MAYBE I SHOULDN'T HAVE DEFENDED THIS GUY
It's clear some bloggers desperately need editors. Case in point--Gregg Easterbrook:
AND ABOUT THAT FAKE TURKEY: The "decorative turkey" in George W. Bush's hands in the Thanksgiving pictures from Baghdad should in fact make people angry. Hundreds of American dead, thousands of Iraqi dead, and the White House is staging phony photos on Iraqi soil? The occupation of Iraq may be justified, but White House use of the war as a political prop is becoming unseemly. And think: somebody had to fly a fake turkey to Iraq. Voters are not stupid; this sort of thing may backfire on Bush.
Voters aren't stupid; about that, Mr. Easterbrook is correct. But I'm afraid it's Mr. Easterbrook who is exhibiting more than his share of stupidity. Nobody had to fly that turkey over to Iraq just so President Bush could hold it. It was already there, a standard prop the military puts out for Thanksgiving holiday parties. How do I know that? I was in the military, and saw these prop turkeys more than once at big to-dos.
The "plastic" turkey incident won't backfire on President Bush, and it shouldn't. In fact, as AOG notes, the very impulse the president showed provided a rich contrast between himself and the dictator he was at that moment still hunting: W's instinct was to serve, rather than be served by, the troops in his command. That's a distinctively Christian, and American, view of leadership. Check out Jesus' washing his disciples' feet if you don't believe me.
I'm starting to think the chatterati needs to go through some sort of compulsory military education. Most of 'em haven't seen the outside of a think tank in a decade, and haven't been anywhere the actual military they talk so much about.
And at least one chatteratus needs an editor. His posts veer from the insightful to the moronic, and occassionally to the career-killing offensive.
(via Andrea Harris)
UPDATE: Batten down the hatches, it's an Instalanche!
I'd say "disappointed" is the right word for my reaction. I went to the mat defending Easterbrook against bloggers I respect on charges that he's an anti-Semite, only to have him fall for the lamest anti-Bush conspiracy yet. Thing is, he's no anti-Semite and his TMQ is the best football column out there. Does he get stuff wrong sometimes? Absolutely. He predicted the Ravens would be horrible this year, and they're a win away from clinching their division. But we all get football predictions wrong--as the saying goes, that's why they play the games. For instance I, a diehard Cowboys fan who stuck with them through Barry "The Bootlicker Boy" Switzer, would never have guessed that even the Tuna could turn that hapless bunch of amateurs from 5-11 to a possible 11-5 in a single season without a major change in personnel, and without Emmitt Smith, but that's just what the Tuna has done. With Quincy Carter and Troy Hambrick in the backfield. As TMQ would say, Ye Gods! So we all get football predictions wrong. But there's no excuse for a real reporter to get the turkey story wrong, and Easterbrook did. So yeah, I'm disappointed. Very.
UPDATE: Easterbrook is wrong about space policy, too. He argues against building a lunar base on the grounds that it would be too expensive and useless for astronomy, but putting telescopes on the Moon makes a great deal of sense. Like current space telescopes--Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer and Compton (the latter of which is dead, btw)--Moon scopes would be beyond the earth's atmosphere and therefore get a clear view of the universe. But unlike space telescopes, scopes on the Moon would not suffer the effects of actually flying in low earth orbit at the speed of 17,000 miles per hour.
What are those effects? Well, for starters, orbiting scopes get a sunrise every 90 minutes. In Hubble's early days, its solar panels would greet that sunrise with a loud RING like a bell (if a telescope rings in space, where there's no air to transmit the vibration and no one's there to hear it, does it still make a sound?), which was caused by the sudden rise in temperature that came with the sun. Hubble's new wings (installed on orbit in 2002) compensate for this disturbance now, but with the old wings you had to wait for the vibes to settle down before you could get the finest imagery from it. Put Hubble on the Moon's dark side and see how often it rings. Hubble is also an expensive beast because we keep having to push it back to its proper orbit. In orbit, it's basically falling toward the earth all the time, but flying so high and fast that it keeps missing. Left alone, it eventually wouldn't miss. We send shuttles up to it both to fix the things that break (gyros, usually) and upgrade its technology, and to give it a kick upstairs. Put it on the Moon--no more need to push it back to its rightful place, which means one reason for expensive shuttle missions to Hubble goes away. And once we've established routine lunar flights to a base, servicing becomes much easier and cheaper.
Now, with current technology you can't do the deepest infrared astronomy from the Moon because it's too close to the warm earth, so we'll probably still need to put telescopes like Spitzer out at 5 million miles from earth. But Spitzer isn't upgradable and shuttles can't fly to it. If it breaks, it's dead. But on the other hand, it doesn't have the sunrise problem since it's so far out, and with advanced cryocooler technology we're already doing bang-up infrared astronomy with Hubble in low earth orbit, so who knows--we might be able to make a lunar telescope cold enough to out do Spitzer eventually.
Oh, and as long as we're no longer defending Gregg Easterbrook around here, we'll note that he's wrong about Saddam's teeth, too. That video sent exactly the right message, particularly to the Arab world.