No doubt about it, President Obama's trip to Europe provided him with a bunch of great photo ops. But when it came to issues of substance, he found himself playing a weak hand. And he played it badly.

Can there have been a more unfortunate coincidence than a North Korean ballistic missile test occurring just at the moment when Obama, in Prague, was making a windy speech about that progressive chimera, "a nuclear-free world"? And that was by no means all, as noted in today's National Review Online editorial. Particularly painful was the snub Obama received from NATO, which flatly refused to support the war in Afghanistan with additional combat troops. If the President believed that he simply had to ask nicely, without bullying our allies as the idiot cowboy Bush used to do, he has been disabused of that notion.

The President can thank God for Michelle's sexy arms, which distracted the media's attention and somewhat obscured the multiple failures of Obama's European tour.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:56 AM EDT

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You may recall that Candidate Obama pledged if elected to restore Science to its rightful place in the scheme of things. (Yes, he's one of those characters who pronounces Science in such a way as to give the impression that its capitalized.) Well, here's the payoff:

Obama looks at climate engineering

[Presidential science adviser] John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

Okaaaay. So Obama's idea of "good Science" is to install a genuine Mad Scientist in the White House. It's amazing, the things they teach you in community organizer school nowadays.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:41 AM EDT

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Catholic university? Give me a break!

Even back in the early Eighties, when I was a graduate student there, it was obvious that the clerical collar tended to chafe Notre Dame’s neck. Goals-oriented progressives—constituting the cadre of the liberal-arts faculty on nine out of ten campuses, Notre Dame included—could hardly be expected to coexist comfortably with Catholic doctrine as it pertains to homosexuality, marriage, abortion, etc. Little by little, therefore, Notre Dame has been shedding its Catholic orientation. So as not to annoy the deep-pocked alumni donors so beloved of major universities, the university has proceeded stealthily on its course. Notre Dame aims to jettison Catholic doctrine while maintaining, for the sake of public relations, a Catholic identity.

But now, with its invitation of President Obama to speak at its 2009 commencement (and receive an honorary degree), Notre Dame’s mask has slipped. For how can a Catholic university honor a man who is an enthusiastic proponent of unrestricted abortion and stem cell research? The answer is obvious: A Catholic university can do no such thing.

This elementary fact explains why Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama has stirred up such a storm of protest among Catholics. Though some are prepared to overlook the President’s pro-abortion position because they agree with him on such issues as healthcare reform, this strikes me as not so very different from the old excuse for Mussolini: that at least he made the trains run on time.

I used to be proud of my graduate degree from Notre Dame. Today, not so much.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:38 AM EDT

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Of course, the behavior of the CBC in Cuba has a long progressive pedigree. Think of such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, who scurried to Moscow during Stalin's heyday and all but tongue-polished the monster's jackboots. Phony revolutionaries always stand in awe of the bloody-handed genuine article.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:44 AM EDT

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I suppose I should thank the Congressional Black Caucus for providing me with a subject for comment under the third slogan of the Party. Here it is:

CBC members praise Castro

Sickening—just sickening. They may as well have praised Hitler, or Stalin, or Jack the Ripper. Here's a particularly disgusting example from one of Chicago's own:

“It was almost like listening to an old friend,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Il.), adding that he found Castro’s home to be modest and Castro’s wife to be particularly hospitable.

“In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor,” Rush said.

But the measure of Castro's survival, Mr. Rush, is the heap of wreckage that is modern Cuba, and the sad corpses that dear Fidel has left scattered behind him in his progress through history. But when, like Mr. Rush, you don't happen to be Cuban yourself, why, it's easy to let bygones be bygones!

Posted by tmg110 at 8:32 AM EDT

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Whenever you come to the intersection of politics and language, there stands George Orwell:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

This passage from “Politics and the English Language” (1946) sprang immediately to mind when I learned that the Obama Administration has rebranded the war on terror. It is now to be referred to as “overseas contingency operations.” Nor are government officials to refer any longer to “terrorist attacks.” The new, officially approved phrase is “man-caused disasters.” (Writing for USA Today, Jonah Goldberg has good fun with all this.)

I find it very revealing of Obama’s mind-set that one of his principal criticisms of George W. Bush is that he gave things their proper names. Now it may be that Orwell would have opposed the war on terror itself, but surely he’d have had no problem calling it a war.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:14 AM EDT

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Is the concept of "human rights" universally applicable?

The obvious answer is "Yes, of course"—but this question is trickier than it seems. First, what is meant by "human rights"? Western progressives have spent years and decades proclaiming various rights: the right to food, the right to housing, the right to healthcare, the right for gays to marry, etc., etc. But when it comes to the traditional rights: freedom of speech, religion, association, etc., they are much more ambivalent.

Consider, for example this comment from Dean Steacy, an investigator employed by the notorious Canadian Human Rights Commission:  "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." Non-Americans from Milton to Orwell—as well as any Canadians who have chanced to read their own nation's Charter of Rights—would be startled to learn from Steacy that freedom of speech is no more than a peculiarity of American constitutional law. But his attitude typifies the drift of progressive thought. It has long been obvious that traditional civil liberties stand athwart progressivism transformational course. And whenever the choice lies between freedom of speech and the Radiant Future, 99.9% of progressives will choose the latter.

The emerging foreign policy of the Obama Administration--a fog of soothing rhetoric obscuring a total unwillingness to speak up on behalf of human rights as traditionally understood—faithfully reflects the progressive attitude described above. For the dream of "peace" and a "nuclear-free world," Obama & Co. are prepared to look the other way while the North Korean regime starves its own population and the Iranian mullahs plot genocide. The wretched people of Zimbabwe, suffering under one of the world's worst tyrants, isn't even on the Obama radar screen. No doubt the President and his people consider themselves hard-eyed realists. Certainly they imagine that by kowtowing to dictators and thugs, they can gain the good opinion of the "world community."

I do happen to think that human rights are universally applicable. But I also fear that the tide of elite opinion is running in the opposite direction. And by a curious irony, the cause of human rights has been abandoned by those who claim to be building a better world. 

Posted by tmg110 at 8:15 AM EDT

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That's the President of the United States bowing—bowing!—to the King of Saudi Arabia. Apparently when I blogged concerning Obama's readiness to tongue-polish the wingtips and combat boots of the world's tyrants, that was no mere figure of speech. How perfectly shameful and disgusting.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:30 AM EDT

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Among other findings, the Obama Administration’s Auto Task Force noted in its report on GM (released Monday) that the company’s plug-in hybrid vehicle program is a waste of time and money. The melancholy fact of the matter is that GM’s much-touted Chevrolet Volt simply cannot be produced and sold at a profit.

So how did GM respond to this scathing assessment? Here you go:

GM asks U.S. gov't for $2.6 bln to build hybrids

And given the Obama Administration’s unreasoning green mania, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if GM got the money—excise me, our money.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:37 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 2 April 2009 8:41 PM EDT

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Remember Thomas Malthus? It was he who predicted, back at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, that our planet’s ever-increasing population would eventually produce catastrophe in the form of resource depletion, famine, plague, and social collapse. His notorious treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was and remains extremely influential—despite the inconvenient fact that its main argument has been thoroughly falsified by two centuries of human history. (Quick, name one region of the world where an increasing population has led to a lower standard of living.)

But Malthus’ theory has its charms for prosperous, guilt-ridden, self-loathing Western progressives whose discontents manifest themselves as an unreasoning hatred of the civilization that nurtured them. Such people are naturally attracted to the idea that the human race in all its branches needs to be ruthlessly pruned.

Just the other day, one Jonathon Porritt, a “green adviser” to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, opined that in order to assure “sustainability,” the population of the United Kingdom must be cut to around 30 million. Since the present population of the UK is slightly in excess of 60 million, this presents a problem. Not that it would be absolutely impossible to reach Porritt’s goal. A good start could be made by slapping an absolute ban on immigration, since immigrants to the UK, who come mostly from the Third World, tend to have much larger families than native Britons. What else? A tax could be levied on families that produce excess children—say, more than two. Women choosing to terminate their pregnancies could be rewarded with cash bonuses. Suicide could be legalized—even subsidized via tax rebates for surviving family members. Medical care could be withheld from the elderly and the terminally ill. (But perhaps this last proposal is already in operation, given the scandalous inefficiency of Britain’s National Health Service.) Once you begin to speculate along these lines, many possibilities present themselves.

That such proposals are morally outrageous is an objection that the Porritts of the world have a habit of waving away. The important thing, you see, is to "save the planet." But given their manifest dislike of their own species, one wonders for whom or for what the Porritts are proposing to save it. The snail darter, perhaps?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:22 PM EDT

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