The Missile Defense Agency released a new logo yesterday. I was contemplating some witty commentary regarding alternate logos, maybe two streaks of light just seeming to miss one another, or maybe just moaning that it would be best if they gave the dough to Raytheon for the SM-3 instead of some design firm.
I was even planning on tracking down that Bloom Country strip in which the Defense Department sends Opus $900 million, mistaking him for “Mr. Spock, chief science officer for ‘Star Trek’ defense research.” Opus designs “Net Wars”, a strategic defense concept in which the earth is covered with a “space net” comprising $500 billion in small bills, and testifies before Congress.
(The strip helped Berke Breathed win the Pulitzer Prize. If someone could scan the strips from Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, I’d love a copy.)
But no commentary on the new MDA logo could best this little wonder from Frank Gaffney (with help from another nut-job), who has taken the whole “Obama as secret Muslim” thing where no wing-nut has gone before:
Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives … seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.
What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Christopher Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.
[snip]
Even as the administration has lately made a show of rushing less capable sea- and land-based short-range (theater) missile defenses into the Persian Gulf in the face of rising panic there about Iran’s actual/incipient ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.
Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.
Seriously, Frank Gaffney believes that Barack Obama has a secret plan to subject the United States to Shariah, which he has decoded based on the logo for the Missile Defense Agency.
This is not, as far as I can tell, Juvenalian satire. Indeed, an aspiring satirist could hardly go as far as Gaffney without inviting the criticism that his caricature was too crude.
Wow.
Update | 12:54 I just noticed that Media Matters, Al Kamen in his In the Loop column in the Post and Max Bergmann at Think Progress all beat me to it.
It reads “O, just do it!”, if the red tick can be mistaken for Nike’s logo. If we have to be really partisan, the red part is striking what is left of the blue.
Sharia aside, the new logo is a thing of almost Soviet-level cheesiness.
It looks like the missles that we can intercept (based on the logo) have to go all the way around the moon and then come back. Are any wonks out there aware of an ICBM that would have this kind of trajectory? Or is that track for the interceptors?
More fun with that and the Boeing logo.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Obamas-Missile-Defense-Logo-Is-Muslim-818
and more patches that should drive Gaffney nuts –
http://shloky.com/?p=2470
😉
I will state the obvious, the logo depicts an eclipse of the earth and moon from an outer space perspective.That’s just uncanny!
New logo should read… “One and done”
DONT BLAME OBAMA ..THIS WAS DONE BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION….
The logo is undergoing spiral development — it will be perfected in the next 1,000 years or so, together with missile defense itself, our God willing.
Actually, this is not the MDA logo — it’s simply an image that has been used on Public Affairs releases for the past three years. The official logo is unchanged:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Mda_logo.png
Kinda reminded me of a Klein bottle designed by MDA. And about as effective as everything else they’ve done.
Isn’t there a strange symmetry shared between MDA and the Iranian space agency?
Looks to me like the “missile” is actually HITTING the “crescent.”
Subtext, anyone?
Considering all the boosters that blew up before leaving the state of Florida during the development of ICBMs and heavy lift vehicles, and the duds which early Polaris subs carried, AND the likelihood that the Trident’s W76 itself is a very chancy deterrent, we shouldn’t be too hard on the MDA’s record.
Seriously.
Tempest – teacup
Sent my way by an associate:
“To all MDA employees,
There are references on the Drudge Report and other media outlets to a ‘new’
MDA logo. In fact, the official MDA seal has not been changed or replaced.
There is a different logo on the public MDA website, to which the media
reports are referring. This logo was developed approximately 3 years ago, in
support of MDA recruiting efforts, and is not linked to any political
entity.
If you are contacted about this matter, refer the interested party to MDA
Public Affairs.”
PA POC: Rick Lehner at 703-697-8997 or richard.lehner@mda.mil.
BTW, scroll down to the bottom of the page (www.mda.mil) and there is the regular logo…
– SJS
It’s not a crescent moon. It’s a boomerang.