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Audacity of Truth
Flyswatter in Chief:
"He had this fly that was persistently buzzing around him during the interview...he swatted his hand and he said ‘I got the sucker’...it was a, you know, Dirty Harry ‘make my day’ moment."- The NYT's John Harwood, describing Obama's killing of a fly - 6/16/09
What he said
(Bumping this post to the top – scroll down for updates and more thoughts)
Rick Moran blogs about the latest controversy involving comments Ann Coulter made in a recent interview with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer. First, the comments:
LAUER: On the 9-11 widows, an in particular a group that had been critical of the administration:
COULTER: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process.”
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”
Of those comments, Moran writes:
This rhetoric is not designed to advance debate or even make any kind of a salient point about the political activism of grief stricken parents like Cindy Sheehan and the anti-Bush September 11 widows. The remarks were designed to hurt other people’s feelings in a deeply personal and entirely inappropriate way. Can you imagine some liberal commentator making similar remarks about Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame, III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon and who is fighting to keep the 9/11 Memorial from being hijacked by the anti-American left? We would be all over that worthy and deservedly so.
The anti-Bush 9/11 widows are not immune from criticism for their political positions nor even for the tactics they use to advance those positions. But to say that they are “enjoying” their status as widows is so far beyond the pale that anyone who makes such a statement deserves the most severe censure possible. And the networks who use Coulter as some kind of “Spokesman” for the right should be told in no uncertain terms by as many of us as possible that she doesn’t speak for any conservatives that we want to be associated with.
I couldn’t agree more.
Ann, of course, has the right to say whatever she wants – but was something like that right to say? I don’t think so. This isn’t about being uber-sensitive. It’s about there being a better way to get your point across without going overboard. No matter what the 9-11 widows have had to say about the President’s policies, Coulter saying they’ve been “enjoying” their husbands deaths is way beyond the pale.
This is yet another example of how sometimes conservative debate can turn from passion to poison.
James Joyner has a link roundup of blogger reax.
Read more via Captain Ed, AllahPundit
PM Update 11:47 ET: It’s ‘progressed’ (don’t know if that’s the best word for it) to a war of words been Coulter and Hillary.
Malkin makes a fair point here on what’s been lost in all this:
Unfortunately, lost in all the hype and hyperbole on both sides is the central point about the absolute moral authority the MSM confers on victims they agree with–while victims whose politics they do not share can’t get the time of day.
She’s absolutely right. Unfortunately, that central point won’t be the focus now. The focus is going to be on how hateful Ann is, and by association, conservatives, because she wrote about how the 9-11 widows were ‘enjoying’ their husbands’ deaths.
To add to my earlier points, on certain issues it helps to be tactful when attempting to get your point across. I have defended remarks made by other conservatives that I thought were taken out of context by the liberal mediots (Bill Bennett [scroll] and Rep. Jean Schmidt are two examples of that) because they deserved to be defended. The usual suspects took offense at Bennett’s and Schmidt’s remarks respectively – Bennett’s because he wasn’t being PC enough and Schmidt because she was supposedly ’smearing’ Vietnam vet Rep. John Murtha after he urged the US to essentially cut and run in Iraq. I cannot, however, do the same for Ann here.
Conservatives, including myself, are strong proponents of saying what needs to be said without worrying about who is going to get offended. The bane of progress on conservative priorities has been political correctness: we’ve been told for decades by Democrats that our ideas are offensive, mean-spirited and wrong – and when we act on our core beliefs (smaller gov’t, fiscal responsibility, etc) well, I don’t even have to give a rundown of the type of venom that spews out of the mouths of demagoguing blowhards like Ted Kennedy in response. In spite of the Ted Kennedys of the world, we need to keep on saying what needs to be said. But on certain issues, tact is important and this is indeed one of those issues.
I know some of my readers disagree with me on this, which is fine because a world in which we always agreed with each other would be quite boring. But I want to reiterate that this is not about political correctness or being uber-sensitive, but instead knowing which issues to approach tactfully and which ones not to. Because of the way Ann chose to make her point on the “Jersey girls” – by saying they were “enjoying” their husbands’ deaths, the real point – as Malkin noted – the one that really should be the focal point, has been lost. It’s become a personality debate now rather than a substantive debate and that is the most regrettable thing out of all this.
(Original post time before the update and bump: 10:16 a.m.)
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“Most current software at the time, took a few lines of code change.”
A lot of people took the opportunity to make investments beyond simply making Y2K compliance.
” Another totally improper anology to any possible Climatic changes.”
What really makes the analogy improper is the external vs. internal nature of the costs. The costs to Y2K dangers were internal — it was your systems and company that would be hurt. The Costs to global climate change are externalised. The incentives to fix are quite different.
- You are correct to a point andrew. The other aspect that makes it “oranges and buicks”, is that what was needed to be done, the corrections for Y2K, were perfectly obvious, and doable. Climate prediction, and control, the whole panoply of this issue,is anything but obvious. Just one bone headed move, and you could end up with tem times the problems. So the analogy completely breaks down.
- By the way, I wonder how Mexico is coming along on those Y1K problems.
- Bang
>>It would really be helpful if posters would stick to things they actually knew something about.
Yes, this true. YOU should stop saying things that you know nothing about. Reading an article in the paper does not make you an expert.
>>- Millions of dollars had to be spent upgrading “COBOL” based systems, e.g. Elevator controls, old vending machines, medical electronics etc. Most current software at the time, took a few lines of code change.
Cobol systems are part of everyone’s daily life in one way or the other. It was one of the most popular programming languages in the world prior to the emergence of desktop pcs in late 1980’s. As a result, nearly everything developed during that time frame and had to be controlled by computer had a COBOL component somewhere in the background.
If a program only included a date value, modifying a program would only involve changing a few lines of code but this was not always true. The date, for example, could be used toward the calculation of another value. Regardless, the programmer’s task was not complete after making the actual change since the output of the program had to mesh correctly with all subsequent programs. A job stream from start to data in its final form could involve hundreds of programs each of which needed to be analyzed. So, even if the actual change took a short time to make, the upfront work needed to properly make that change was tremendous.
>>The real expense was entirely self incurred by delinquent upgrades
I have no idea what you mean by deliqunet update. Do you mean a full scale migration away from cobol? Although some companies may have decided to swallow the bitter pill and launch a complete migration from cobol systems to something else. I personally know no company that did so during that time. Migrating a production system is an enormous task and requires serious commitment in time and money. The city of New York has been undergoing a migration from cobol batch processing to the people soft platform for the past two years and is not scheduled to complete the migration for at least another year.
Further, in spite of the advance of microprocessors, for certain types of processing and for systems requiring nearly 100 percent uptime, cobol and mainframe systems remain remain without peer. Many companies continue to use cobol including nearly all banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies for this reason.
Nearly every person I know in the IT field spent sometime on this issue, at my company a department was even created to deal solely with this issue. During new year’s eve 1999, some departments were completely staffed to deal with possible y2k issues. (They were partly compensated for their time by a fully catered lobster dinner complete with waiters and white linen tables brought in from the outside.) Companies do not commit this kind of resources to an effort if they do not think that failure to do so would be detrimental to their business.
- Among other things as an IT Edited. –ST, I’ve written COBOL for a living on occassion….
- Does THAT make me an expert numbskull… Stick to safe ground like the cartoon section of the daily worker…. At least SOMETHING you know something about Sparky… Your Liberal bromides and mis-speak are as empty headed as you are.
- Bang
Bang, the climate is falling or rising or falling. The highest average world temperature of the century was 1998. But it doesn’t stop people like Gore from putting out movies that are alarmist in nature.
Get with the program. Be alarmed and blame conservatives and prosperity even though prosperity is what has helped American get it’s environmental act together in the last 2 decades. Now only if we can make even further strides without playing the blame game (that won’t happen) and without so-called enviros thinking their solutions are the only ones to the problems we face.
Bak – While all the Pol opportunists and press op-ed hounds are running aroound like chicken little, the larger group of sensible, honest, and careful scientists, meterologists, and climate engineers, are continuing the real work that makes sense and garners progress. I seldom even responde to the feckless, fact-starved, nonsense of the hard left anymore. they have the prospective of children. Best seen, but not heard.
- Bang
Bang, I just read that you have written COBOL for a living. My condolences, my friend. I don’t want to go off on a rant, but COBOL is a $%$#/!@ piece of $^&!/# language that is so @#%#!/&$ hard to follow that reading someone else’s code makes me want to $@!&^0@ punch someone.
That said, searching for the ‘time’ variable doesn’t seem all that difficult. Am I mistaken?
I think he meant that companies had to over-pay coders to get them to fix their computer problems in time because they waited so long.
Bah with a capitol B! Mainframes continue in their importance, but COBOL is history. COBOL is no more stable than C, perl, or any of the database programs like SQL. If you would have said ‘less stable’ I might have agreed with you. COBOL blows, plain and simple.
Sorry, that did kind of turn into a rant. My apologies.
UPDATE: I hate COBOL.
- Well in that you’re certainly not alone blogagog, so pity the poor guys like myself that actually had to wade into decades old scrambled, non-anotated speghetti code. I think the only language I hated more was ADA, and that at least had a lofty purpose when the gov. originally introduced it, albeit by the time it saw the light of day it was already outmoded, so typical of our eridite leadership inside the beltway…
- And no it wasn’t a “simple fix”, since there were always many multiple “references” to date bytes that had to chased down and feretted out. the worst thing you could have was a “mixed” set of references, for obvious reasons.
- Bang
Since you said the word, I can’t help posting this. My roomate in college wore a cap that said, “I’m eruditer than you”.
We used to say ‘he’s eh-rooditter than us’. Still not sure why that makes me laugh, but it does.
DOH ~ butchered the language yet again…..lolol
If you wrote Cobol code for a living why don’t you know better Edited. –ST? Did you work on the Cobol Y2K issue? You can dish out the bull but you can’t stomach it yourself. Every chance you get you dish out the liberal this and the liberal that. Is that the best you can do, to deride my political position? I’ve never called you names.
I’ve read your posts, you seem to claim intimate knowledge on everything from computers to global warming to statistics. Either you are one of the world’s great polymaths or you are one of the world’s great bullshitters. I think it is the latter. Isn’t that right sparky?
After editing two posts in this thread for insults, I think it’s time to close it. I didn’t even realize how far off topic it had gotten.
If anyone wants to continue the discussion,p lease do so in an open thread and do so sans insults, please. Thanks.