Transterrestrial Musings

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Remind me again, which media is reporting, ad infinitum, Al Gore's supposed GW hypocrisy?

Posted by Offside at March 1, 2007 10:29 AM

WASHINGTON - If this presidential campaign is anything like the last, John McCain’s Vietnam service will inevitably be contrasted with GOP rival Rudy Giuliani’s avoidance of a war that he opposed.
“Any suggestion that he was dodging the draft is totally, factually inaccurate,” said a senior Giuliani campaign adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. “He opposed the war on tactical and strategic grounds.”

Posted by Swift-boat Rudy at March 1, 2007 11:27 AM

It certainly isn't the media that actually investigated Al Gore's history of energy use at the premier of his movie or at any point prior to his acceptance of an award months later. Indeed the media basically took Al Gore at face value until a couple of blogs brought up "An Inconvenient Truth" about Al Gore.

Posted by Leland at March 1, 2007 11:29 AM

Too bad that McCain will probably never stoop so low and play this dirty game. A far superior man to Swift-Boat Rudy IMHO.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at March 1, 2007 12:42 PM

Few people care what a candidate did decades ago, as a young man. The only reason that it was an issue for Kerry was that he made it one, by running on his Vietnam record as the centerpiece of his campaign.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 1, 2007 12:44 PM

Remind me again, which media is reporting, ad infinitum, Al Gore's supposed GW hypocrisy?

I don't think Rand meant that the media ignore or help spin away all missteps by all Democratic politicians. That would be kind of weird, don't you think? Every last Democratic politician from Senator Hillary down to the local dogcatcher? Every mistake from Hillary's ill-advised reaction to Geffen down to the fact that said dogcatcher once let a friend's dog go?

In other words, the fact that you can find an exception to a general observation doesn't say dick about whether the general observation is true or not. The fact that some of the bright lights in the sky are meteors that fall to Earth doesn't mean that all of them are, and will.

See, what you've really done is avoid the point, by pretending that Rand meant a far more absolute statement than he did. Then you pull out an exception and say "Aha!" This isn't a very honest way of arguing, although it doesn't take much brains (because, of course, you can find an exception to any generalization).

Why pick a dumb and dishonest way of arguing? The intelligent observer is likely to conclude that it's because you aren't capable of framing a reasonable and honest counter-argument to Rand's assertion. (Or there isn't one.) So you look kind of like an idiot here. I mean, just FYI.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 1, 2007 12:48 PM

Rand,
it's much worse than not caring what they did decades ago. Voters are so dense they seemingly don't remember anything from the beginning of one election cycle to the beginning of another.

Voters don't watch or know their incumbents voting records, yet they get re-elected, time and again. Continually re-elected, unless of course the incumbent calls someone "macaca".

Posted by Steve at March 1, 2007 12:54 PM

Yes, Carl, let's talk about general observations and exceptions.

There is the more than general observation made by the vast majority of climate scientists that GW is caused by human activity. And then there is the exception to that argument which so many cling to with such fervor. For some, that sort of exception is one worth holding on to for dear life. That's the kind of exception the right wing media clings to - Limbaugh, Hannity, The Corner etc. Can you point me to a parallel situation where the MSM actively promotes a viewpoint denied by a clear majority of experts in any subject?

So if we want to talk about media bias, maybe we should look elsewhere, where the deviation from the norm is greatest, and where facts and propaganda are Really indistinguishable?

Posted by Offside at March 1, 2007 01:36 PM

Can you point me to a parallel situation where the MSM actively promotes a viewpoint denied by a clear majority of experts in any subject?

Hmmmm...let's see...

The danger of nuclear power? The danger of genetically-modified organisms? The societal and health benefits of organic food? The danger of fat? The notion that gun control will reduce crime, or that the Second Amendment is a "collective" right? The murderousness of men on Superbowl Sunday? The large number of women who die of anorexia yearly?

I could go on. (I'm of course assuming that you really mean "experts" and not just people with an axe to grind, who don't understand science or statistics, or logic.)

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 1, 2007 01:54 PM

Let me throw 'Nuclear Winter' in there Rand. Another climate hoax that was backed by many of the same agenda driven cabal that once backed global cooling and now back global warming.

How many times must we go thru this until even the most witless of dullards amongst us realize that that dog just won't hunt.

Posted by Mike Puckett at March 1, 2007 01:59 PM

Yes, Carl, let's talk about general observations and exceptions. There is the more than general observation made by the vast majority of climate scientists that GW is caused by human activity....

And this is called "changing the subject." It's a still more impoverished form of "argument" than the modal scope fallacy in which you indulged above. It doesn't require (or merit) a response.

Er...maybe you should head on over to digg.com? You might enjoy playing with people more your own age.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 1, 2007 02:00 PM

Let me throw 'Nuclear Winter' in there Rand.

Sagan et al. might still be right about this one, Mike. The evidence from the effect of volcanos (e.g. Pinatubo) is pretty compelling.

Sagan was most spectacularly wrong about the oil fires in Kuwait during Gulf War I, but maybe that's because (as an astrophysics guy, or even more relevantly as a media talking head) he didn't pay enough attention to the important question of the dynamics of the atmosphere, and therefore mistakenly thought putting junk in the troposphere was pretty much the same as putting it in the stratosphere, as volcanos do and big nukes would do. (This is just a wild guess, BTW, as this isn't my field.)

I'm not saying the goofier adherents of 'nuclear winter' didn't go happily off the deep end, but that doesn't mean the underlying idea is wrong. (Also worth noting is that Sagan himself admitted to his error, like a good empirical scientist.) That a full-scale nuclear exchange might have led to the deep freeze isn't very implausible, and draws mild support from better follow-up studies than the original Sagan paper.

'Course, global cooling would seem to be only one of the major problems facing the world following a full-scale nuclear war...

I find, sadly, the same kind of herd hysteria attaches to climate modeling and change. You get some very interesting and provocative science (like maybe anthropogenic CO2 could alter global climate), and right away a bunch of fools with axes to grind grab it and glue themselves to it and slobber all over it and generally make it their own, and then rational discussion just sort of ends, because they make so much irrational noise that everyone else thinks the irrational hooliganism is all there is to it.

Feh. Makes you think calling ourselves Homo sapiens means just about what the yoozed-car dealer means when he calls himself "Honest Joe."

Posted by Carl Pham at March 1, 2007 02:18 PM

I just love it when pencil armed wimps like Simberg who never served in the armed forces somehow think that they are qualified to pass judgement on people like John Kerry who risked their lives in service to our country.

Posted by at March 1, 2007 02:20 PM

And I just love it when anonymous morons trot out the Chickenhawk argument, and ignore the fact that Kerry got his ass out of there as soon as he could (probably a record short tour), after he accumulated his three scratches, at least one of which was questionable. Sorry, but I'll pay much more attention to what his fellow officers thought about him than anonymous morons.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 1, 2007 02:24 PM

Carl,

When you have studied the total megatonnage of a hypothetical exchange and the relative effects of groundbursts vs airbursts, let me know and we and we will talk. Volcanos are a bad analog for several reasons.

Piggy ain't coming home on this one. Nuclear winter is a hoax and volcanoes are in no way comparible unless the world reverts to 50 megaton Tsar bombas from 40 Kiloton class warheads.

Posted by Mike Puckett at March 1, 2007 02:35 PM

The MSM isn't actively selecting which direction to proceed on any of the issues/ topics Rand mentioned. There isn't a particular script that must be followed other than to find the most spectacular, the most entertaining, the most attention getting reporting. That is quite different from active propaganda. I'm not trying to be an apologist for the MSM; my complaint is the lack of commentary here on a far more propagandized media on the right. If one is looking for media bias its right there talking to you from your car radio, and its a lot worse than any bias you can find on the MSM. It has a more pernicious reach, a captive audience and the power to generate a far more hysterical goose stepping herd than anything the MSM can remotely achieve.

Posted by Offside at March 1, 2007 02:42 PM

Kerry volunteered to go over there and get shot at. Have you risked your life for your country, Simberg? You are pathetic.

Posted by at March 1, 2007 03:14 PM

And yet you lack the balls to even attach a valid name to your asinine posts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 1, 2007 03:21 PM

Mike, 'nuclear winter' was a scary scenario when the weapon of choice (at least on the Soviet side) was the 20-megaton whomper. The original TTAPS paper was published in 1983, and the only wide-spread discussion I recall was in the same time period.

I don't think anyone seriously considers it a likely scenario today. I mean, leaving aside the fact that tactics have changed (especially towards using smaller but more accurate warheads, as you point out), there aren't nearly as many deliverable megatons lying around, and, besides, who would be fighting? Can't see even a re-nationalisticized Putinized Russia posing enough of an existential threat to the US to warrant a full-scale MAD response.

So why isn't the volcanic injection of dust into the stratosphere comparable to that from a big nuke? Clearly there are minor differences, of course, but I don't see why you feel the comparison is quite worthless.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 1, 2007 03:22 PM

Truth hurts doesn't it Simberg?

Posted by at March 1, 2007 03:32 PM

It is amazing that both sides of the political spectrum think that the media is on the "opposite" side.

The media is on the side of ratings.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 1, 2007 04:33 PM

Apparently, John Kerry is as pathetic at kicking @ss as he is at everything else.

Democrat Condemnation Disease.

Kerry's true service record remains a mystery, and a suspicious one.

It's a world of bias, no question about it. Even Fox News is falling down on the job. It's as if they think that audiences are just plain bored
with the story. Maybe they are --- the audiences could be biased too.

Posted by at March 1, 2007 04:36 PM

Mike:

Correct or not, don't you think that the whole nuclear winter hypothesis served a useful purpose? This idea was widely circulated; and who knows for sure that it wasn't the reason why we didn't have a nuclear Armageddon in the 1980s?

Maybe Sagan and his associates did us a favour - even if they were wrong.

And the only way to fing out for sure was to do the experiment - a rather undesirable idea no matter what the outcome.

Posted by Fletcher Christian at March 1, 2007 04:40 PM

I agree with Robert:

It is amazing that both sides of the political spectrum think that the media is on the "opposite" side.

Everyone seems to hate the MSM. On all sides.

Posted by Bill White at March 1, 2007 06:32 PM

Bill:

the problem with the MSN is that it doesnt match anylonger the concept of news which is "our side is great and the other side is horrible".

In the end there is no difference between Libby and Lewinski except whose Ox is being gored...well there is one. Libby involved affairs of the state conducted by individuals representing the state.

My own opinion of LIbby based on what I have heard of the case and my own view of what he and his boss have done to The Republic...is that he should go to jail.

A long time ago Cheney should have done the honorable thing and left government service.

There is nothing about the case for going to Iraq that has honor written on it.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 1, 2007 07:14 PM

HatsOff2U Robert!

Posted by Offside at March 1, 2007 07:23 PM

Kerry won a silver star and a bronze star, that's all I need to know
about his service record.

Shrub won the bottlecap award for downing a case of beer
while on duty.

Posted by anonymous at March 1, 2007 07:25 PM

Re: the original 'nuclear winter' paper

Once upon a time I actually read that paper, and it's conclusions are based on amazing flaws regarding assumptions and definitions, all in transparent service of a political agenda.

The basic mechanism of nuclear winter was from the smoke of burning urban centers. Types of nuclear war in the study were defined by total megatonnage employed NOT by the targets of the megatonnage. Thereby the study concluded that even a 'limited nuclear war' could generate nuclear winter. Their limited nuclear war scenario defined by burning down 100 major urban areas!

That nuclear winter study by Sagan et al was utter crap.

Posted by Brad at March 1, 2007 09:30 PM

Analmous,
Kerry got his medals and promptly stabbed all his comrades in the back at congressional hearings. THAT defines who he is and why he should NEVER be President.

Offsides,
Comparing Rush and talk radio to network "news" organizations is ridiculous. The networks had a monopoly on what was news, how it would be presented and then would have people from the same newsroom "analyze" it Why do you think Dems want to bring back the "Fairness Doctrine"? Case in point, without blogs, Dan Rather runs his story about TANG docs and everyone passes it on as gospel. JFK II is President. Don't forget the "Chevy trucks blow up" fiasco on Dateline. There are plenty more of those. Why do you think newspapers are hemorraging money and subscribers? Pinch is running the NY Times into the ground with his left wing bias.

Robert G.,
So a political witch hunt and sexual harrasment are morally equivalent? Remember, there was no "Fitzmas". Plame's name coming out was NOT a crime. Clinton taking advantage of a naïve 23year old and then lying about it and obstructing the investigation earned him disbarment.

Posted by Bill Maron at March 1, 2007 09:45 PM

Bill.

There is no more a political witchhint with Libby then there was with Lewinski.

Clinton's "efforts" were not "actors of the state" engaging in efforts to support in some fashion "actions of the state" against people who were employees of the state.

Libby's ( and I think Cheney's) were. They were efforts by people who were policy managers in The Republic to silence people who were critics of that effort by engaging thier spouses.

That type of effort is at the very least "without honor". What fracken business of LIbby's was it PERIOD that an employee of the CIA was married to Joe Wilson?

What fracken business did he or anyone have telling that information to anyone?

NONE. Had Clinton done this the far right would have had to have been sedated how nutty they would have gone.

All Clinton's "deeds" in Lewinsky were done as essentially a "citizen" who was being engaged by political actors using his personal life and events in it for a political motive.

Libby HAD NO BUSINESS discussing Plame for ANY REASON...WHY WAS HE EVEN FRACKEN INTERESTED IN HER?

Everything about Lewinsky until the stupid impeachment started was that of private citizens attempting to engage a sitting President for political means.

There is no honor in what Libby did. There is no honor in what Cheney did. It was petty bs because they got caught "misstating" things about Iraq for their own political motives.

Cheney shouldhave resigned a long time ago. Nothing he has claimed about Iraq has turned out to be true.

Do you like that?

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 1, 2007 10:18 PM

Well Robert, for now I'll let fracken go till the end. Plame was an intergal part of the story because SHE WAS MARRIED TO JOE WILSON. SHE WORKED AT THE CIA WHO SENT HER HUSBAND TO AFRICA. His whole story was a lie. I think it would be prudent to ask what part his wife played. She wasn't covert, hadn't been for years. Wilson made a political attack on the administration and either had willing help or finessed the CIA. Fitz found no underlying crime and Libby is on trial for discrepancies in his statements.
Clinton was a serial womanizer. That points to a BIG character flaw. When you are PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, YOU ARE NOT A PRIVATE CITIZEN. He was the commander-in-chief and getting oral sex from a woman, not his wife, in the oval office. In what world do you think the taxpayers don't have a right to know how he was abusing his office?
Okay, back to fracken. This means what?

Posted by Bill Maron at March 2, 2007 12:42 AM

Bill.

If Wilson's whole story was a LIE, what do you call "the WMD, the Al tubes that were for nuclear equipment but were not, the "drones that were going to attack the US", the this will be a piece of cake, the "it wont take 250,000 troops, the etc etc etc".

You are upset over WIlson? AND YOU ARE NOT UPSET over any of this?

We do not allow people who represent the "State" to attack people who are simply married to someone that they do not like.

IF WILSON WAS WRONG, why not send people out to say that?

Reason...almost everything Cheney et al said about IRAQ WAS WRONG...

Why are you not upset over Rummy who ignored Shinseki WHO WAS RIGHT?

Why are you not upset that we were told that Saddam could "have a smoking gun that was a mushroom" and that was a complete fabrication?

Why?

The answer is because you are like those on the far left...your outrage over lies is biased by your political leanings.

Clinton was a womanizer. Yeah, but the American epople knew that when they elected him twice.

This administration sent us on a foreign policy adventure that was based on misstatements as large as anything you can claim Wilson told, they DID IT POORLY, about the worst that has ever been done, and then they started using the mechinisms of the State to attack the spouses of people who disagreed with that.

and you defend all those things?

If your argument is that clinton should have gone because he was a womanizer and you are not as equally upset over the "stories" that were told about Iraq...that is proof enough that your moral outrage is filtered through your political beliefs.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 2, 2007 03:53 AM

Bill.

in the end I would rather have an administration that would lie or misstate or whatever you want to call it the marital situation of the POTUS then I would an administration which either misstates or is incompetent or both about war.

Be upset over the Misstatement and incompetence of this administration over Iraq and then you can claim to not be biased and a Clinton hater.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 2, 2007 04:10 AM

We do not allow people who represent the "State" to attack people who are simply married to someone that they do not like.

No one was "attacked," Robert.

IF WILSON WAS WRONG, why not send people out to say that?

They did.

As with the Clinton case, you seem to be living in some alternate reality.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 2, 2007 05:14 AM

I personally blame John Kerry for the massive increase in the US deficit and for the massive quagmire that Iraq has become. He robbed competent candidates like Dean in the primaries and then proceeded to make a clusterfsck of his campaign.

Posted by Adrasteia at March 2, 2007 05:14 AM

Be upset over the Misstatement and incompetence of this administration over Iraq and then you can claim to not be biased and a Clinton hater.

I am upset about it. But there's no reason to think that the Dems would be any better.

...competent candidates like Dean...

That's hilarious.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 2, 2007 05:30 AM

He robbed competent candidates like Dean in the primaries and then proceeded to make a clusterfsck of his campaign.

Doesn't sound like he'd have made a very good President then, does it? Or d'you figure running a country is easier than running a Presidential campaign?

And if your alternate, Howie Dean, is such a weenie he can get his lunch money taken by a doofus like John Kerry, how 'zactly was he going to take on the mullahs or the Taliban?

Sounds like you want to have it both ways: your guys were stumblebums who were robbed blind in the election, but would have become tough, cannny leaders once in the Oval Office, while the Shrub was a fiendishly clever Machiavellian manipulator right up until Election Day but became Mr. Stupid as soon as the votes were counted.

sproing!

And that's the sound of the logical consistency meter blowing a fuse...

Posted by Carl Pham at March 2, 2007 05:38 AM

Clinton's "efforts" were not "actors of the state" engaging in efforts to support in some fashion "actions of the state" against people who were employees of the state.

Really? And all this time I thought Clinton was the President thus in charge of the White House as well the country and Monica was an intern employed by the White House. That evil Rush Limbaugh misled me. I even thought that Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, was delivered by Arkansas State Troopers to then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

We do not allow people who represent the "State" to attack people who are simply married to someone that they do not like.

We also should not allow "employees of the state" to use taxpayers dollars to send their family members on business trips to gather classified intelligence for a New York Times op ed piece.

Posted by Leland at March 2, 2007 07:11 AM

Carl, like Brad said, TTAPS was based on smoke and soot, not lofting. And the 20 Megaton bunker buster was reserved by the Soviets for things like Cheyenne mountain, not just any old missle silo. Those things tied up an entire SS-18 IIRC.

Urban centers would have been struck by much smaller airburst weapons that would not have produced the effects predicted by TTAPS.

We actually have examples of urban areas subjected to airburst warheads. Urban areas with a high percentage of combustible materials. Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And the fire bombing of Tokyo would have produced more soot and combustion by-products than any modern nuke detonation over an urban center due to the WWII era construction of Tokyo being far more wood and bamboo than concrete and steel.

Posted by Mike Puckett at March 2, 2007 07:26 AM

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 2, 2007 05:14 AM

Of course they did...

the attacked Wilson's wife...they brought her into the affair when what they needed to do, if they could was shoot down Joe Wilson's view.

Problem is that they didnt believe the Niger thing either...its just that they were so concerned with bundling everything that they could get into the case for war, no matter its validity that they didnt care who they attacked.

Here is a test...

What about Saddams ability to attack the US that they said has turned out to be true?

NOT A SINGLE THING.

They are misstaters on a scale that make Clinton a piker.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 2, 2007 06:52 PM

the attacked Wilson's wife...they brought her into the affair when what they needed to do, if they could was shoot down Joe Wilson's view.

Robert, answer a simple question. Who was the first person who told the press who Wilson's wife was?

If you don't know the answer to this question, you haven't clue one as to what was going on, which you reveal with every post on this subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 2, 2007 07:09 PM

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