Couldn’t Help But Notice (050807)

New London, Connecticut’s land-grabbers got oodles of free publicity last week (video here, which worked as of last Saturday) as they unveiled its plan to replace old homes, many of which, like Susette Kelo’s, had an ocean view, with ….. (jaw drops at the lack of irony in the statement) ….. “luxury homes with an ocean view.”

New London Calling attended the New London Development Council’s annual meeting last week, and caught this:

Highlight for me: Mr. Finley (of contractor Corcoran Jennison) stating that he wanted to design something that “fit within the fabric of New London.”

Insert “destroy the village in order to save it” joke here. It is way too easy to mock these people.

Thanks to the Kelo ruling, it’s also way too easy for “these people” to get their way.

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Not nearly enough attention has been paid to this startling admission of archlib Garrison Keillor (click on the April 17 article in the right frame, because your first click may you to the home page’s more recent article; HT Lileks via Hot Air):

It’s good for an old liberal like me to read history and recognize that Eisenhower was no dolt and Adlai Stevenson was no giant. And to read about Joe McCarthy and realize that, opportunist and blowhard that he was, he was hardly the embodiment of evil that we liberals cherished as an enemy. We made the people he attacked into heroes but McCarthyism was very small potatoes. Alger Hiss was not the victim of a witch hunt; he was a witch. The big story was taking place in Russia and Eastern Europe, in China, and in Cuba, places where evil ruled with an open hand, but a great many Democrats refused to see it. This refusal was a reaction against anti-communists such as Richard Nixon — if he said the sun rose in the east, then we would look off to the west and maybe build mirrors there so as to be able to argue the point — and this gave the Democratic party a reputation for appeasement that has crippled us ever since.

He goes on to incorrectly apply the “lessons” he learned to today’s GOP, but the larger point is that people like him were running the country at various times during the Cold War. These people would never, ever do anything that might make it look like they agreed with conservatives. So they, naturally, felt compelled to choose the appeasement route time and again, even though they instinctively knew it was wrong to do so.

That we didn’t lose it all because of them during the Cold War is almost a miracle.

The mentality still prevails today in the Formerly Mainstream Media, where there appear to be two rules:

1. Republicans and George Bush get no credit for anything.
2. If you think Republicans and George Bush might deserve credit for something, see Rule Number 1.

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Most underplayed story of the past week: The courtroom smackdown (HT Michelle Malkin) delivered to “Baghdad Jim” McDermott over his handling of illegally obtained recordings of cellphone conversations involving Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, and others. Boehner prevailed. If the parties were switched, he would have been in the rotation on every major news show in the Formerly Mainstream Media, and McDermott would be a Gordon-Liddy-level dirty tricks artist for the ages.

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Kevin at Pundit Review had the opportunity to visit Walter Reed Memorial Hospital, and has an excellent report on it, complete with lots of great pics.

This paragraph of his caught my eye. It puts the recent congressional hyperventilating, in some cases by those who either have never set foot in the place or haven’t done so in over a decade, into perspective:

Walter Reed has gotten some bad press lately about the conditions in some outpatient housing. The criticism was deserved, but the story that caught everyone’s attention does not reflect the facility as a whole, but only a few rooms within a sprawling, college style campus. Within the hospital itself, the soldiers at Walter Reed are receiving the best care in the world, and are treated with the respect and dignity worthy of their service and sacrifice.

That surely isn’t the impression the rest of the country has, because those who really don’t support the troops and their allies in the Formerly Mainstream Media opportunistically piled on the entire Walter Reed operation, and pilloried those who actually went there and wouldn’t join in across-the-board condemnation.

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Notice how little, if any, hue and cry is raised by so-called “mainstream” enviros when radical depopulation manifestos like this one from Sea Shepherd are released, or when someone advocates the societally suicidal idea of one child per family (which, if followed, would itself force radical depopulation, because the few young who are on hand could not possibly support the hordes of elderly in their midst).

The second idea is advocated by something called the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). For a supposedly radical outfit, it has interesting “mainstream” enviro support — Wikipedia lists as OPT’s top Patron best-selling author and gloom-doom legend Paul R. “The Population Bomb” Ehrlich.

It’s not unreasonable, in the lack of evidence to the contrary, to believe that the lack of objection by “mainstream” enviros stems from their fundamental agreement with what organizations like OPT are saying.