The Sunday Morning Comics

[sailaway21]

This might be a recurring event. I've selected the Sunday newspaper column exhibiting the least amount of correct facts, the highest hubris content possible by law, as well as the usual quotient of conclusions leaped-to with little or no evidence , that I could find. The number one criteria in the selection of our Sunday Stupidity is, and will be, journalistic ability to draw conclusions based upon no new evidence.

For example, while it might be appropriate to say that western leader's and people's hopes for a change in relations with the US remain high under a new Obama administration that is not the same as to say that relations have tangibly changed in the last two weeks. Not that they won't; they just haven't yet as it's only been, well, two weeks. In the below article you'll note all kinds of flights of fancy based on this simple mis-assumption.

Your Sunday morning test is to delve the article and discover whatever stupidities may lie within. Our Midwestern office has devoted countless hours as well as our legion of waterfront spies to bring you what we feel to be the most entertaining fare that Sunday morning has to offer. We think you'll find it a target rich environment.

In your responses to today's Sunday Sophistry please quote the offending passage you found most egregious and why. Herewith, today's offering:
In its relations with the world, America takes a sudden turn toward pragmatism - The Boston Globe

[PBzeer]

I expected one of the many columns that told us how smart Bambi was in handling the multiple ethically challenged nominees he appointed.

[PBzeer]

Here's a quote for the day, from the ever insightful Frank Rich:

In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get.

Now, I"m not a CPA, nor have I played one on TV. but I seriously doubt that any semi-competent accountant (though perhaps Daschle's doesn't rise to that level) would let these "honest" mistakes slide for 3 years.

[sailaway21]

OK, it started early for me in the article. Right around the second paragraph:

"It has been all the more striking, then, how much of the flurry of activity with which the new administration has started - the executive orders and announcements and appointments - seems pitched to an international audience. On his first day in office Obama signed orders to ban torture and to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, a symbol of injustice and cruelty in much of the world; his first formal interview as president was with the moderate Saudi news network Al Arabiya. He has already dispatched a high-level envoy to the Middle East, and appointed another for Afghanistan and Pakistan. His administration has reached out to Russia over the possibility of massive cuts in the two nations' nuclear arsenals, while at the same time expressing a willingness to talk with the Iranian government. In less than three weeks, the image that the country presents to the rest of world has been unmistakably altered."

As if no previous administration had ever thought to, or done, such a thing? Every new administration to grace the White House has immediately dispatched envoys to both the Middle East and the USSR/Russia coupled with an announcement that, finally, real progress was to be at hand. 'Cause our guys and gals are talkin' to 'em now being the implication. Maybe this rush to deploy the professional jaw wagglers is a good part of the problem. Judging by the results of, say, the last forty years, what's been the improvement, where's the security?

Notable exceptions to this could be observed in the successful foreign policy presidencies of RW Reagan and GW Bush. Reagan said that we ain't talkin' about arms control or much else; we'll be busy down at the shipyard building a 600 ship Navy, some of which will be carrying Pershing missiles to deploy within Europe. Boy, that put a real damper on diplomacy.

GW Bush just invaded Afghanistan. Not a whole lot of diplomacy got done with the Afghans beforehand.

The strapped for relevance author of this piece typifies the usual media gaga over the idea that we'll be taking the pulse of the Saudi's and others in the region to examine the possibilities for fruitful diplomacy. Conveniently ignored in the fact that the Saudi's and other "moderates" are a good part of the problem and the main problem herself, Iran, has said that she'll continue to nuclearize regardless of an Obama presidency. Uh, so what's to talk about?

The trouble with the stability issue in the regions is that things are so reliably stable. The only stability is the consistency of the threat and the strife. You want to change things in those tow regions? Clamp an embargo and a blockade on Iran; they'll notice. And, if we got the EU to stop buying natural gas from the Russians, from a pipeline we told them not to build, we'd restore Russia to a condition she was in at the end of the Cold War. A condition that incidentally was the only one in which any real and meaningfull reforms have ever come.

[sailaway21]

The reliably liberal and more reliably wrong columnist for the NYT on how the pollling and the pundits were so wrong about Obama and the stimulus package. It apparently does not occur to him that they may have been right then, the polls are wrong now, and that polls are nothing more than a snapshot of the political climate anyway. Having panicked the American citizenry, it would be hardly surprising that a majority favor the stimulus package. That's not to say that they do not remain deeply skeptical, a factor polls usually miss. As for support of the President and congressional approval numbers, we just voted for these cats in November and they didn't do anything until after the Super Bowl. Even those of us whom voted against the current administration have some hope that they do well.

Frank Rich is this day's Sunday morning comic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/op...=1&ref=opinion

[sailaway21]

but, we've already got this week's winner. From the pages of a newspaper left at the Buffalo Bill Museum by persons unknown.
RealClearPolitics - Articles - Appoint Paul Krugman Economic Czar

[sailaway21]

I spoke too soon. Maybe it's a full moon. Some ramblings from the only Senatorial Intelligence committee member to lose his security clearance while serving. A call for the return of the Church commission which, incidentally, managed to do what the Soviet Union never could, gut the CIA and intelligence services to a point where things like 9/11 were not only possible but, inevitable. This from one of Ben and Jerry's leading producers....
The Case for a Truth Commission - TIME

[camaraderie]

Hard to believe he was ever a republican.

[sailaway21]

Originally Posted by camaraderie

Hard to believe he was ever a republican.

The next two years, minimum, are going to be target-rich times for the utterances of such as Maxine Waters, Patrick Leahy, Henry Waxman, and John Conyers. With the Dem's in control, the leash is slipped and we can return to those halcyon days when a Dem was free to say any damn fool thing and some moron in Birkenstocks would stand up and cheer. In times like these, the morons, not the cream, rises to the top. Get yer popcorn popper oiled up.

It can be only a matter of time before Oliver Stone, for whom I expect to have a cabinet level position created, reopens the investigation into the recent events in Dallas.

[PBzeer]

Ya gotta love a media that finds strength of character in every miscue. It's almost as if he screws up enough, he'll be great.