Tuesday, April 24, 2012
American Exceptionalism Cartoon of the Day
But sadly, our president does not want America to be exceptional anymore:
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The Roots of Obama's Rage by Dinesh D'Souza:
"One of England's great colonial figures was the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, one of the few people in history to get a country (Rhodesia) named after him. Rhodes is today remembered for the diamond mining company he founded, De Beers, and also for the Rhodes Scholarship. But in his time he commanded something of a private army, he got mixed up in the Matabele Wars and the Boer War, and his political and economic tentacles reached across most of southern Africa. At the peak of his power, Rhodes was asked by a journalist how far he intended his influence to spread. He replied, "R would annex the planets if I could. I often think of that." This is the colonial mindset carried to the final frontier: even possession of the whole earth is not enough! You can imagine how the anti-colonialists reacted to Rhodes. Rhodes's comment can help us understand how the anti-colonial mind perceives America's space program-it is a projection of American power and arrogance into the solar system.
"Recall the Moon Landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind." But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was eight years old at the time and still living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about how there was a great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon, and America had won. And everybody knew it because Neil Armstrong placed the American flag on the moon. So it wasn't one giant leap for mankind, but one giant leap for the United States. It was as if that flag signified, "We Americans did this. We Americans now own the moon." I can understand how many in the Third World might see the Moon landing that way, because I'm from the Third World and that's the way I saw it.
"If Obama shares this view, no wonder that he wants to blunt NASA's space program, to divert it from being a symbol of American greatness to a more modest public relations operation that builds ties with Muslims and other peoples. Even when Muslims aren’t' involved, Obama wants to make sure the Russians and the Chinese share the credit. Space, you see, is for human and not merely American exploration. Plug in our anti-colonial model and what at first seems inexplicable-converting NASA into a community outreach program for Muslims-suddenly makes complete sense. Remove the theory and it is almost impossibly difficult to account for what Obama is doing."
Well, I have to say that the shuttle was at or near the end of it's useful life. Thing is, we weren't building a new, improved version or something rather different and better.
That's what burns my butt.
We were until Obama cancelled it.
From msnbc 2/2/2010:
"President Obama's 2011 budget request for NASA cut the agency's Constellation program completely, effectively canceling a five-year, $9 billion effort to build new Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets.
"The new space vehicles were slated to replace NASA's three aging space shuttles (due to retire this year) and launch astronauts into orbit and on to the moon."
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