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Vin Suprynowicz
Fallen under the rule of lunatics
In the past, if anyone asked whether the folks in charge in the nation's capital were certifiable lunatics, or whether policy decisions were being made by superannuated college kids with no experience out in the real world, who apparently stayed up too late last night, smoking too much dope and listening to too much heavy metal, those questions could be safely dismissed as exaggerations for rhetorical effect.
Last month, however, another wacky Obama appointee, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, told Al-Jazeera Arab television that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted Mr. Bolden to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships, and "perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."
Officials from the White House and NASA on Tuesday stood by Mr. Bolden's statement that part of his mission is to improve relations with Muslim countries -- though NASA soft-pedaled his assertion that such international diplomacy is Mr. Bolden's "foremost" responsibility.
NASA was created by President Kennedy in the early 1960s, tasked with putting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely within the decade. NASA succeeded. Manned lunar missions continued into the mid-1970s.
At that point, based on any sensible balancing of cost versus benefits, the plug should have been pulled. For 30 years, NASA was largely an ongoing publicity stunt, launching schoolteachers and token foreigners into low orbit on an out-of-date fleet of orbital buses better known as "Space Porkies." NASA was reduced to advertising on message boards specializing in antique computers for replacement parts for its maintenance systems.
The Obama administration, which pays lip service to budget-balancing, should close NASA. Failing that, surely some use should be made of the existing corps of highly trained NASA engineers whose expertise has something to do with -- hold onto your armrests -- space flight.
Helping Muslim nations "feel good about their historic contribution to science"? Yes, when innovative European scientists were oppressed by a hidebound church in the Middle Ages, math and science flourished in Arab lands, God bless 'em. But leadership in these fields shifted to Europe during the Renaissance, and to America a century ago, while much of the Islamic caliphate grew decadent, corrupt, backward-looking, and finally fell into murderous tyranny after the debacle of 1917.
Many in the lands that "contributed so much to science" a millennium ago, today lack flush toilets.
Why should NASA teach the Muslims their own ancient history? Better someone from the National Endowment for the Humanities inspire them to stop sawing people's heads off and start teaching engineering, instead of getting all homicidal should anyone suggest Mohammed once shaved his armpits.
Instead it's Halloween in July, we've all paid our admission to the Fun House, and we wait in morbid fascination to see what's around the next bend.
How can you make up stuff to trump today's headlines? Barack Obama warns against returning to the "failed ideas of the past." Heck, by March 1921, Lenin was trying to introduce his "New Economic Program," admitting that 3½ years had been plenty of time to demonstrate that true workers' collectives had failed; that calling entrepreneurs "enemies of the state" had proved counterproductive, that a way had to be found to reintroduce "market-based" pricing and motivation.
But today the president of the United States dismisses free markets, tax cuts, any attempt to downsize government, as "failed ideas of the past"?
We have awakened inside Philippe de Broca's 1966 film "King of Hearts," in which the cheerful lunatics of a local asylum take over an abandoned French town near the end of World War I, or perhaps in Woody Allen's 1971 slapstick film "Bananas," in which a Castro-like dictator seizes power in the fictional country of San Marcos and promptly decrees, "From now on everyone will wear their underwear on the outside, so we can check."
President Obama vows that cleaning up the Gulf oil spill is his "number one priority" ... but spends more than two months turning down foreign nations that offer to loan us oil skimmers to help clean up the mess.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal does manage to get some skimmer barges operating off the environmentally sensitive Mississippi delta -- whereupon the Obama Coast Guard sends them back to port for a life-preserver inspection.
They couldn't just have air-dropped them some life preservers? Can anyone spell "EMERGENCY," here?
Waive the 1920s Jones Act and other federal laws that prevent foreign-based skimmers with non-union crews from helping out in the Gulf? President Obama, who has time for golf games and Paul McCartney concerts, hasn't gotten around to that yet.
Or is it that subservience to union interests -- the reason we also don't have any new "bracero" legal agricultural guest worker program, by the way -- is this White House's real "number one priority"?
Meantime, in a classic example of the perfect serving as enemy of the good, the EPA refuses to allow whatever Gulf skimmers are operating to release 97 percent clean water back into the Gulf, allowing them to stay on station much longer. Instead, if they can't purify the water beyond 99.9 percent, they must haul all their captured water to shore, fatally shortening the time they can spend on station.
In fact, the Taiwanese-owned "A Whale" skimmer ship -- 3½ football fields long and 10 stories tall -- is still negotiating with the Coast Guard to join the cleanup efforts because the owners still lack a waiver of the aforementioned 80-year-old law aimed at protecting unionized U.S. shipping interests, and also because -- according to The Associated Press -- "Environmental Protection Agency approval is required because some of the seawater returned to the Gulf would have traces of oil."
You cannot make this stuff up.
Unless you're Woody Allen.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/.
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Regarding the notion that one can learn all one needs to know about Muslims, by considering September 11--well, if that's your standard, I guess you could say that you learned everything you needed to know about Christianity, when you studied the Spanish Inquisition. Or the Crusades. Or the extermination of the native American tribes in the late 1900's.
Or, perhaps you learned all you needed to know about Christianity when you read about the great Christian king, Richard the Lion-Hearted, when he had five thousand helpless Muslim prisoners beheaded in a single day (almost twice as many as died in the WTC).
Or, you could say that you learned everything you needed to know about Judaism, when you read about the war crimes of Saul--egged on by the prophet Samuel--as described in the Bible. You know--attacking cities that had not threatened you, killing all the men, women, and children, and then going out and burning the fields and killing all the livestock. Niiiice! (Yes--read your Bible. It's in there.)
Or, maybe you learned all you need to know about Hindus, when they murdered Muslims. Or Muslims, when they murdered Hindus.
Or, maybe you learned all you need to know about Germans, when they exterminated Jews. Or English, when they did the same (under Edward the First).
So you see, you really didn't learn everything you needed to know about Muslims, when September 11 happened. You'll have to go a lot deeper than that.
The DEFINITION of "WMD" is quite slippery--conveniently so.
Chemical weapons and biological weapons, in actual fact, have never been particularly useful in causing MASS destruction. Chemical weapons in WWI were useful in instilling terror, as the victims died horribly. But far more soldiers were killed by conventional methods, than by chemical weapons.
(Interestingly, the case has been made, quite credibly, that more soldiers in WWI died from bad sanitation and the ensuing diseases, than from anything else. A sort of unintentional biological warfare, if you will.)
And then again, the cab bomber in NYC was accused with--you got it--having a "Weapon of Mass Destruction."
Wake up, folks! WMD is whatever the power elite want it to be. It is a typical buzzword, meant to cloud an issue, rather than clarify it.
It seems the old "Saddam had weapons of mass destruction" meme just won't go away. People will twist themselves into semantic pretzels trying to somehow justify this stance.
Now, it is true that Saddam had chemical weapons back in the 1980's Iran-Iraq war. In fact, as another poster noted, we sold the Iraqis the raw materials with which to make them.
The UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, actually oversaw the destruction of those chemical weapons, way back in the early 1990's.
The US attacked Iraq in 2003 (it's embarrassing to have to point this out, but I guess laptop bombardiers can't figure this out on their own).
Hans Blix, Mohammad El-Baradei, and the IAEA were unable to find ANY evidence of a "reconstituted" (to use Dick Cheney's words) nuclear weapons program, even when they were given free hand to investigate anywhere in Iraq.
But man, Bush's boys WANTED that war, and they were going to get it!
So we attacked Iraq, as stated earlier, over WMD's that did not exist.
Now, if you are going to attack countries because they USED to have WMD's in the past, then the worst offenders, who have to be attacked, are the US, Germany, France, and England--all of whom used chemical weapons in WWI.
Of course, the United States stands alone in being the only country in history to actually USE nuclear weapons.
Has anyone else noticed that the Right Wing resorts to name calling when they can't get their facts straight? Or don't even know what they are? Vin is, in my opinion, one of the worst offenders. Lincoln was a 'tyrant' and we have 'lunatics' running the country now.
Ah, Dirty Harry, those WMDs used against Iran by Iraq were of US make. Either way, explain to me how or why I should care what Iran and Iraq are doing? I have no close relative over there so I really don't care. Not my business and more than likely none of yours either. If Hussein hide any thing it was American made. That is for sure.
If those guys had better self-esteem, they wouldn't be goin' "Jihad this" and "Jihad that" all the time.
I think next year the CDC should follow-up with a group-therapy outreach to al Quaeda.
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MUSLIMS I LEARNED ON 9-11
Paul.Weber --- So we went to war "on the flimsy excuse of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist". Really. Tell that to the people of Iran. First, you need to look up the definition of WMD. Then, do some research on the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988). You will find that Iraq used chemical and mustard gas during this war, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians. In March, 1988, Hussein even used nerve gas, in northern Iraq, killing up to 10,000 of his own people, the Kurds. Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, and the whole world knows it. Denying that they didn't exist won't change the facts. Hussein either disposed of his WMD's before we invaded, or they are still there, and will be found in the future. Check your facts before you post so your rantings might have more credibility.
We're dealing with 2 distinct methods of governance. One we haven't seen for 85 years (Harding/Coolidge), and one that's been steadily creeping into our fabric since Woodrow Wilson.
The founding fathers KNEW human nature. We are a corrupt people that need the rule of law, and the Judeo/Christian morals to temper our greed.
Paul Webber and Winston Smith accurately portray the march of collectivism, socialism and the welfare state through out our society, for the past 45 years. It's not too late. We can revisit what worked for the Pilgrims (thank you William Bradford). The choice is ours. It starts this November.
Vin made some good points, but he chose the wrong movie for comparison. The current White House is more like BEING THERE than those other movies.
American voters went to the polls in 2008 and traded in a President surrounded by untrustworthy crooks and self-aggrandizing advisers for a President surrounded by trustworthy morons and elitist twits (e.g. science adviser John Holdren).