Barbara Kay: When Mark Steyn struck back

I was one of the lucky attendees last Friday at the Munk Debate in Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall. The motion before the house concerned refugee policy: “Be it resolved: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” On the pro side: Louise Arbour, former UN Human Rights commissioner and historian Simon Schama; on the con side journalist Mark Steyn and Britain’s UKIP party leader Nigel Farage.
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Oligarchs for Hillary!

For me, the issue this US election season is the corruption. Sure, I'd like a balanced budget and less debt and repeal of Obamacare, but I'm getting used to being sold out on those issues. So I'm down to the bare minimum requirement for a politician: The corruption nauseates me, and, if it doesn't nauseate the candidates, then that explains a lot about why nothing happens on any of those other matters. It's in the air, it's in my nostrils, and I'm sick of choking on it. We have a "justice" department that prosecutes a senator who made the mistake of crossing the President (Menendez) but declines to do anything about a tax collector who treats American taxpayers differently on the basis of how they vote (Lerner). We have a revenue agency that regards itself as the paramilitary wing of the ruling party.


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O Beautiful, For Specious Guys...

The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani's suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve.  For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I'm growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That's why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.  So please don't insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current "leader of the free world" is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

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The Fire Rages

In 2008, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing, we heard a lot of the usual hooey (courtesy of that eugenicist crackpot Oliver Wendell Holmes) that there was no right to shout fire in a crowded theatre. On the very last day of the trial in Vancouver, my old friend Julian Porter, QC summed up thus: Against the argument that you cannot cry fire in a crowded theatre: Oh yes you can — you must, if in your considered view there is a fire. In that case there is a duty to cry fire. The satirists of Charlie Hebdo thought there was a fire, and therefore considered they had a duty to cry fire. And they were right: There is a fire - in the expanding no-go areas of les banlieues, in the routine Jew-hate on the streets of Paris and Toulouse and other French cities, in the ranks of "mentally ill" "lone wolves" yelling "Allahu Akbar!" while mowing down pedestrians and stabbing policemen...

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Beyond Europe

On Saturday, I spoke to the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua, New Hampshire. I was one of the last of a bazillion speakers over two days, many of whom - Bobby Jindal, for example - had pointed out how serious things are by offering some variant of the warning that, if we're not careful, we'll wind up like Europe.

So I tried to explain that, by most measures, America is already way beyond Europe, and significantly worse than other English-speaking nations in the New World (Canada, Australia, New Zealand).

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Park Service Paramilitaries

If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns.

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Steyn: Shutdown Simulacrum

By Mark Steyn - Just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier.
Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans. Read more at NRO... Read More......

Mark Steyn: The End of the World as We Know It

Welcome to the “post-American era.” By Mark Steyn - According to an Earth Day survey, one third of schoolchildren between the ages of six and eleven think the earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and the eco-propagandists of the public-education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.

Call me crazy, but I’ll bet that in 15-20 years the planet will still be here along with most of the “environment” — your flora and fauna, your polar bears and three-toed tree sloths and whatnot. But geopolitically we’re in for a hell of a ride, and the world we end up with is unlikely to be as congenial as most Americans have gotten used to.

For example, Hillary Clinton said the other day that Pakistan posed a “mortal threat” to . . . Afghanistan? India? No, to the entire world! To listen to her, you’d think Pakistan was as scary as l’il Jimmy in the second grade’s mom’s SUV. She has a point: Asif Ali Zardari, the guy who’s nominally running the country, isn’t running anything. He’s ceding more and more turf to the local branch office of the Taliban. When the topic turns up in the news, we usually get vague references to the pro-Osama crowd controlling much of the “northwest,” which makes it sound as if these guys are the wilds of rural Idaho to Zardari’s Beltway. In fact, they’re now within some 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad — or, in American terms, a couple of I-95 exits north of Baltimore: In other words, they’re within striking distance of the administrative center of a nation of over 165 million people — and its nuclear weapons. That’s the “mortal threat.”

What’s going to stop them? Well, not Zardari. Nor his “summit” in Washington with President Obama and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. The creation of Pakistan was the worst mistake of post-war British imperial policy, and all that’s happened in the six decades since is that its pathologies have burst free of its borders and gone regional, global, and soon perhaps nuclear. Does the Obama administration have even a limited contingency plan for the nukes if — when — the Pakistani state collapses?

It would be reassuring to think so. But I wonder.

What’s the greater likelihood? That, in ten years’ time, things in Pakistan will be better? Or much worse? That nuclearization by basket-case dictatorships from Pyongyang to Tehran will have advanced, or been contained? That the bleak demographic arithmetic at the heart of Europe and Japan’s economic woes will have accelerated, or been reversed? That a resurgent Islam’s assaults on free speech and other rights (symbolized by the recent U.N. support for a global Islamic blasphemy law) will have taken hold in the western world, or been forced to retreat?

A betting man would check the “worse” box. Because resisting the present careless drift would require global leadership. And 100 days into a new presidency, Barack Obama is giving strong signals to the world that we have entered what Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post calls “the post-American era.” At the time of Gordon Brown’s visit to Washington, London took umbrage at an Obama official’s off-the-record sneer to a Fleet Street reporter that “there’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” Andy McCarthy of National Review made the sharp observation that, never mind the British, this was how the administration felt about their own country, too: America is just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. In Europe, the president was asked if he believed in “American exceptionalism,” and replied: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Gee, thanks. A simple “no” would have sufficed. The president of the United States is telling us that American exceptionalism is no more than national chauvinism, a bit of flag-waving, of no more import than the Slovenes supporting the Slovene soccer team and the Papuans the Papuan soccer team. This means something. The world has had two millennia to learn to live without “Greek exceptionalism.” It’s having to get used to post-exceptional America rather more hurriedly.

It makes sense from Obama’s point of view: On the domestic scene, he’s determined on a transformational presidency, one that will remake the American people’s relationship to their national government (“federal” doesn’t seem the quite the word anymore) in terms of health care, education, eco-totalitarianism, state control of the economy, and much else. With a domestic agenda as bulked up as that, the rest of the world just gets in the way.

You’ll recall that, in a gimmick entirely emblematic of post-exceptional America, Hillary Clinton gave the Russians a (mistranslated) “Reset” button. The button has certainly been “reset” — to September 10th, to a legalistic rearview mirror approach to the “War on Terror,” in which investigating Bush officials will consume far more time and effort than de-nuking Iran. The secretary of Homeland Security’s ludicrous re-classification of terrorism as “man-caused disaster,” and her boneheaded statement that the September 11th bombers had entered America from Canada (which would presumably make 9/11 a “Canadian man-caused disaster”) exemplifies the administration’s cheery indifference to all that Bush-era downer stuff.

But it’s not September 10th. In Pakistan, a great jewel is within the barbarians’ reach, the first of many. At the U.N., the Islamic bloc’s proscriptions on free speech will make it harder even to talk about these issues. In much of the West, demographic decay means the good times are never coming back: Recession is permanent.

Hey, what’s the big deal? Britain and France have been on the geopolitical downward slope for most of the last century and life still seems pretty agreeable. Well, yes. But that’s in part because, when a fading Britannia handed the baton to the new U.S. superpower, it was one of the least disruptive transfers of global dominance in human history. In the “post-American era,” to whom does the baton get passed now? (Z: As Obama neglects to figure out where Gitmo detainees might go after announcing to the world he's shutting down Gitmo, there seems to be a lack of "thinking about consequences" in this administration, I believe the Left has also been unable to extrapolate that when America's no longer the world power, who WILL it be? It won't be the UN, no matter HOW much they dream for that..China? Russia?)

Since January, President Obama and his team have schmoozed, ineffectively, American enemies over allies in almost every corner of the globe. If you’re, say, India, following Obama’s apology tour even as you watch the Taliban advancing on those Pakistani nukes, would you want to bet the future on American resolve? In Delhi, in Tokyo, in Prague, in Tel Aviv, in Bogota, they’ve looked at these first 100 days and drawn their own conclusions.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn Read More......