Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Decline Of America

21 Comments

Charls Krauthammer says that we have a choice to make. The problem is that the country is being run by people who think that such a decline is a “progressive” value, and not only favor, it but are doing everything possible to hasten it, in their goal to level the field and reduce us all to Eurosocialists.

[Update a while later]

Related, but disturbing thoughts from David Solway:

…is there a chance that America will emerge approximately intact after the 2012 election, send Obama packing back to Chicago where he belongs, and gradually recover the strength, dignity, and economic vitality it has forfeited to a charlatan? Might the 2010 congressional elections apply the brakes and at least slow down the nation’s careening descent — what Roger Kimball calls a dégringolade — into impoverishment, stasis, and political and military weakness? Maybe. Maybe not.

Obama reminds me of a Star Wars Imperial Walker, wreaking havoc and devastation with every step, but one who may not be brought down by ordinary Americans who understand the danger he represents. The fear is that Obama has amassed so much power, aided by a Pravda-esque media and backed by a like-minded political clientele among left-wing voters and significant minorities, that he may be invulnerable. But, unfortunately, his country is not.

I think that the Republic will ultimately prevail, but the immediate future looks very ugly.

Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Space

Annoying

40 Comments

As a “rocket scientist” (I hate that phrase), I wish that everyone in the media would stop saying that NASA crashed a “rocket” into the moon. A rocket put it into space, but what crashed into the moon were spacecraft (though they had small rocket motors on them). I don’t actually even like the term “rocket” for a launch vehicle. It’s like calling a car an “internal combustion engine.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

Waking Up To Absurdity

61 Comments

I watched the lunar attack on NASA TV. As is usually the case with that venue, it was boring to tears.

In other news, for those who thought that non-science Nobel peace prizes had any meaning, and haven’t just become a bad joke, the committee just awarded one to the president on the same day that he was the first one to bomb the moon.

I have to repeat the words on so many lips today. For what?

There’s a big roundup of commentary over at Instapundit. Even the Obamafellators in the media are stunned.

If he were a man of any sense or honor, he would point out the absurdity, and refuse it. So we know what he’ll do.

[Update a few minutes later]

A lot of good commentary at The Corner, for example, from Yuval Levin:

It’s hard to know quite what the right response would be, but it would probably require a self-effacing show of humility (including declining the prize) that our president may not even be able to fake, let alone actually exhibit. It is a dangerous thing for a president to become a joke, and between his Olympic Committee trip and this peculiar honor, he’s getting there fast, and in a way that could do him real harm.

I wonder if any commentator, anywhere on the political spectrum, will offer a genuine straight-faced defense or case for this prize. Whoever does will no-doubt win next year’s Nobel Prize for literature.

I don’t know if they’ve ever given one for fantasy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Getting back to the original topic, Clark Lindsey has some links to preliminary LCROSS results. Let’s hope that the moon was not attacked for no good reason.

[Another update]

Actually, President Obama wasn’t the first one to bomb the moon. Kennedy did, with the Ranger program. So I guess that’s another way he’s trying to emulate him. On the other hand, he was the first to do it on the first attempt. The first few Rangers managed to throw a spacecraft at the ground and miss (those weren’t JPL’s finest days).

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts from Jonah:

The only thing that really bothers me is that this comes just days after the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the Dalai Lama and told the world that it’s at least considering a separate peace with the Taliban. That’s grotesque. Meanwhile, there are real peace activists and dissidents out there whose dungeons will stay just as cold and dark for another year because of this. Indeed, this news comes during a year when the Iranian people rose up against tyranny and were crushed. Surely someone in Iran — or maybe the Iranian protestors generally — could have benefitted more from receiving the prize than a president who, so far, has done virtually nothing concrete for world peace.

That wouldn’t fit the template. Like the UN, the Nobel committee has become an enabler of tyrants and dictators. I expect that Ahmadinejad will get one in a couple years, once he’s wiped those war-mongering Jews off the face of the Middle East.

[Update a while later]

A lot more at The Corner. I agree that he should be given the Cy Young award, too. After all, he intended to reach home plate with that pitch. And that’s what counts, right?

[Update a while later]

Man, oh man, I can see this going on for days:

A reader asks:

Can Obama accept the $1 million Nobel prize?

I believe, since he’s also won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his groundbreaking work demonstrating that “profit” is part of “overhead“, that the prize is being increased to $1 trillion. They give it him in small bills and if Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod can get it in the attache case they get to share the Nobel Prize for Physics.

However, under Congressman Rangel’s recently tightened federal ethics rules, the President has to give the money to an Acorn-supported child-sex brothel symbolizing in a very real sense “cooperation between peoples” of many lands. So don’t worry about it. On Monday, he’s scheduled to win the Eurovision Song Contest…

Actually, this is the first time that I’ve actually felt any sympathy for the administration. The Nobel committee has put them in a real corner where there’s almost nothing they can do that will look good. But they’ve been asking for it, going all the way back to the speech in Germany last summer.

[Update mid morning]

Frank J. is taking all the credit, natch:

A lot of you laughed when I first unveiled my peace plan over seven years ago, but who is laughing now? This morning, America crashed a probe into the moon causing an explosion. And the result? Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

As I note in comments over there, though, and above, Obama was not the first American president to attack the moon.

And help Obama win the Heisman. I think he deserves it just for questioning the BCS.

[Late morning update]

John Podhoretz disagrees that he doesn’t deserve the prize:

he Nobel Committee chose him wisely because he does, in fact, represent the organization’s highest ideals.

He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than “the indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.

There’s a Michael Moore reference, too.