Ghost of a flea

The blog that roared

The blog that roared. Mark Steyn writes in the Telegraph that Americans are tougher about these things now. The following quote seems to be drawn from my account of the Newsworld interview with Robert Sawyer. I am not certain what Steyn means by the term "gleefully" and I ask anyone using my posts as a source for the Sawyer interview to please do so with care. If Steyn's rendition of the interview is based on my comments his version is a gloss which risks imposing an interpretation which is not entirely supported by my posts. If his account is drawn from his own interpretation of the Sawyer interview I would be grateful if he would also contact the CBC ombudsman. When the CBC produces a transcript of the interview you can judge for yourself what may have motivated the suggestion of "arrogance" as a cause for the disaster.

Indeed, you don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the Shuttle's loss, a Canadian Broadcasting Corportation interviewer was gleefully asking her alleged expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance", the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" - a sci-fi writer - said no, it wasn't "arrogance". But an hour later the CBC was apparently citing mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led Nasa to go ahead with the flight.

And furthermore... a review of my earlier posts turns up the word "gleeful" used by Frater Libertas to describe callers identifying themselves as Canadian to a C-SPAN phone in show wishing to express their ambivalence about the Columbia disaster. Could this be the source of Mark Steyn's use of the term to describe the tone of the CBC anchor's question?

Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 2, 2003 12:54 PM