Potpourri LXXI

Doc and I have been engaged in an extended discussion about the frog-marching of Sarah Palin out of the public square. The DUDE (Down Under Defense Expert) brought a Peggy Noonan column to my attention about this. As I noted in my discussion with Doc, I didn't do my due diligence on Palin's positions/papers--most of what I caught about her came from sound bytes--some good, some not so good. It appears, if one reads Noonan's column, that Palin really didn't have a lot of positions explaining the foundations of her beliefs. My choices in 2008, after my original choices dropped out of the GOP race (Thompson, Romney), were bad (McCain), mad (Paul), or frickin' sad(Obama or Clinton).

I can understand mockery, for instance Palin's flubs in interviews, but what continues to bother me is the vitriol--the visceral hatred critics displayed toward Palin and George W. Bush before her. It's one thing to disagree with one's opponents; it's another to consider them the Devil Incarnate or some retarded human being worthy only of contempt. I didn't hate Sarah Palin, nor would I mock her. I think she's a nice lady with a lot of spunk and an ability to fire up a crowd. She supported causes I agree with: pro-life, pro-oil drilling in ANWR, and pro-gun, for instance. The few speeches of hers I've heard or read seemed to articulate those views pretty well, so I don't understand the "lightweight" comments, nor do I agree with Ms. Noonan that Palin was utterly out of her depth on the issues. Might she have been better off staying off the radar in Alaska? Perhaps. But the drama is over. With any luck we can move off of Palin, Michael Jackson, and Farrah Fawcett and move back to things that actually matter, like the economy, Iran, North Korea, missile defense, etc.--you know: the issues--all of which President Obama is handling not handling well, I might add.

Rocketplane Kistler is looking at Hawaii as a possible base of operations for space tourism flights, as well as possible transportation services.

Big aerospace companies met with Senator Shelby (R-AL) to discuss their plans for supporting the Ares Projects. This line from a Shelby aide was telling: "it appeared that the aerospace contractors did not have a public support strategy." A couple of reasons for this come to mind: while Big Aero has big contracts with NASA for Ares, they might just as easily pick up other contracts if the administration decided to cancel Ares. They probably also see what kinds of negative press Shelby is getting regarding his efforts to pull money from other NASA centers that support COTS so he can protect Ares jobs in Huntsville. Mind you, I'm one of those jobs in Huntsville, and a Republican, but I think Shelby's funding games are shortsighted. We need COTS and Ares as multiple means of access to the International Space Station. I might have to write another letter.

Need a poster of the X-15 hypersonic aircraft? NASA has one you can download.

The Charles Bolden/Lori Garver confirmation hearings appeared to be a lovefest. NASA should have a new Administrator soon.

America is in no danger of being taken over by an iron-fisted tyrant. However, we might find ourselves smothered under a cloying, will-do-anything-for-you Mommy State if we're not careful. This article on cafeteria snacks also comes from the DUDE. His commentary is priceless:

In the second month after they won the election, the centre-right government down here rescinded the law passed by the previous leftist government that required government approval of what snack food would be sold in schools. The reason given, which set off days of strident yawping our nanny-staters, was that parents should be the ones to decide what foods their kids should eat.

The Lost High Road

Somewhere along the line, I picked up a love of philosophy and political rhetoric. However, these interests have a particular flavor. It is the flavor of highfalutin' words, clear reasoning, and incisive criticism of an opponent's positions. That is to say, the academic study of politics, not necessarily politics as it is practiced today. Mind you, classical references to the Greeks or the Romans can still be heard from our legislators in the late hours on C-SPAN. And at least on the surface, American politics is about ideas regarding how the government should behave and how people should live their lives. However, in regular practice, thanks to the television, the 24-hour news cycle, and the irrational belief that "the personal is political," American representative government has strayed a long way from the Greek or Roman forms of rhetoric and politics.

Father Dan suggests that such ideas are passé, naive, or both. And it's a pity, really, because with no serious rivals left, and with our unchallenged military, economic, and social leadership in the world, one would like to think that a nation with serious responsibilities would have a serious political discourse to match. Alas, one would be thinking wrongly to assume such a thing.

A friend of mine tried to convince me a dozen years ago that "philosophy has nothing to do with politics." I was offended by her statement, and refused to believe it. After all, the political fights of this generation and those that went on before HAVE dealt with the behavior of government and its relationship with the people. One would like to think that there was something behind it besides gossip, innuendo, and trashy insults. However, the longer I read and hear the nation's political theater, the more depressed I get because it appears that my friend is almost right.

Almost right, that is, because there IS a philosophy at work in American politics, and that philosophy can be expressed as follows: "If you do not like the political ideas of your opponents, you must constantly and relentlessly attack their character, truthfully or not, to undermine their credibility and ability to campaign or govern."

Note that this has nothing to do with the merits of your opponent's positions, or the possible outcomes of those positions--which should be more important--but those are irrelevant. Your enemy is EVIL because they belong to a different party. They oppose what YOU believe, and therefore they must be DESTROYED by any means necessary--lies, cheap shots, or dirty laundry that has little to nothing to do with how smart their political ideas are.

The latest victim of this "philosophy" is Sarah Palin, who has decided to leave the Alaska governorship after a vicious presidential campaign and the aftereffects thereof. She's getting out of Dodge while she's still got some dignity left...and even so, she'll be the butt of nasty political jokes long after she's gone. And it's a damn shame to me, because she was willing to take on her political opponents on matters of policy that are vital to our national economy right now. But no: it was more important to mock her Christian faith, her quaint accent, her lack of international travel (George Washington never left the States, by the way--neither did Lincoln), her wardrobe, her family's personal tragedies, or her lack of an Ivy League pedigree. So: another conservative politician goes down in flames, to the great delight of the TV pundits; and another several dozen or hundred or thousand serious citizens think twice about running for office for fear of the trashing that might face them...which is the whole point of the trashing.

I don't really care "who started it." I'm more interested in who's going to take a shot at stopping it. You can find examples of dirty politics in America going back to at least 1800. In the television era, one might find mobsters enforcing dead men voting to elect Kennedy or Nixon bugging his enemies to take an election he was likely to win anyway. I don't care. Would it kill our politicians to ATTEMPT the high road? And if someone DOES take the high road--say, by criticizing someone in power about their policies--would it kill the other guy to respond in kind rather than look for dirt as a way to discredit the criticism?

Of course we do have such things--the televised debates, which are a choreographed exercise in policy trial balloons and sound bites--and they bore the public to death because they ARE so scripted. How do we overcome such things? I don't know, but I'd like to see it tried. Call it principled naiveity.

A Cipher Speaks and McCain’s Running Mate

I just couldn’t bring myself to watch Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech last night. Instead, I did what I will probably do with McCain’s speech: I read it. That takes away the theatricals, the Greek temple, the voice, the man, the cheering, applauding crowds, and leaves you with just the words on the page. Still, you can learn a lot by reading; it’s a shame more people don’t do it.

Yesterday was Obama’s big interview with the country, as I’m sure he knows. Now here’s the thing about interviews: you don’t just want to know what this presidential candidate will do for you, though that’s the most obvious thing. You also want to know what he has done. A little background is nice—he’s got a wife and kids—but what you really want to know is what he’s done with his experience. What has he learned from it? What has he done in the last four years? We know he gave a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. We know he has been a senator. He states that has voted against the war in Iraq, but the war began two years before he assumed office. Before he was a U.S. Senator, he was a state senator. What did he do there? What did he learn? Silence. He has been a lawyer and a community organizer. Doing what? How? With what sort(s) of people or organization? Unknown. He was a near-top-of-his-class student at arguably America’s most prestigious university. That’s a lot of hard work; certainly he can speak to that, no? I hear crickets chirping.

Who the hell is this guy? If you expected to find out during this speech, you were likely to be disappointed. And, again, as an interviewer, you’d have to be asking yourself, “This guy’s had an interesting past—why doesn’t he talk about any of it?”

So what did we get with this speech—five pages long at about an 8-point font? Three themes dominated:

• Barack Obama is not George W. Bush. This is hardly surprising, but one must consider that Mr. Bush is no longer up for election, and McCain is hardly his surrogate.
• America is suffering. He sprinkles the speech with a lot of little anecdotes that demonstrate his compassion, his superior understanding of what ails the country, and his willingness to fix it. Never mind that we’re still the richest nation on Earth, as he admits—people are suffering and it will be the sole job of his government to fix it.
• Barack will do a lot of things. This is the standard laundry list of political promises. Some of them are economically questionable, such as lowering taxes on the middle class when the rich pay the bulk of taxes and the poor pay none at all; others are grandiose and unrealistic without serious government micromanaging of the economy, such as getting America off of petroleum products in ten years. There's an awful lot of personal ownership going on--"I will..."

Going back to the interview, it is interesting to note the few places where he does talk about himself:

• “If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander in chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.” You forgot experience, laddie. But I suspect you already know that. Of course experience is what gives us temperament and judgment.
• “If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” Not precisely. The more specific action you take is to stand back, and wait awhile longer until the candidate develops the record so you can have a better sense of who he is and what he has accomplished. That’s another thing missing from this speech: Obama’s accomplishments. What has the man done? Ted Kennedy, much as I dislike his politics, has a solid record of achievement there. I can probably name at least three laws he’s pushed through and several issues on which he is known to be an expert and ardent supporter. I cannot say the same about Obama.
• “I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office.” Wow. Then why should I hire you? This would be an excellent opportunity to explain that, Barack, but you didn’t do it. Your policies are what they are, and Joe Biden could sell them as easily as you could. We’re not just hiring the policies, we’re hiring the man, the mensch, and we know diddly-squat about him. Admitting that you’re not the likeliest candidate might be self-deprecating, but it might also be the truth. We just don’t know, and Obama does not follow up by explaining why the presumption of his unlikeliness is false.
• “I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.” Let’s start with the word pedigree, which is little more than another way of saying that he’s African-American. I find this notion offensive. Imagine an interviewee saying, “I realize you don’t usually hire blacks.” He’s insinuating that a) you’ve been a racist in the past or b) you are a racist if you don’t hire him now. That’s insulting, it’s blackmail, and quite frankly it’s rude.
  Earlier in this campaign (a year or two ago), I might have even considered, briefly, voting for this guy. And were I still a mushy moderate, I probably would. But in fact I don’t like his policies. I think they’re bad for the country. I don’t like the fact that he’s cagey and evasive about his past. I don’t think he’s got the experience—yet—to be president. That is not questioning the color of his skin, but the content of his character.
  Then there’s the matter of where he spent his career. As some folks like to remind us, Obama has had 143 days of experience in the U.S. Senate. His experience before that I’ve already mentioned above—but again, what has he done???
• “But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s about you. It’s about you. For 18 long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us—that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it – because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time. America, this is one of those moments.” I’m sorry, but the last 18 months have been all about Obama—whether he has the charisma and political personality people are willing to buy to vote for president. The lie is so emphatic, he has to repeat it twice to make sure people get the point. After all, if it was all about “you,” why is he asking “you” to vote for him?
  And I’ve said this before, but it still bears repeating: we’re going to get change no matter who is elected because Bush’s term ends in January. The question is, what types of change are the American public prepared to accept? Change will happen even if you don’t vote in November. And while we would also face unknowns with John McCain, we have a better clue into his character. “McCain-Feingold,” for instance, is practically part of the everyday vocabulary. We know more about him, from his pre-congressional life as a fighter pilot and prisoner in Vietnam to his previous runs for president and his willingness to battle his own party to get his way. I might not agree with him, but I feel that I at least understand him.
  Also, Obama’s ideas are not new; they are the Democratic Party’s standard talking points for the last 20+ years: soak the rich to subsidize the poor, regulate industry to protect the environment, reduce the military to encourage peace. The only things new about Obama’s candidacy are his age and his race. And when this speech was over, we still had no solid clue about the man wearing this age and race. Caveat emptor.

I did like a few lines from this speech, and they’re toward the end:

“You know, this country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit—that American promise—that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.”

That section is almost Reaganesque. However, lofty words are not enough by themselves to get me to vote for Barack Obama, nor would his policies be, were I to favor them. He’s proven that he can give a good speech, but not that he can govern well or that he can lead. In short, while impressive in bearing and political presence, Barack Obama did not pass this interview with me to become President. I wonder what effect his speech will have on the rest of the public.
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And speaking of the public, the McCain campaign did a masterful job of sucking up the oxygen Obama hoped to gain from his speech last night. I had to chuckle a bit when a couple of friends told me that selecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was an attempt to pander to or take the votes of Hillary Clinton voters. That might be the case, if there are a lot of people who would vote for Hillary solely because she’s a woman. However, from a policy perspective, Palin is not there to wow liberal feminists. She won't. She is there for one reason, and it’s a good one: to wow the conservative Republican base. It's a smart move. Brilliant, in fact. Surprisingly brilliant, considering some of McCain’s calls. Of course the MSNBC types now think McCain is no longer a "maverick" because he didn't pick a liberal (a maverick, after all, is a term of affection when it's a Republic going against his own party). He's being a maverick toward the media. He's smarter than some conservatives--including me--thought he was.

I first heard about Sarah Palin from one of my favorite conservative ladies, who’s actually from Wasilla, Alaska. She told me that Palin would make a good future president. She described Palin as much like herself: a gun-toting, environmentalist, God-fearing, pro-life conservative. So my friend sold me a few years ago. Now we’ll see how she wins over the country. Way to go, John. You just might pull this one out.