Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Clive Crook in his Atlantic Monthly blog tells us what a young boy in England was thinking when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
A personal recollection, if you’ll indulge me. Reflecting on Neil Armstrong and the American mission to put a man on the moon, it occurs to me that this astonishing achievement probably altered the course of my life.
My father, who has been very ill lately, was born in the same year as Armstrong. He was an engineer in the British nuclear power industry, a job that involved a lot of international collaboration. As a result, I was raised on tales of his experience of working with American engineers on the finer problems of fuel rod manipulation and so forth. He used to say Americans worked harder, faster and to a higher standard than his British colleagues. They love their work, he used to tell me; not many Brits are like that. (I’d better not say what he thought of his colleagues in France and Italy.) My father is a skeptical man, not given to enthusiasm or exaggeration, so his admiration of the American engineers impressed me all the more.
When it came to what NASA accomplished, his admiration turned to awe. It makes me chuckle even now to think back to it. This reverence was so unlike him. He wanted me to understand just how difficult a thing it was–and how daring. “I know you think it’s incredibly hard, but it’s so much harder than that.” He followed the engineering as closely as he could and explained a lot of it to me. He persuaded me so well that I secretly decided it couldn’t actually be done. The margins for error were just too small. I was sure something would go wrong and they’d fail. Of course we stayed up all night and watched the video of the first walk on the surface. We were both moved to tears.
Armstrong’s subsequent shunning of the limelight only deepened my father’s regard for him, were that possible. Armstrong–an engineer by training and vocation–was embarrassed to be given so much credit, knowing that it rested on the work of the rest of the NASA team. More than forty years later, the only thing that seems anachronistic about the commander of Apollo 11 is that he had no capacity whatever for self-promotion–which in most fields of endeavor we have made a substitute for achievement, or at any rate a necessary component of success.
I think by 1969 my father’s admiration of Americans had seeped in anyway, but that night something gave way once and for all.
Evelyn Gordon is not surprised Hamas has a better developed moral sense than the UN.
If I were UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, or any of the 120 countries that sent delegates to the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Iran this week, I’d be more than a little embarrassed to discover that Hamas, a terrorist organization that thinks nothing of slaughtering innocent men, women and children in buses, restaurants and hotels, actually has a more developed sense of morality than I do.
While Hamas was invited to attend the NAM summit by Iran, it ultimately declined. This decision followed a public threat by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that if Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh went, he would stay home. But senior Hamas officials say the desire to prevent an open rift with Abbas was only a secondary consideration. Their number-one reason for staying home was that they didn’t want to be seen as supporting Iran at a time when Iran is openly supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people by supplying him with arms and even troops. …
Jennifer Rubin says Ryan is starting to live inside the Dems’ head.
The Democrats are losing it, literally. The Obama camp and its surrogates are losing the fight to control the narrative about Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) They are losing the effort to distract voters through the presence at the GOP convention of Obama campaign staffers such as Robert Gibbs and Ben LaBolt, who spend their time wandering about and whining to the media here in Tampa about the “negativity” of the other side. They are losing the ability to con the media into focusing on likability, as if perceptions of Romney and Ryan wouldn’t improve after this event.
That spilled over last night in a group outburst from Romney-Ryan critics over Paul Ryan’s speech. Needless to say, the speech was a ringing success with delegates and in much of the mainstream media. Ryan bloodied President Obama with blow after blow, all the while appearing cheery and sincere. The crowd loved it. So nearly en masse the left decided that Ryan “lied.”
For starters, that is the ultimate compliment. It is in effect saying the speech worked so well and was received so well that the only thing to say is that it was a con job. …
Seth Mandel at Contentions says Obama is like John Lindsay, another empty suit who did not care how much money he spent.
Since we’re now in the portion of the presidential election campaign in which the parties hold their respective national nominating conventions, the urge to find historical comparisons to analyze the candidates will be even stronger than usual. But there is one comparison when contemplating President Obama’s re-election agenda that seems apt, but goes unmentioned: John Lindsay.
Lindsay, like Obama, was young, charismatic and telegenic when he ran for mayor of New York City in the mid-1960s. Like Obama, Lindsay ran as a moderate (he was actually a liberal Republican, but eventually switched parties to run for president as a Democrat), and like Obama Lindsay ran a campaign of hope and optimism at a time of dreary pessimism. But Lindsay also put in place some of the worst public policy New York saw in the 20th century, and the assumptions and outlook that led him to that legislation mirror those of the current occupant of the White House. If Barack Obama wins re-election, he will take office forty years after Lindsay left his, and the latter’s administration offers us a good case study of the weaknesses of Obama’s political instincts.
A great guide through the problems of the Lindsay years is Greg David’s new book on the economics of postwar New York: Modern New York: The Life and Economics of a City. David was editor of Crain’s New York Business for two decades, and the book’s chapters are essential snapshots of each mayoral administration during those years. David’s chapter on Lindsay is particularly relevant. …
IBD Editors call BS on the media’s “fact checkers.”
If media “fact checkers” are just impartial guardians of the truth, how come they got their own facts wrong about Paul Ryan’s speech, and did so in a way that helped President Obama’s re-election effort?
Case in point was the rush of “fact check” stories claiming Ryan misled when he talked about a shuttered auto plant in his home state.
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler posted a piece — “Ryan misleads on GM plant closing in hometown” — saying Ryan “appeared to suggest” that Obama was responsible for the closure of a GM plant in Janesville, Wis.
“That’s not true,” Kessler said. “The plant was closed in December 2008, before Obama was sworn in.”
What’s not true are Kessler’s “facts.” …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the best and worst of Tampa.
The best zinger of the convention. From Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.): “College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.”
The worst part of Tampa, other than the humidity. The enormous, oppressive security apparatus (and those silly khaki uniforms for the local sheriff’s department, which cost $500,000.) …
Ed Morrissey shows how the Clint Eastwood pick turned out well.
Feel lucky, punk? When Republicans chose Tampa as the site for the 2012 national convention, they didn’t do it for the weather, obviously. They saw Florida as a key to their hopes of winning the presidential election and hoped to make an impact on voters with their week-long argument for Republican control of the White House. According to a snap poll from Survey USA of 754 registered voters who watched the final night of the convention, they may have switched 10% of the vote with the effort:
1,211 adults were interviewed statewide 08/31/12, after Romney, Florida’s Marco Rubio and Clint Eastwood spoke to the convention 08/30/12. Of the adults, 1,100 were registered to vote in Florida. Of the registered voters, 754 heard the convention speeches. Of the convention speech watchers:
* 66% did not change their mind.
* 16% switched from “undecided” to Romney.
* 6% switched from Obama to Romney.
* Adding those 2 together, that’s 22% who switched TO Romney.
* 10% switched from “undecided” to Obama.
* 2% switched from Romney to Obama.
* Adding those 2 together, that’s 12% who switched TO Obama.
* Comparing the 2 aggregate numbers: 22% switched TO Romney, 12% switched TO Obama. …
David Harsanyi says Eastwood worked well for the GOP three ways.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how Clint Eastwood’s rambling appearance would play with voters, though I knew immediately how it would play with most Beltway types. For me, it was, without doubt, the most entertaining convention speech in memory — hell, maybe the most entertaining of any political event period. But let’s concede for the sake of argument that Eastwood’s performance (empty chair and all) was all the terrible things that Democrats and many in the media have been saying it was … So what?
1. It was fun. How many potential voters actually changed their minds — or made up their minds – on the basis of an ad-libbed comedy routine by a celebrity? If anything, chances are probably higher that that some mildly curious voters found the idea of an iconic actor giving a speech — one, incidentally, that didn’t adhere to Republican orthodoxy — at the RNC as evidence that the GOP wasn’t as rigid and unapproachable as everyone’s been telling them. …
The tag team of Romney and Eastwood gets the nod from Jennifer Rubin.
The Romney team, following up on a strong convention, outfoxed the president by making a stop in Louisiana to view the Isaac storm damage and empathize with the victims. (No word if Mitt Romney folded everyone’s laundry and brought dinner as well.) President Obama hadn’t yet gone, so he was forced to cancel an Ohio event and scramble to get there himself. He was quite literally racing to catch up to Romney’s lead. One could imagine that after a convention in which $150 million of its negative ads were brushed aside, the Obama team has been thrown off guard.
Rattled and bitter that they could not knock the Romney-Ryan ticket off-message, the Obama team and its allies in the blogosphere fixated on Clint Eastwood. Listen, I was there and it was darn weird. But at times it was funny and devastating in its dismissal of the president’s excuses. And in clips and sound bites the day after the live performance, the oddness is diminished and the punch lines seem more biting. In simple terms, the movie icon encapsulated the message of the convention: If someone is doing a bad job, you have to fire him. …
Walter Jacobson says the tweet reacting to Eastwood shows Obama’s lack of confidence. The tweet shows the back of the Narcissist’s chair in the Cabinet room. It is hard to believe, but Obama’s chair has a brass plaque that says The President. And the back is slightly higher. How sick is this man? Better yet, the picture has been photoshopped. We have one with a clown’s head visible and another with the back of Alfred E. Neuman’s head.
While I was very uncertain whether the Eastwood appearance worked, I now believe it did.
If it didn’t, Obama would not have felt the need to respond.
It must have been a late night in AxelPlouffe HQ figuring out what to do, and whether Eastwood making a mockery of Obama’s empty chair before tens of millions of people was something which could not be left to just the media to counter.
This is not the tweet of a confident man.