Dana Milbank has a fabulous, some might say scathing and sarcastic, column in today’s Washington Post about Hillary Clinton’s campaign rhetoric:
Are you in it to win? Would you regard civil rights as the gift that keeps on giving? Do you believe in the American Dream, stupid?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you might consider supporting Hillary Clinton, the person to send to the White House when you care enough to send the very best. More than any other candidate, Clinton has brought the sensibility of Hallmark greeting cards to the 2008 presidential race.
Yesterday, the Democratic front-runner took a number of provocative stands as she spoke about soldiers and veterans at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank:
“If you serve your country, your country should serve you.”
“I’m here to say that the buck does stop with this president.”
“Let us work . . . to take care of those who are taking care of us.”
The controversy didn’t end there. She also offered her view that American soldiers are simultaneously “giving their all,” “holding their breath” and “stretched to the breaking point.” Candidate Cliche continued: “Who’s on their side? Who’s standing up for them? . . . We owe these young men and women the very best.”
We do not owe them the very best rhetoric, however. Abraham Lincoln gave the last full measure of devotion to support-the-troops language 142 years ago, when he called on the nation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.” Yesterday, Clinton had this to say of the troops: “They don’t have the luxury of passing the buck to somebody else. They step forward and they step up.”
And then there’s this rhetorical gem:
[I]t is on the campaign trail where Clinton’s language really soars. According to The Post’s Anne Kornblut, a veteran Clinton watcher, the candidate’s greatest moment on the stump came last summer in Denver, when she gave an updated version of “It’s the economy, stupid,” an unofficial slogan of her husband’s 1992 campaign. “It’s the American Dream, stupid,” she proposed. A few weeks earlier, Clinton laid out her legislative agenda, including: “I believe in the chance for every person to pursue his or her dreams”; “we are safer and stronger when we work together”; “we are a resilient people”; and “we care deeply about the future.”
All the sentimentality of a soap opera, combined with the substance of Dr. Phil.
Read the whole thing.
March 16th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Hillary is strong on the security of our nation and would welcomed change from President Bush that panders to special interest and only gives the illusion of being strong on security. For example, since Bush has been president thousands of innocent people died needlessly in 911. Yet, neither the Secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT) nor the Chairman of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have lost their job. Hijacking and Terrorist attacks have traditionally accounted for about 10% of fatal accidents world-wide. This known threat existed and was well tabulated/tracked prior to 911 in world fatal accident statistics and still President Bush?s appointed a political head of the FAA that had little security or aviation experience. Neither the DOT nor FAA took the required steps necessary to keep the public and the nation safe even though the threats were known and it was their job to assure the security and safety of our sky. They operated out of fear of losing the aviation industries support for maintaining their positions and thereby allowed the nation and the traveling public to suffer needlessly. The deaths that occurred on 911 won?t even show up on the FAA?s fatal accident statistics. This is done intentionally to minimize aviation related fatalities and to give the public a false sense of security. Thus 911, like Katrina, was the result of President Bush?s Republican political appointees that had little knowledge of their appointed critical tasks.
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At first look it isn’t obvious that the Payne Stewart(golfer)/ Helios(2005 - 100+fatality) decompression crashes and 911 are related but from a aviation safety and security system view they are:
When a plane substantially deviates from its approved flight plan it is presently possible to have a remote pilot located in a secure simulator fly the plane to a safe landing at a sparsely populated airfield. Over 70% of all fatal air crashes occurrences are readily preventable if handled correctly.
Unfortunately, the data needed to accomplish this is locked up in the flight recorder and is utilized predominately in an autopsy mode. If the data is so important that it is necessary to discover the cause of a fatal crash it is much more important to prevent a fatal crash. Yet because of the aviation industry’s partnership with the FAA and NTSB none of the flight data coming out of the recorders is available in real-time to proactively prevent fatal crashes. The inability to use the flight data in real time has jeopardized the safety and security of the traveling public and the nation. The astronauts were guided back from the moon because the data was telemetered to the ground in real-time. Once it got to the ground it was analyzed, and then via a concerted effort by experts, using simulations the proper and safe way to handle life threatening situation was accomplished. Yet this proven technique isn’t utilized by the industrial/government partnership to keep our nation and air-passengers safe and secure.
One year prior to 911, I was the guest speaker at the International Aviation Safety Association meeting in NY where I spoke on how terrorists and decompression fatal crashes are preventable via remote control of a deviating aircraft using ciphered technology developed for our ballistic missiles. This technology can prevent most aviation crashes (approximately 70%) even those from mechanical problems and errors of commission and omission. At present a pilot has displayed only a fraction of the information necessary to make the right decision to prevent a crash. The pilot in many instances is seeing a problem for the first time. The aircraft data and air traffic control data isn’t shared extensively so experts on handling the aircraft’s problem aren?t consulted nor can the problem be simulated to aid in crash prevention. This data vacuum is responsible for most fatal crashes. For example, the Swiss Air and Alaskan Air fatal crashes could have been prevented if handled correctly.
In addition it is not only terrorists that sabotage aircraft. Commercial and Military pilots have also done it. When a pilot deviates substantially from the approved flight plan the aircraft should be safely remote piloted to a landing at a sparsely populated airport. Several years ago a rogue military pilot substantially deviated from his approved Continental United States (CONUS) flight plan and flew an A-10 aircraft loaded with bombs clandestinely across multiple states. It took two weeks to find the plane which had crashed into a Colorado mountain. The plane was eventually found but the bombs are still missing. Exhaustive searches were made but no one has a clew as to what happened to the bombs. Must we wait for a bigger disaster than 911 before any action takes place?
Everyone knowledgeable about the holes in our aviation system, brought about by the industrial government partnership, knew that a 911 could occur and the government allowed it to occur. Even though we knew about Payne Stewart nothing was done and so we got Helios’ 100 + deaths. Presently we are just as vulnerable to a 911 disaster, decompression disaster, … etc. as we were in 2001. The public needs to know the system is fixable for the good of our nation. Even though 3000 people died needlessly on 911 the system doesn’t fix the data vacuum mode of operation. It works around the system with attempted patches that are costly and ineffective fixes simply to protect the industry from liability suits. The necessary data is only available in the tombstone/autopsy mode. With all of the deaths that were preventable not a single FAA or NTSB person was even laid-off. Thus, the industry won out and the public and nation suffered. It is quite possible that we went into an unnecessary and horrible war just because we protected the special interest of the aviation industry. The cost of those disasters alone would have been a small fraction of the cost necessary to fix the system and we would now have a safer and securer nation. Instead, things are the same and we are vulnerable.
If you should need more info on this please don’t hesitate to contact me (you can see some of my work by going to Google and doing a search on “aviation security, safety and sy levine” or go to my web site http://www.safelander.com. My work was also featured on the BBC show called “The Black Box”. There is simply no reason, technical, cost or data privacy wise” for not using the Black Box Data in real-time, in addition to its autopsy mode, to make our nation safer and securer. The fear of liability, via law suits, should not stand in the way of the airline passenger safety, the safety of people on the ground, or our national security. It is imperative that the traveling public write to the President, their Congressional Representatives, the DOT, FAA and NTSB and demand that the Black Box data be available and utilized in real-time for the security of our nation and to substantially reduce fatal crashes.
Sincerely,
Sy Levine
sylevine1@sbcglobal.net