I somehow missed the Post’s Al Kamen kicking Rick Lehner and MDA in the jimmy on Monday:
Opponents of the Bush administration’s Star Wars missile defense system jumped all over Wednesday’s failed launch, saying the setback showed the administration was rushing to deploy the system without adequate testing.
Au contraire, said a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency: The test was not a failure, it just was not completed. “We weren’t able to complete the test that we had planned,” Richard Lehner told the Los Angeles Times. “I definitely wouldn’t categorize it as a setback of any kind. The test had been planned for a while so it’s a disappointment for those of us who were working on it. We will isolate the anomaly and fix it.”
See? Not a fiasco but actually a great opportunity. More like Monty Python’s dead parrot, the famed Norwegian Blue, which we all know wasn’t really dead, as the shopkeeper explained to the irate customer, but merely “kippin’ [napping] on its back,” and “pining for the fjords.” Why, if the parrot hadn’t been nailed to the perch it would have broken out and “Voom!” Or maybe gotten off the launch pad and hit that target.
Whatever it is, they don’t pay Lehner nearly enough.
Ouch.
