Jetlag plus allergies maybe even a cold. Ugh.
Thanks gentle readers for your patience. Have hardly posted anything new since the end of May.
I was genuinely grateful for the respite from American politics/news while in China. Although they do follow the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Quite closely.
Charles Krauthammer compares the visionary rhetoric of President Obama on the one hand to reality on the other – and finds a large gulf between the two. In “Barack Obama, Dreamer” this paragraph especially stood out:
His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?
Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of clichés comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless. The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it. Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.
On a similar note – rhetoric versus reality – check out “He Blinded Me with Science” by Jonah Goldberg who exposes the vapidity of appeals to science by President Obama. I was particularly troubled by how a report on the safety of underwater drilling was completely misrepresented.
Fast-forward to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The White House issued a blanket moratorium on deepwater oil drilling. Obama cited a report commissioned by the Interior Department that purported to recommend the ban.
“The recommendations contained in this report,” declared the document, “have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.”
Except that was untrue. In fact, it was such a glaring lie that the seven engineers who peer-reviewed an earlier version of the document felt obliged to come forward to clear the air.
“The Secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct,” wrote the scientists, “but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.”
The draft these experts saw was substantively different from the document that bore their names. The draft called for a moratorium on issuing new permits, not stopping existing drilling (a move many experts believe would be unsafe).
Read the whole thing here. Nonsense is one thing. But misleading the American people is another.
And we are supposed to regard this president as brilliant and effective?!?
