House of Eratosthenes

A perfect storm of idiocy led to a frightening 9/11 flashback for thousands of New Yorkers Monday when a jumbo jet and an F-16 fighter jet buzzed lower Manhattan without warning.

A “furious” Mayor Bloomberg denounced the dunces who dreamed up the stunt – and the NYPD officials and bureaucrats who never told him about it.

By day’s end, an obscure City Hall deputy named Marc Mugnos, who makes $60,000 a year, was taking the fall for not telling Bloomberg that the low-flying planes were coming. He was reprimanded.

But there was plenty of blame to go around.

Louis Caldera, the director of the White House military office who sent Air Force One and the fighter jet on an “aerial photo mission,” got slammed by an angry President Obama.

“I approved a mission over New York,” Caldera said in a hastily prepared statement. “I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused.”

Under the bus you go.

Yeah, Obama wasn’t on the flight, He wasn’t aware of what was being done, and He was properly “furious” after the poop hit the fan. (Just like He would’ve been if the Somali pirate thing happened to turn into a crap-fest.) For reasons best left unexplored, the “Big We” will keep on buyin’ it.

But President Palin would’ve been able to get just as testy and screechy as she cared to get…she’d never for a split-second get away with this. It’s a double-standard created for, perpetuated by, and enforced by, our weakest thinkers. This is why, back during the presidency of Obama’s predecessor, the only planes that flew this kind of trajectory really were taken over by bad guys and really did want to hit the buildings.

It’s a Jar Jar Binks administration. Nobody in the hierarchy really owns a decision, because the credit for any good decision is going to straight up to the guy at the top, and the blame for any poor decisions will be systematically scattered down to scapegoats at the lower levels. And so anybody with the authority to decide things that really matter, just kinda does…whatever…and then does their very best to hippity-hop out of the way if there’s a boulder of crap rolling down the mountain. The crap-avalanche is quasi-random, virtually disconnected from the conscious decisions that occasionally cause it.

As for when the Big Guy At The Top makes a bad decision — well, it’s just more of the same. And the prospects of anyone in the room saying “Eh, boss, that just might not be a swell idea…” Don’t make me laugh. Hasn’t happened before. Why would it start now?

Better than even odds He was behind this one. Maybe not. But we’d never know, would we? The decision simply cannot be defended, so bring out the spear-catchers…not the first regime to function in such a way…but wasn’t that part of what was supposed to be — uh — “changed”?

You can’t change that when The Boss is a religious figure. Harry Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here” sign is in a closet somewhere, gathering dust. An unused relic from the past, a casualty of the hopey-changey goodness. Say what you want about Sarah Palin not making the best appearance of her career before Perky Katie — but if this call happened on her watch, there would be no spear-catchers. That idiotic stupid dimwit redneck hick from Alaska would’ve taken the fall.

Which is why it wouldn’t have happened.

Louis Caldera, the director of the White House military office who sent Air Force One and the fighter jet on an “aerial photo mission,” got slammed by an angry President Obama.

ONE fighter jet?
…so where’s the omelette?

Altitude over Manhattan was reported to be ….?
Are those photos taken from NYC street surveillance cameras?

I can’t WAIT for the prints to come back from the drug store.
I hope, like Air Force 1, he ordered doubles.
- CaptDMO | 04/28/2009 @ 14:08
Much ado about not much, IMHO. Stupidity abounds, even in the military (maybe especially in the military, but I won’t go there, seeing as how I ain’t part of the active duty force any longer). This was a truly bad idea and I can understand the New Yorkers reactions, kinda-sorta. But I think the press most certainly created the feeding-frenzy here. Musta been a slow news day, all things considered.
- bpenni | 04/28/2009 @ 14:54
I really don’t see how you can call it “not much.” I suppose it’s a little bit easier if you were never overly much fooled by this “change you can believe in” stuff.

But what were the goods? Thinking back to half a year ago, I recall…

• Senator Obama is a clear, articulate speaker;
• There’s just something about Him, people want to do what He says;
• He inspires people, inspires hope and not fear;
• He’s a brilliant communicator, He seems to know what people think before they do;
• He’s a curious thinker, always wanting to learn more, not like that closed-minded Crawford dolt;
• He connects with His audience (boldface, underscore, double-underscore);
• He has a calming, soothing effect on the psyche of a traumatized nation;
• He is going to lead us and unify us.

In addition to all that, He is supposed to be exceptionally tech-savvy and He was supposed to gift us with the most technologically sophisticated White House ever. Now, a sixth-grade kid knows you can use Photoshop to get the desired prints, without flying anything past anything.

This just goes straight back to my observation about “wonderful communicators” who seem to be perpetually at war with the likable nerds who index their databases and debug their computer applications. So many of them seem to think communicating wonderfully is a substitute for getting real work done, and then — when it’s time to do this wonderful communicating — they’re nowhere to be found, or they’re making mistakes beneath even the lackluster communication talents of Rain Man. So it’s like we’re sacrificing everything else for this one thing, and we don’t even get the one thing.

I’m a lot more bugged by the solution the administration has found for its problem, than by the problem itself: The privates and corporals are to fall on their swords so the generals can keep on strutting. But we’re going to have four years of this?? How in the world is that not to become a major disaster? Fire up that video footage, Buck. That’s our new President’s wonderful way of communicating, at work, right there. Soothing the scarred and shell-shocked brow of His overly-traumatized country. Hope won and fear lost?
- mkfreeberg | 04/28/2009 @ 15:17
Obama didn’t have a thing to do with that photo op and probably didn’t know one single thing about it… from start to finish… until the brouhaha exploded. At least one hopes he had better things to do, and I strongly suspect that’s the case.

I don’t like the guy any more than you do, Morgan, and we could argue all day about who likes him less. But I tend to be a little bit choosier about the nits I pick. This event was the result of a slow news day, clue-impaired office of military affairs personnel in the White House, and some incompetent people working in Bloomberg’s office. It wasn’t about The One, at all. Unless you choose it to be, which you did. Remember BDS? You seem to be getting close to that point. Just sayin’.
- bpenni | 04/28/2009 @ 17:49
Now Buck, you know very well that if George Bush or Sarah Palin did the same thing, you’d never see a “slow news day” ever again until Labor Day, at the very least.

Besides of which — This was all done for a photo op? In other words, a massive fustercluck for no higher purpose than raw vanity? Now…who does that sound like, to you? Honestly?

Besides of which — Why is there a scapegoat at City Hall, and another one in the White House? Does that really make sense, and if so, how?

Besides of which — Just speaking for myself, from my own years in the IT field, a resume page which I know you share…this just resonates to me as one of those moments in which the suit-and-tie guys, the happy-laughy-talky-jokey “I don’t know a hard drive from a crescent wrench, but boy oh boy I got me some people skills!” types take over the work of those oh-so-boring computer nerds…show up with their great big straight white teeth ready to dazzle everybody with their empathic skills…and fail miserably. Empathy, baby, it’s all about the empathy. How much would it have taken to nip this thing in the bud? Isn’t this administration supposed to have the market cornered on that?

They didn’t bring anything else to the table. The folks who voted for them, sacrificed any & all other standards, to uphold just that one — The Chosen One makes everyone feel so good.

Like I said: We didn’t even get the one commodity out of this trade that we were supposed to get. Those Manhattan folks don’t look like they feel too good, to me. What say you?
- mkfreeberg | 04/28/2009 @ 18:18
Those Manhattan folks don’t look like they feel too good, to me. What say you?

No, they don’t look like they’re having fun at all. I feel for them, really, and I mean that.

As for scapegoats… I think pointing the finger at the asshats that actually MADE the stupid move is not a bad idea at all.

Case in point: an entire segment was devoted to this event on FNC’s Special Report panel this evening, and here’s the one meaningful thing I got out of that little discussion. The White House…whether it was that jerk-off Emmanuel, The One, a combination of the two, or someone else entirely different… converted the position of White House Chief of Military Affairs from a traditionally military slot, usually held by a brigadier general (or Navy equivalent), to a civilian slot, currently held by some former-Congresscritter-cum-fund-raiser from California — something previously unknown to me. I think that’s the point of failure in this whole mess. While I joked about stupidity in the military in my first comment above, I do NOT think… for a single moment… that a military Chief of Military Affairs would have authorized this stupid-ass photo op. There’s your principal villain in this piece. Bloomberg’s office has some splainin’ to do, too, but the burden of stupidity lies with the political-appointee asshat from California.

And there’s an issue worth pontificating about… which is to say The One and his team have made a tremendous number of BAD choices when it comes to staffing up the administration, for starters. And then one could continue with the little problem of the asinine policy decisions and budgetary priorities said administration staffers have pulled out of their collective asses. But I still think berating The One for stupid staff decisions is just a wee bit over the top, yanno?

YMMV.
- bpenni | 04/29/2009 @ 00:04
Yes, it does vary. To me, it’s a Yin/Yang thing. These smiley-teleprompter people step in with their wonderful communication skills and their beady eyes and flapping heads, saying “who needs a computer nerd when ya got me?” And suddenly, a generation ago it was important to draw a straight line — now you just laugh and smile and talk. Add two numbers together — no, just laugh and smile and talk. Figure out where a memory leak is in a client/server application…nope, just laugh and smile and talk.

They’re selling empathy is an all-purpose replacement for anything that used to be a left-brain specialty. So it frosts me, on all sorts of levels, when they can’t even be relied on for the empathy. How much empathy would it have taken to prevent this? And what a miracle it is, that nobody got hurt.

Like I said…all standards were relaxed for the sake of recruiting that ONE skill. Barack Obama, it is said, *really* knows His audience. Well. That one goody He was supposed to bring to the table, ain’t there. Communication breakdown, or He’s an awful judge of character, or it really was His decision and He isn’t owning up to it — does it even matter which of those three it is? After the episode is over, the same sword dangles over all of our heads.

He’s derelict in the one skill He was supposed to have. That means we could have recruited a random homeless bum, and gotten equal or superior results. And from my years in IT, I notice this seems to be a constant outcome when the laughy-talky-smiley guys are put in charge of the technical stuff. It never changes. And that’s why my patience for this, sometime back, got better-than-exhausted. This part of it really doesn’t have anything to do with Republicans and democrats. Tech things are tech things, and not to be entrusted to those oh-so-articulate jibber-jabber water-cooler chatting former ASB Presidents.

Other than that, I really don’t have much of an opinion about it, sorry. 😉
- mkfreeberg | 04/29/2009 @ 00:31

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“Plane Stupid”Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

“Plane Stupid”
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009