Courtesy of The National Review: MORNING JOLT with Jim Geraghty
“Another one of my favorite examples of a journalist getting it wrong on an epic scale was Fareed Zakaria’s 2009 Newsweek cover piece, “Everything You Know About Iran Is Wrong.”
Zakaria’s got the sterling resume – Yale, Harvard, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, adjunct professor at Columbia – and he wrote, in what must have been a heavily researched piece, that Iran’s regime might “be happy with a peaceful civilian [nuclear] program,” “Iranians aren’t suicidal.” “Iran isn’t a dictatorship,” and it has a culture of “considerable debate and dissent.” Newsweek readers no doubt concluded that hyperbolic media coverage had obscured the reality of Iran, which was a sophisticated, multifaceted, modern state that is not so scary or brutal after all.
A month after the Zakaria piece ran, the Iranian regime announced Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won reelection with 60 percent of the vote, a result that many Iranians concluded had to be fraudulent. The regime crushed the Green Revolution with brutal force, shooting women like Neda Agha-Soltan in the street.
Within a matter of months, President Obama announced “the United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years.”
So if you had previously seen Iran as a country dominated by a brutal, dangerously aggressive, nuclear-ambitious regime that already demonstrated a willingness to use children to clear minefields and embraced a philosophy of risk and sacrifice unthinkable to Western values. . . it turns out everything you knew about Iran wasn’t wrong. Everything Fareed Zakaria knew was wrong.”
LANTANA, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump wants small businesses to thrive, but his frequent Mar-a-Lago visits have flight schools and other companies at a nearby airport in a financial nosedive.
The Secret Service closed Lantana Airport on Friday for the third straight weekend because of the president’s return to his Palm Beach resort, meaning its maintenance companies, a banner-flying business and another two dozen businesses are also shuttered, costing them thousands of dollars at the year’s busiest time. The banner-flying company says it has lost more than $40,000 in contracts already.
The airport, which handles only small, propeller-driven planes and helicopters, is about 6 miles southwest of Mar-a-Lago, well within the 10-mile circle around the resort that’s closed to most private planes when he’s in town. Trump flies into Palm Beach International Airport, which is 2.5 miles from Mar-a-Lago, and remains opens as it handles commercial flights. Small private planes can also use that airport during presidential visits if they meet certain stringent conditions.
The Lantana owners are pushing compromises they say will ensure Trump’s security while keeping their businesses open. They involve letting pilots fly in a closely monitored corridor headed away from the resort until they are outside a 10-mile ban around Mar-a-Lago and a 30-mile zone where flying lessons are restricted. Pilots, planes and cargo would undergo preflight screening by Transportation Security Administration agents.
“None of us are suggesting that we shouldn’t do everything to keep the president safe but we believe there are things that can be done to keep us in operation,” said Jonathan Miller, the contractor who operates the Palm Beach County-owned airport.
And so it goes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbDTTPuTzv4
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The challenge for academics in general and liberal academics in particular is their inability to relate all their “higher learning” in a sterile environment to a much more dynamic and chaotic reality. IMO the biggest obstacle that liberals stumble over is their desire to have a utopian world where everything is as perfectly predictable as math problem and their inability to accept the facts that suggest the world is far more chaotic and messy. Passionately stating that something is the way you would like it to be does not make it so….Zakaria’s opinions as stated in this article and as seen on his GPS show demonstrate that his superior intellect is “reality challenged’.