Cheat Seeking Missiles

Was Jimmy Carter Right After All?

ow there’s a question I bet you thought you’d never be asked, but it’s official: Historian Joseph Wheelan asks it on History News Network in a little piece he titled Is it Safe Now to Admit Jimmy Carter Was Right?.

No, of course he’s not alluding to Carter’s flaccid stand on Iran and terrorism; it’s his 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech that’s got Wheelan all hopped up on Karter Kool Aid.

We admirers have long endured ridicule whenever we dared to defend Carter’s prescient plan for reducing U.S. dependence on oil.

But today, after all the abuse and scorn heaped on Jimmy Carter and his supporters, we find ourselves paying more than $4 a gallon at the pump to fill our hulking gas guzzlers.

It turns out that Carter was right after all.

He was?! Let’s review the list of Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” recommendations:

Requiring auto manufacturers to deliver by 1995 an auto fleet that tools along at 48 miles per gallon. The Smart Car, which gets very unstable at high speeds, gets 36 mpg. The Prius does get 48 mpg, so we’d need an all-Prius fleet to achieve Carter’s goal. Oh. Boy.
Asking Americans to turn down their thermostats. Conservation is always a good idea, but the amount of energy saved if all Americans had donned dorky cardigans is a pittance compared to what we now save with energy-efficient systems brought to us not by government mandate as much as free market demand.
Establishing a tax on “windfall” oil profits to finance a crash program to develop affordable synthetic fuels. Yeah, those synthetic fuels have fared wonderfully. And taxing corporate profits is always a great way to encourage business innovation, which explains all the technological innovation coming out of France.
Setting a goal of 20 percent solar by … eight years ago. He apparently never computed the cost, which would make $4 a gallon gas seem like a gift, nor amount of acreage that would be required for solar farms, nor the protests of the environmental movement against any such idea.

Wheeler is just another historian who refuses to learn from history and still thinks that somehow government knows better than the free market. Besides being utterly unrealistic, Carter’s ideas are as bad today as they were in 1979. So of course Barack Obama pretty much did a Carter cut-and-paste to come up with his energy policy.

A RINO For An African-American

ov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he will serve in the Obama cabinet if asked. In fact, he won’t even wait for Obama to be elected:

While he described the scenario as “hypothetical,” Schwarzenegger, who has endorsed presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, admitted he would “take [Obama's] call now and I’d take his call when he’s president, anytime.” (ABC News)

As inept as Arnold has been as Gov., I’d be happy to see him serving B.O.

Warming Up To Bias

he reporters and editors of AFP - France’s AP - can tilt a story with the best of them. Here, for example, is the lead on a story about China’s increasing drive toward genetically modified crops:

China has said it must urgently step up the development of genetically modified crops as it faces mounting challenges to feed its 1.3 billion people due to shrinking arable land and climate change.

And here’s the actual quote describing China’s motivation to go genetic - as it appears word-for-word in the last paragraph of the story - from Huang Dejun, a Chinese agriculture analyst:

“Given the shortage in resources like arable land and water and increasing population, [genetically modified crops are] vital for the country’s agriculture output.”

Wait a minute! How did “climate change” get into the lead?

A Bit More On Media Bias

ant a nice relaxing Sunday? Then steer clear of The Real Life ‘24′ of Summer 2008 by Frank Rich in today’s NYT. It’s a review of a book that’s sure to be a sensation on the left, a final round of Bush-bashing before the Prez surprises all his fanatical critics and actually cedes the presidency next January.

The book is New Yorker torture reporter Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, and it tracks Bush as a hands-off sort of guy who allows Dick Cheney to trash the constitution in order to bring in a return of Nixonian executive power while getting some torture jollies - all under the guise of fighting terror. Here’s Rich at his richest:

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land.

Where are the protests from the Italian-American community? For that matter, where are the protests from Geneva? The way these people trash their famous Conventions, making them apply to just any ol’ terrorist who breaks all the rules! And I’m truly sorry that Rich can no longer read; otherwise he would know that torture, covert or otherwise, is not the law of this land of ours. He has America confused with Iran, the Republicans confused with al-Qaeda and FARC.

One last piece, just to show you the bizarre thought patterns of Rich, who has the editorial board of the NYT eating out of his hand:

So what if they cut corners, the administration’s last defenders [all millions-strong of us] argue. While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

But are we safe? As Al Qaeda and the Taliban surge this summer …

The Taliban surge is a joke, of course, and already has eroded into the last resort of the desperate and soul-less: The suicide attack. Of course we are safe. There has been an attack on our shores since September 11, 2001. And the constitution is still intact.

Frank Rich is just too far lost in Bush-hatred to see the world as it is, and the compliant and sympathetic NYT editorial board will always make room for another of his op-eds.

Quagmired?

prominent NY Times columist is asking, “Are we quagmired again?”

An equally prominent NY Time reporter piles on:

Despite the insistence of President Bush and members of his cabinet that all is going well, the war … has gone less smoothly than any of them hoped.

The LA Times ups the ante:

Despite [the Secretary of Defense's] claim that critics are looking for ‘instant gratification,’ the war effort is in deep trouble. The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it’s already in one.

Never to be out-pundited, Zbigniew Brzezinski chimes in:

When we started out, we were going to smash Al Qaeda and punish the Taliban. Now we seem to ge getting engaged in [a] civil war, almost as an end in itself. That could be a quagmire.”

C’mon, we’ve heard this before, right? Well when we heard this particular batch of America-smashing punditry, it was the month after 9/11. The quotes were directed at the war in Afghanistan, and just two weeks later, Kabul fell and the Taliban were routed.

Thanks to Douglas Feith’s War and Decision for this recounting of some exceptionally aggressive media bias.

The Rest Of Us?

od has found his way back to TV, with at least a couple characters - Benjamin Bratt of A&E’s “The Cleaner” to Holly Hunter of TNT’s “Saving Grace” - being, you know, like, Christians or something. And that’s mighty offensive to the hip media aristocracy at Slate. After all, Heather Havrilesky knows where to really find God:

In these trying times, more and more TV characters are turning to God for help, but the rest of us seek salvation where we’ve always found it: At the bottom of a cold bottle of beer, in between the lines of a Gillian Welch song, in the shade of a big oak tree, in the creases of the Sunday New York Times, in the musty corners of our pot drawer, in YouTube footage of hopeless drunks, in an icy jug of water on a walk in 100-degree heat, in the first bite of an Egg McMuffin, in an afternoon double-espresso break, in the summer breezes blowing in the window at dusk.

Since he is omnipresent, yes, you can find him in all those places. But those of us who are not quite as hip and self-aware as Ms. Havrilesky choose to put Him on a bit higher plane, to trust Him and to understand His plan better, so we don’t write ridiculous things like:

But most TV shows serve up the obvious: characters in crisis, talking to God. And when characters roll their eyes skyward and plead with their makers, the divine is rendered mundane. Why wrestle with a world that holds no easy answers, why look for salvation in odd places, when you can discuss your next move directly with the man upstairs?

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