This, of course, is a charge that Democrats usually love to levy against Republicans. When Barack Obama took office in 2008, Democrats swooned that we finally had a “pragmatist” back in the White House after eight years of a Republican president who supposedly favored ideology to facts on everything from science to foreign policy. Translation: Democrats act based on knowing things because they are smarter and think about them rationally and scientifically, while Republicans act based on believing things because they are religious, ill-informed, or misled by powerful interest groups.
The last few years have supplied ample evidence of the opposite — namely, that Democrats are the ideologues wearing blinders to shield themselves from inconvenient realities. Indeed, it is worth reviewing a list of items on which Democrats seem incapable of overcoming preconceptions and interest groups.
The long standing deceit and conceit of the left, as Jonah Goldberg has documented in his books, going all the way back to John Dewey, is that they are “pragmatic” and that everyone else is “ideological,” when of course it’s exactly the opposite. The great irony of last year’s election was that the nation actually had a choice between an leftist ideologue and a pragmatist: Romney truly doesn’t seem to have any political principles, and just wants to do what “works.” They chose the ideologue.
Oh grow up. Please. Any form of disputation is now “Bullying,” as if the act of being less than supportive is a passive version of pushing someone down in the mud in the playground. The spread of the term beyond school infantilizes everyone and dilutes the term. Criticism is bullying; failure to agree with someone else’s precepts is “hate.” The internet did not invent this; it just allowed people with mushy noggins to retreat into supportive spaces where everyone outside the wall was a meany.
Dennis Wingo has the 2014 edition. Long but worth a read. I disagree with him on the first flight for commercial crew. I think it may happen as soon as next year.
Someone needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that “as soon as possible” could be within a year, if they accelerate the docking system, and they could fly someone in ten days, if someone decided it was important.
The headline of this good National Journal article on yesterday’s Senate Appropriations hearing is very misleading. One would think from it that’s it’s about the commercial crew competition between Dragon and CST, when in fact it’s about the competition between SpaceX and ULA for milsat launches. I assume that the copy editor screwed up, not the author. Anyway, note the typical socialist argument against competition that Dick Shelby uses.