NYC Letter: View From Above

UPDATE 05.21.09: Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, candidate in the GOP Senate primary, on the greatness of America.

After Mr. Rubio announced, the Republican National Senate Committee endorsed Florida governor Charlie Crist in the primary. Huh? Where's the Republican content? For background on the RNSC's muddled meddling see here. Republican machine politics, the Democrats' inside advantage in 2010.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Day 118 of CHOPE

THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY
The World Yawns, "Oh. The Americans"
[Photo source: NASA]

Photo caption: Astronaut Michael Good peers through a window toward Atlantis' crew cabin interior, where his shirt-sleeved support team members busy themselves to aid the flight's second of five spacewalks to perform work on the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronaut Mike Massimino can be seen in the background at work on the port side of the shuttle's cargo bay.

Correspondent V de T sent us this cheering picture, which got us thinking. Here is the gist of our reply.

The next time someone tells you China is the future* ask to see its space flight snaps. The next time Mr. Obama tells you that America is just another nation among others, show him this picture. Our friends the Soviets couldn't sustain their space program. And the Soviets are no more. Nobody else has ever come close.

Last year France called for a "global" programme to explore Mars (i.e., America pays and France takes credit; unless it flops in which case it's all American) -- 30+ years after America's first successful Mars landing, followed by several other successful Mars missions.

While Euros wrapped themselves up in national health rationing, market distorting job protections, beat their armies into "peacekeeping" plowshares, guaranteed second-rate secondary education for all, and became enslaved by endless layers of government and bureaucracies -- Americans landed on the moon.

America was once a nation of great deeds. Certainly primus inter pares. Mr. Obama wants to change that to unus inter pluribus. Mr. Obama and a great many Americans seem weary of American greatness. It embarrasses them. They feel greatness leaves us few friends, and those few loathe us. International chumminess seems more alluring than national greatness. [Pause.] Or national character.

But the UN will never put a man on the moon. It can't manage to keep a single "peacekeeeper" in Somalia. Ask France how a Union of equals is working out for her. [We dial the Élysée but are disconnected.]

Oh, yes, by all means, let's have Mr. Obama trade down to a tuffet at the big world tea party.

CHOPE.

The embarrassment of greatness. The arrogance of embarrassment.

------------------------------------
* Short-lived.