Political Commentary

Iraqis In Oklahoma?

Most political observers agree that the Oklahoma City bombing resurrected Bill Clinton’s political career, or at least initiated the process. The Democrats had just lost the Congress in the 1994 elections, due to the health-care debacle, gun control, and a number of other overreaches. There were stories in Time and Newsweek about the “incredible shrinking President” and whether or not he was “relevant.”

OKC changed all that almost overnight. It not only allowed the Big He to go out on one of his “feel your pain” trips, but he and his minions used it to blast militias, talk radio, and evil Right-Wing Republicans, blaming them and their “hate speech” for the bombing.

All of this slander was contingent, of course, on the fact that the job was done, and done solely, by a member of such a “right-wing group.” So Tim McVeigh was the perfect fall guy, from the Administration’s point of view. Once they had the goods on him and Nichols, they basically quit looking for anyone else. Remember “John Doe #2”? Few others do, either, because all evidence that could implicate anyone but McVeigh and Nichols was excluded from their trial, and it became quickly forgotten.

While it could be argued that such evidence was irrelevant to the case against them, and thus properly excluded, it was also convenient to those who wanted to demonize the “right,” since it allowed the finger of blame to be pointed only at the evil right wingers. That full justice was never served wasn’t as important as making clear how evil McVeigh and like-thinking people were.

Well, now that we’re digging into terrorism, and terrorist connections, in light of the past few months, some old skeletons may be starting to clatter out of the closet, as described in this article at Insight. In the process of seeking additional justifications to go after Saddam, yet another old Clinton coverup may finally see the light of day.

Note the last, and key, paragraph:

But one thing is clear: Bill Clinton and Janet Reno exulted when they found a domestic conspiracy behind the Oklahoma City bombing, say administration insiders, and immediately ordered the FBI to call off its investigation of any international connection. Details of that connection finally are beginning to emerge.

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Blogspotty

Down again.

I’m whomping up a little perl script that will check once a minute or so automagically to see if it’s working. It’ll turn on a little traffic signal (green for up, red for down) so people can know not to waste any time with blogspotters.

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Still In Denial

In an article in Salon last week, Josh Marshall displayed his tendency to check his brains at the door when it comes to the Clintons. The full article is only available as a “premium” (i.e., you have to pay cash money for it), but I didn’t bother, because this (free, thankfully) excerpt leads me to conclude that it’s worth less than nothing:

The final report into the Whitewater investigation released Wednesday by the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) confirmed what had been known for some time — that after all the tens of millions of dollars and eight years of investigation, the OIC found no evidence of any criminal activity on the part of Bill or Hillary Clinton in the various dealings that fell under the catchall heading of “Whitewater.”

As I already pointed out previously, if Josh really believes this, he’s delusional, or he didn’t read the report (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and not simply call him a liar). And when a couple of Washington Post reporters tried the same thing the other day, their on-line headline later had to be revised to reflect reality.

Contrary to finding “no evidence of any criminal activity,” Mr. Ray actually found quite a bit–he just didn’t think that he had enough to get a conviction. But, as is the case with all Clinton liars and spinners, “insufficient” evidence somehow gets transmogrified into “none,” and it’s just a witchhunt on those poor paragons of virtue by the evil rightwingers.

Well, Josh, by your own standards, I find no evidence that you are a serious journalist.

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The Blasphemous West

Steven Den Beste has a nice description of Japan’s martial history and how it was necessary to end it and entirely restructure their culture in order to get a lasting peace with them.

The point, of course, is that we will almost certainly have to do the same thing with Islam, at least Wahabi Islam, to end the current war. It’s a long read, but a good one. As Steven says, our very existence is not just a threat to them–it’s blasphemy.

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Cracks In The Dam?

There’s an interesting little item in the Village Voice about questions concerning Cliff Baxter’s demise. He was the Enron executive who ostensibly committed suicide, but according to this report, he was talking about hiring a body guard shortly before his death–a behavior more consistent with later homicide than suicide.

But what I found most interesting were these words:

Those who doubt the official line think he’s another Vince Foster, murdered in cold blood to stop him from spilling the beans on Enron chief Ken Lay and blowing open the whole scam?offshore accounts, political connections, and all.

The title of the piece contains Foster’s name as well. He says it as though it’s established fact that Foster was murdered. Gee, while the Village Voice is hardly mainstream media, I thought that it was only “right-wing nuts” who have suspicions about the circumstances of Mr. Foster’s strange departure from this world.

Now that Mr. Starr has long departed from the prosecutorial scene, Mr. Ray has submitted his final report, and the Clinton’s have been out of office and power for over a year, I wonder if we’re going to start to see cracks appear in the official story on Foster?

If either Clinton, or even a Clinton or Rodham relative get indicted and/or convicted for the pardon mess, we may see the floodgates start to burst here.

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Pot, Meet Kettle…

At The Nation, the eternally loathesome Eric Alter writes:

Now Sullivan has launched a career in the brave new world of “blogging,” or vanity websites. And while his site arouses a certain gruesome car-wreck fascination, it serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors.

Well, certainly Mr. Alterman is the poster child for that concern. Maybe Katrina, Victor and David Corn were all on vacation this week. Or maybe the editors need editors…

Political Commentary

In Defense Of My Home Town

I’m getting a little tired of having my home town of Flint, Michigan being continually slandered and libeled by the Australian oppressor and others, including Michael Moore. He is not from Flint. That benighted town has lots of problems, some even of its own making, but spawning the likes of Michael Moore is not one of them.

According to one of his many contradictory stories, he himself claims that he was raised in rural Lapeer county, and according to one of his fan websites, he was actually born in Davison (now a suburb just east of the growing city, but at that time a small town outside of it). Of course, I didn’t have to look it up on the Internet. Being there at the time, I knew that.

In 1954, Michael Moore was born in Davison, Michigan, a suburb of Flint, to an Irish Catholic family of laborers.

Well, now we know that being a laborer is not genetic.

At 14, Moore, impressed by the Berrigans, joined a diocesan seminary. But a year later, he was asked to leave.

What a shocker.

Moore cited girls as the main proponent.

And the girls no doubt cited him as the main repellent.

He was forced to return to Davison High School, where he became a star of the school debate team, a student-government organizer and even authored a school play.

Note: Davison High School. Not a Flint high school.

In 1970, Moore received the Eagle Scout award. His Eagle Scout project was a slide show exposing the worst polluters in Flint.

Was he part of the show? Based on first-hand reports of his personal hygiene habits, inquiring minds want to know.

And we have good reason to be suspicious. After all, he is famous for creating exposes of things for which he himself could be a poster child (e.g., “Stupid White Men”).

Though, I suppose he’d be exempt in this particular case, being a resident of Davison.

After high school, Moore worked several jobs, including one at Buick, which he quit on his first day.

How does one “work” a job that one quits on the first day? This is a logical miracle achievable, apparently in some immaculate way, only by someone who is the offspring of “laborers.”

In 1972, spurned [sic] on by Donald Priehs, his former government teacher, Moore decided to run for the school board and won; at 18, Moore became the youngest member to sit on the Flint City Council. Shortly after, Moore lobbied to get Priehs fired.

Isn’t he a gem?

Moore caused so much trouble for the town that a recall drive was attempted. Moore dropped out of the University of Michigan, Flint because he was too busy suing his town in court.

And the University rejoiced.

Shortly thereafter, he headed out to infest San Francisco, and tormented my poor city no more until he came back in the late ’80s to stalk Roger Smith.

And, as someone who was born within the city limits (the year after Mr. Moore) and a resident through my third year of college, I can assure all that Flint is nothing like Manhattan, a fact that I regretted throughout my childhood…

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Red Faces At Gallup

Apparently, that public opinion survey done in the Islamic world was dramatically misreported.

These eye-opening results were “actually the average for the countries surveyed regardless of the size of their populations,” the NCPP noted. “Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims.”

That’s Enron arithmetic. It’s as if California and South Dakota each were granted the same number of electoral votes in presidential elections.

Also, apparently the Kuwait numbers weren’t of Kuwaiti citizens:

One other problem: not everyone interviewed for the poll was Muslim. “The surveys were samples of all residents of the countries surveyed, not only Muslims,” the NCPP statement read. (In hindsight, this probably was a minor problem: fewer than 500 of the 9,924 respondents were non-Muslim, according to Gallup.)

In fact, you didn’t need to be a citizen of the country where the interviews were conducted. For example, fewer than half of the individuals in the Kuwait sample were Kuwaiti citizens.

So who were they? Saudis? Palestinians?

While the correct numbers still give a grim picture of Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. (much of which is fomented by a government-controlled press), it doesn’t speak well for this much-vaunted polling organization.

Space

Half A Century Of (Non) Wheel Spinning In Space

I’ve previously talked about how we’re in a decade of fortieth space anniversaries. Well, today is a fiftieth anniversary of a very significant space-related cultural event.

Fifty years ago today, the first of a series of popular space articles was published in Collier’s Magazine. This was a collaboration with several space engineers (including Werner von Braun and Willey Ley) and space artists, including the incomparable Chesley Bonestell.

It presented a future in space that helped prepare the American public for the upcoming space age. It included von Braun’s vision of expansion into the solar system, nurtured even while he was designing the V-2 rockets for Hitler’s Third Reich. The series described crewed reusable shuttles, large wheeled space stations (as later depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), lunar shuttles and bases, and manned flights to Mars. It later resulted in a Disney animated series that was shown on Sunday nights.

Unfortunately, for many reasons, the future didn’t turn exactly as von Braun, Ley, Bonestell and others envisioned. NASA was formed in response to a public panicked by Sputnik, and then diverted from a slow, rational development of the high frontier to the Cold-War imperative of beating the Russians to the Moon (and per Lyndon Johnson’s desires, helping industrialize the South) with the Apollo program. Once this pattern had been set in place, the space bureaucracy acquired an institutional inertia that has prevented us from making much further progress, at least in proportion to the funds expended on it.

There’s another article on the topic from Space.com a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it’s used as the background of a depressing puff piece for NASA and the International Space Station:

Some of the elements of the “Collier’s Space Program,” like the creation of crewed rockets, a reusable space shuttle and the first landings on the moon, have already been achieved. With a few trial runs behind us, we soon will be a step closer to a permanent crewed space station — the next stage in the magazine’s imaginary conquest of other planets — once the International Space Station goes on line.

Yeah, right. No one on that team envisioned going to the Moon and then abandoning it. Or a reusable Shuttle that would fly only half a dozen times a year at a cost of over half a billion per flight. And there is nothing in the design (or location) of ISS that will allow it to make much of a contribution toward going to other planets.

At a planned size of 356 x 290 feet [118 x 97 meters], the ISS will favorably compare to von Braun’s 250-foot [83-meter]- diameter ring-shaped station, which the Collier’s team designed to hold 80 people.

Favorably compare?!

By what criteria? Apparently this guy thinks that size means something. Because it’s a few tens of feet larger (because the solar panels stick out that far) than the planned wheeled station, he thinks that it’s a better station, even though the wheel held 80 people, and ISS holds three (and perhaps a dozen if it ever gets fully built).

However, unlike the ISS, the Collier’s station would have been built exclusively by U.S. funds. Given estimates that such a structure could be built by 1967, the total bill would have come in at around $4 billion in 1952 dollars.

And even accounting for inflation over the past fifty years, it would have been a bargain, compared to ISS, particularly when one considers that it had artificial gravity, and held an order of magnitude more people.

Australian David Sanders has produced a documentary of what life would have been like over the past half century had that vision been actually carried forward. From his website:

This film is based on an alternative timeline to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of reality – it is based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950’s in Colliers actually came to pass – and sooner than they expected.

Through the expert use of special visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the world of wonder and imagination expressed though Collier’s has become real. The film Man Conquers Space looks like a documentary from the 1960’s, complete with varying grades of film quality, scratches and lab marks, and a tinny soundtrack – just the way it would appear today if it had indeed been made over 30 years ago on the limited budget afforded to documentary makers of that era.

David has the vision, even if Washington has lost it. Check it out.

[Update at 1:30PM PST]

Dr. Al Jackson has a web page commemorating this series, with his own personal recollections.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!