…about a hypothetical Kerry administration, as part of a generally good, if screedy, Bleat:
Oh, more thing. Let’s say President Kerry would be forced to act against North Korea, because we caught them shipping nukes to a terrorist organization, and once we got there we uncovered all the torture camps and poison-gas human experiment labs. Let’s say his administration had several retreads from the Clinton era. Do you think we’d see this image below on Democratic Underground message boards?
Just asking.
To be fair, the answer would be “No, because the pictures would be on Free Republic instead” – but I take Lilek’s point anyway. I didn’t particularly need it, mind, as I’m already a fellow-traveller, but considering that the people that most desperately needed to hear the above are precisely the people least likely to listen, it seemed only polite for somebody to nod and get the point.
Moe
PS I also happened to find this line:
And Patrick Stewart has now become T. J. Hooker. I know him not.
…both funny and utterly damning, which is a reaction that I somehow find obscurely disquieting.
I’m tempted to give the obvious answer, which is, fine. Put the image up. I don’t think it’s quite as much of a substantive parallel as Lileks would have us believe (I think we were going slightly less out of our way to be friendly to North Korean than the Reagan Administration’s beheavior toward Iraq), but it’s certainly a decent gotcha argument to make.
So does that mean Lileks is admitting that the Rumsfeld/Hussein picture reflects badly on the Reagan Administration, Rumsfeld, etc?
As a pro-manned space exploration liberal, I found Lileks (and Jonah Goldberg’s) comments patently absurd.
Attention James and Jonah: Star Trek isn’t real. It’s a TV show. Patrick Stewart is an actor who played a fictional character named “Jean-Luc Picard.”
And sorry, those phasers you bought are not going to work.
i am sorry but anyone who messes with patrick stewart is gonna come face to face with Fafnir. and i will kick all y’alls pasty white asses. mm-hmm.
To anyone who’s heard Stewart talk about politics or the media before, this is no surprise. Nor is his sentiment controversial in the least: that we should try fixing earth before we stomp on off to other planets. The “Now we spread our glorious seed to the stars” message IS arrogant, it always WAS arrogant; we clearly have not created a society that even slightly approaches meriting that level of arrogance. When we do, we’ll talk space travel. Until then, I’m happy with probes and space telescopes.
Maybe so, Lungfish, but don’t you think the most satisfying cure for that arrogance would be for us to shuttle off to space, ready to dazzle all and sundry with the wonder that is Earthlings, only to come across some other form of life that had far outpaced our own accomplishments and viewed us as ignorant hicks from some forgotten backwater of the universe?