I haven’t had much (anything, in fact) to say about the Pluto imbroglio. I do think a lot of the commentary about it is kind of silly, anthropomorphizing an icy rock with talk of “poor Pluto.” Get over it, folks.
Here’s what I would have written, if I’d had the time and more inspiration.
In this post, a commenter says:
…it is apparent that you hardly ever criticise Bush for anything. You are primarily concerned with the nuttier fringe of Bush’s opposition and what they say. The end result is that although you claim that there is a lot to criticise about Bush, you never say what it is, nor spend much time on it.
What you don’t seem to acknowledge on your blog is that significant portions of the anti-Bush population is _not_ the nutcase moonbat fringe, but people who supported the president but changed their minds because of things that they found they did not like. But you seem to clearly divide the country into “us” and “them” and the only “them” that you acknowledge is the nutters.
A lot of people supported Bush up to the middle of last year, when several things happened. For one, it became clear that Iraq was not getting any better and Bush’s pronouncements about it seemed to indicate that he was the only person who did not recognize this. Then there was the Harriet Miers Supreme Court choice, which convinced a lot of conservatives that Bush was more interested in helping friends than in making decisions based upon sound conservative (and intellectual) core values. And then there was hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, where the entire response seemed muddled and confused. For me, I could substitute “terrorist bomb” for Katrina and conclude that this administration would do as bad a job responding to a terrorist attack as it did responding to a predictable hurricane. That caused me to lose all faith in the president. (And the continuing deterioration in Iraq has not helped change my mind.)
Sure, there are a lot of crazies saying crazy things about Bush. But a) they are not the majority of his non-supporters, and b) they are not the ones who hold political power in this country. So why be so concerned about them, when the problems are with the people in charge?
I am concerned with that because the “nuttier fringe” seems to have become the mainstream of the Democrats, and it gets a lot of air time.
I have criticized the administration, and linked to others’ criticisms with approval often–I suspect you just haven’t noticed. I thought that the Harriet Miers nomination was one of the biggest blunders of his presidency, and I’m livid that amid all the out-of-control spending that he’s actually encouraged, the first thing that he could find his veto pen for in five years was stem cells (not that I think that this should necessarily be federally funded). I think that it was a travesty and in fact a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office that he signed McCain-Feingold when he said himself that it was unconstitutional.
I remain furious that Bush didn’t can George Tenent when he came into office, that he allowed Norm Mineta to remain in charge of Transportation for so long after he refused to profile, that he allowed the TSA to drag its feet for so long on arming pilots, that he allowed that idiot who insisted on dress codes for air marshals to remain in place for so long, only recently ending that inspired idiocy.
I think that the Department of Homeland Security was a disastrous mistake (and the reorganization that it entailed was one of the reasons that the federal Katrina response was laggard, though I never have high expectations of federal bureaucracies). Will it respond well to a terrorist attack? Probably not, but I don’t blame George Bush for that. As I said, I have low expectations for big government, regardless of who’s president, and losing faith in a president because a bureaucracy acts like a bureaucracy is silly, though people tend to do it anyway (it was one of the reasons that Bush’s father lost to Bill Clinton). I wish that the administration had used 9/11 as a justification to refocus the federal government on the things that it’s really responsible for and good at, and cleared the underbrush of a lot of the nonsensical things that have accumulated over the decades. Instead with the connivance of the Chuck Schumers of the world, it became an excuse to continue nonsensical things like the Drug War, and grow the government.
There are many other things for which I could criticize the administration, if I had time, and if there was a point. I have said these things, many times, over the years. As I said, for some reason people only notice when I bash the mindless Bush critics.
But my problem is that we are war, and much (even most) of the criticism coming from the left is purely partisan and unserious (if it were a Democrat doing many of the things that Bush, along with his “compassionate conservatism,” has done they’d be praising him as a tough president, instead of vilifying him). I shoot down these spurious critiques in order to clear the field for rational criticism, of which he’s quite worthy. I’m not a Democrat (though I was one once), but I’m not a Republican either (and never have been), and I can certainly understand why Orson Scott Card is upset with his party.
New York Times editorial page today has an opinion about stem cells concluding:
Mostly it illustrates the great lengths to which scientists must go these days to shape stem cell research to fit the dictates of religious conservatives who have imposed their own view of morality on the scientific enterprise.
This following a piece on cluster bombs where they “dictate” the terms of weapons sales from the Pentagon to protect Lebanese. They have also “imposed their own view of morality on the” war “enterprise.”
At least both views of morality coincide on the ethics of cluster bomb use in stem cell research.
To paraphrase Golda Meir, so-called human rights organizations will be useful when they learn to love human rights more than they hate the US and Israel. Or to paraphrase someone else–they’re not in favor of human rights, they’re just on the other side.
We need to either reform them (unlikely–it would require a housecleaning so thorough there would be little left) or form some new ones that could be more credible.
Given that some of the nations who have offered troops for the farce that is a ceasefire in Lebanon don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist (e.g., Malaysia and Indonesia), and the UN itself doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, what would they say at Turtle Bay if Iran offered up “peacekeeping troops” in south Lebanon? Since they don’t formally recognize Iran’s role in the war, how would they refuse? For that matter, why wouldn’t they accept an offer from Syria to help “police” its border with Lebanon?
National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield is calling it quits at the end of the season. Certainly the last two years have to have been pretty rough on him. Here’s hoping that he’ll get a lighter season as a send off.
Lileks’ Newhouse column is a partial replay of his earlier screed, but still entertaining. I thought this line encapsulated the nuttiness of the people who worry about theocrats in the White House, but seem indifferent to the ones who actually havea theocracy, and would impose it on us if they could:
…one could make the case that the greatest threats to the freedoms of the West are posed by the head-choppers, plane-exploders, their many merry supporters, and the nuke-seeking state that supports them.
But don’t expect the artists to make the case. They saw what happened to that Theo Van Gogh fellow. Pay no attention to that imam behind the curtain. Here’s the ghost of Eisenhower. Booga-booga!
The artists seem more concerned with a culture that won’t let gays marry than one that won’t let them live.
And I got a dark chuckle over this:
They take the easy way out, these brave souls; they’ll perform “The Diary of Anne Frank,” but only because now some people think it has a happy ending.
Orson Scott Card isn’t very happy with his fellow Democrats. I’m sure that it’s very frustrating for him to have to defend George Bush, about whom there are a great deal of things worthy of criticism (if so, I certainly share it), but the lunacy of the continuing attacks on him make it necessary.
Jonah Goldberg talks about the Democrats’ latest amusing dementia. So does Rich Lowry.
Amir Taheri thinks not. Michael Young agrees.
Longer term, I suspect that the media is another loser, with continuing self-inflicted blows to its credibility in the wake of the fauxtography and willing (and even eager) acceptance of staged Hezbullah propaganda. I hope so, anyway.