enables his behavior and protects him from discovery by threatening his victims to remain silent, and then is presented to me as a champion of women, the disconnect is more than I can take. I felt like the little boy who yells out that the emperor has no clothes on. I decided that I had to go there and ask my question in any way that I could and would do so at the moment the question portion of her event began.

I went into the venue early, got a seat up at the front and waited. I even told the talkative, friendly man sitting next to me exactly what I was going to do. He thought it was a bad idea and tried to talk me out of it. I was expecting to be thrown out of the event or arrested, but I believed so much in my cause that I did it anyway.

Hillary told me last July in Gorham that she has no idea who Broaddrick is. Now she claims there is evidence to prove that Broaddrick is lying. That makes no sense. Why didn’t Lisa Myers find anything to discredit Broaddrick? Why didn’t NBC’s army of lawyers find anything? They would have welcomed any reason not to show that interview, but they did not find it.

People should be doing this to the rape enabler everywhere Her Highness goes, and force the media to cover it. There is no law that the Clintons don’t consider themselves above, including violent rape.

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

Apollo, I Love You

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…but:

So maybe Apollo went too far too soon and set an impossible target against which everything since has been measured. It wasn’t about primarily about exploration, although that did happen, and it certainly wasn’t about sustainability, but it has cast a long shadow over what has come since.

Am I committing some sort of heresy by saying these things? Well, all I can say is that the people who made Apollo happen are still my heroes. I still get a lump in my throat when I think what they did, the risks they took and the certainty they had in their belief that it was worth it. Armstrong himself has now left us, his surviving fellow moonwalkers are now old men – still active, still advocating the next big step, but a vivid reminder of the time that has passed since Apollo.

I guess my conclusion is that the further we get from those days, the more anomalous Apollo appears – an amazing adventure that will stand out as future generations look back on the twentieth century, but not something that can be repeated. We live in a different world now.

Yes. We need to stop trying to do Apollo to Mars. It isn’t going to happen, and moreover, it shouldn’t.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Oh, Sarah

26 Comments

Emily Zanotti has it right:

Sarah Palin took the stage last night in a strange chainmaille cardigan, determined, it seemed, to relive the best moments from every speech she gave on the campaign trail in 2008. The result was an amalgamation of “Drill, baby, drills!” and vague references to congressional spending as drug use, pulled, seemingly at random, through a Magnetic Poetry kit or the like, from every great speech Sarah Palin has ever given. In some places, you could have easily replaced the what was quickly deemed on social media a “word salad,” with a string of emojis, and still have elicited the same general level of specificity and reason. We will be America! We will go to places! We will ensure the conservative opinion journalists of this world constantly regret their internal provision against day drinking!

The result was bizarre. She raged against crony capitalism — alongside a man who earlier in the day had embraced increased ethanol disbursements to the Iowa farmers we already pay not to grow food. She insisted she was “sticking it to the establishment” — alongside a man who has openly embraced the symbiotic relationship between government and big business at every opportunity. Gone was any indication that she had ever supported grassroots principles — you can’t oppose Obamacare in the same room as a man who recently called for a single-payer health care system, call for lower taxes from a man who has openly committed to raising them, or claim to support the pro-life cause next to a man who claims to be pro-choice “in every respect.” It’s hard to push a conservative agenda when the man standing next to you has no agenda but his own.

[Mid-morning update]

Matthew Hoy is with me:

Now, I’ve never been a big Sarah Palin fan, but I defended her in 2008 against attacks by the media on her fitness to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. Not that I thought she was necessarily qualified to be vice president, but she was more qualified to be VP than Sen. Barack Obama was to be president. It was the media’s willful and abject failure to apply a consistent standard that prompted most of my defenses of her.

I don’t know if yesterday’s endorsement will help Trump in Iowa or any other state, but for Tea Party conservatives, Palin has trashed what little remains of her own brand. Donald Trump is in no way shape or form a conservative. It’s almost mind-blowing that in her endorsement speech, Palin would include the following, considering who she was standing next to:

The permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class, and that’s why you see that the borders are kept open,” Palin said. “For them, for their cheap labor that they want to come in. That’s why they’ve been bloating budgets for crony capitalists to be able to suck off of them.
Trump is the living embodiment of crony capitalism. He brags about how successful he is at the crony capitalism game.

I’m through defending Sarah Palin against anything anyone throws at her, no matter how vile.

[Afternoon update]

Does Palin’s endorsement of Trump spell an end to the Tea Party? An interesting conversation with some libertarians:

I’m not one of those guys that thinks that Donald Trump would make a bad president because he’s not a conservative; I’m one of those guys that thinks that Donald Trump is dangerous because he has such an authoritarian instinct that we don’t know what he would do as president. But he would not follow the rules, he would not respect the differences between the executive branch and the legislative branch. And that’s what the Tea Party was supposedly all about. We didn’t like executive power. […]

And I hate to use the F-word, but let’s go ahead and use it: The technical definition of fascism, and the history of fascism in the world, really wasn’t tethered to some sort of ideology the way socialism is. The goals were more random and scattered, but it creates a lot of chaos and it requires a lot of power. And I think we as Tea Partiers, as libertarians, as constitutional conservatives, we should judge a candidate based on whether or not they’ve actually read and respect the restraints placed on government power by the Constitution….

And by the way we should point out that there’s a mythology that all of Trump’s support is coming from the Tea Party. The data suggests something quite different–there’s a lot of independents, there’s a lot of registered Democrats, there’s a lot of people that haven’t participated in the process before.

That’s pretty much my take, too.