Mark Steyn's Blog, page 10

Slapping the Cat

Thank you for your kind donations to our legal defense fund against a nuisance suit from self-endowed Nobel laureate Michael Mann. We can always use a little more -- we're in court in D.C. later this month, and the framed copy of my online legal diploma (valid most jurisdictions except the Northern Mariana Islands and Abkhazia) from a website in Tajikistan has apparently been delayed in the Christmas mail.

But here's the thing. South of the border, National Review is being sued for defamation for publishing a piece by me. North of the border, they've gone to the next stage: one of Canada's top bloggers is being sued for defamation merely for linking to me - or, as the plaintiff puts it, to "far-right website SteynOnline". He's seeking half-a-million bucks in damages, which even in Canada seems a high price for an Internet link to lil' ol' me.

This is what you might call a bit of mopping-up after my free-speech battles in Canada. We won, and we got the law in question, Section 13, repealed last summer. But along the way we pointed out that the plaintiff on all but one of those Section 13 "hate speech" cases since the turn of the century had been the same man -- a civil servant called Richard Warman, who appointed himself Canada's Hatefinder-General and brought highly lucrative "hate" complaints against anyone who crossed him. Since the repeal of his own personal revenge law, he can't file "hate" complaints anymore, so instead he's filing nuisance law suits against the bloggers who exposed him.

Arnie Lemaire of the Blazing Cat Fur website is one of those bloggers, a man who breaks a lot of news the cowed politically correct ninnies at the big dailies won't go anywhere near until he's made them too big to ignore -- like the Toronto middle-school "Mosqueteria" story, in which he exposed a Canadian public school that converts its cafeteria into a mosque every Friday and segregates its girls according to whether they're menstruating or not.

I've been involved in cases like these from Copenhagen to Melbourne, and I'm mighty sick of people who find it easier to sue you into silence than argue their case on the merits. Free speech is beleaguered in Britain, Australia, Europe -- and also the United States, where, to his discredit, the president recently lent credence to the notion hitherto unknown to American law that it's possible to "slander" a bloke who died in the 7th century. So I'd like to keep Blazing Cat Fur in business. Instapundit and other American bloggers agree. He's having a big fundraiser in Toronto on Monday. If you don't fancy the scenic drive from Buffalo up the Queen Elizabeth Way, I hope you'll consider helping out in other ways.

Re: Something for Nothing

Ramesh is being too kind to the Republican leadership. He is correct that current, supposedly temporary tax rates are scheduled to "expire" and older, supposedly permanent rates are scheduled to resume - which is, in itself, an absurd proposition that exemplifies the dysfunction of American government. He then adds:

If letting part of a scheduled tax increase take effect counts as Republicans’ “giving in” on taxes, why doesn’t letting a scheduled reduction in projected spending take effect count as Democrats’ giving a little on spending?

Because, thanks to the Republicans, most of the "reduction" in "projected" spending (another absurd proposition) isn't about anything Democrats care about. As John Hinderaker writes:

Sure, on this scenario the sequestration cuts remain; but they are tilted heavily toward defense, as a result of the last lousy deal the Republicans negotiated.

Exactly. Back when they were flush from their 2010 victory and were in a position of relative strength, the Republican Party held the debt ceiling hostage in order to extract an alleged seven billion in budget cuts - or about what the government borrows in a day and a half (and which, by the time the final accounting was done, all too predictably turned into a budget increase of $10 billion anyway) - plus a threat of mandatory spending cuts that impact Democrat enthusiasms not a whit, and which they scheduled to kick in on the same day as the Bush tax cuts expire, ensuring that Obama & Co can conveniently blur the two and blame everything on the GOP.

With negotiating skills like these, why not just go to the Bahamas and work on your tan?

PS Notwithstanding Ramesh's technical characterization of what's happening, it's utterly ridiculous that an advanced society cannot say what its tax rates will be in 48 hours' time.

Freedom Fries!

France's Conseil Constitutionnel sides with Gérard Depardieu:

France's constitutional council has struck down a top income tax rate of 75% introduced by Socialist President Francois Hollande...

In its ruling on Saturday, the Constitutional Council said the new tax rate "failed to recognise equality before public burdens" because, unlike other forms of income tax, it was to be applied to individuals rather than households.

"Equality before public burdens": what a beautiful concept. No chance of it catching on over here, alas. And there's more:

The constitutional court lowered a series of other tax increases, calling them excessive or saying they also violated equality of treatment for taxpayers.

"Equality of treatment for taxpayers": there's another beautiful concept. Maybe John Roberts can arrange a judicial work-exchange program.

Laws Are for Little People

A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.#ad#

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012” is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20--30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties -- and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Anything involving guns is even less amenable to “obviousness.” A few years ago, Daniel Brown was detained at LAX while connecting to a Minneapolis flight because traces of gunpowder were found on his footwear. His footwear was combat boots. As the name suggests, the combat boots were returning from combat -- eight months of it, in Iraq’s bloody and violent al-Anbar province. Above the boots he was wearing the uniform of a staff sergeant in the USMC Reserve Military Police and was accompanied by all 26 members of his unit, also in uniform. Staff Sergeant Brown doesn’t sound like an “obvious” terrorist. But the TSA put him on the no-fly list anyway. If it’s not “obvious” to the government that a serving member of the military has any legitimate reason for being around ammunition, why should it be “obvious” that a TV host has?

Three days after scofflaw Gregory committed his crime, a bail hearing was held in Massachusetts for Andrew Despres, 20, who’s charged with trespassing and possession of ammunition without a firearms license. Mr. Despres was recently expelled from Fitchburg State University and was returning to campus to pick up his stuff. Hence the trespassing charge. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing a “military-style ammunition belt.” Hence, the firearms charge.

His mom told WBZ that her son purchased the belt for $20 from a punk website and had worn it to class every day for two years as a “fashion statement.” He had no gun with which to fire the bullets. Nevertheless, Fitchburg police proudly displayed the $20 punk-website ammo belt as if they’d just raided the Fitchburg mafia’s armory, and an obliging judge ordered Mr. Despres held on $50,000 bail. Why should there be one law for Meet the Press and another for Meet Andrew Despres? Because David Gregory throws better cocktail parties?

The argument for letting him walk rests on his membership of a protected class -- the media. Notwithstanding that (per Gallup) 54 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the NRA while only 40 percent have any trust in the media, the latter regard themselves as part of the ruling class. Which makes the rest of you the ruled. Laws are for the little people -- and little people need lots of little laws, ensnaring them at every turn.#page#

This is all modern life is. Ernest Hemingway had a six-toed cat. The cat begat. (Eat your heart out, Doctor Seuss.) So descendants of his six-toed cat still live at the Hemingway home in Key West. Tourists visit the property. Thus, the Department of Agriculture is insisting that the six-toed cats are an “animal exhibit” like the tigers at the zoo, and therefore come under federal regulation requiring each to be housed in an individual compound with “elevated resting surfaces,” “electric wire,” and a night watchman. Should David Gregory be treated more leniently than a domestic cat just because when Obama tickles his tummy he licks the president’s hand and purrs contentedly?#ad#

There are two possible resolutions: Gregory can call in a favor from some Obama consigliere who’ll lean on the cops to disappear the whole thing. If he does that, he’ll be contributing to the remorseless assault on a bedrock principle of free societies -- equality before the law. Laws either apply to all of us or none of us. If they apply only to some, they’re not laws but caprices -- and all tyranny is capricious.

Or he can embrace the role in which fate has cast him. Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. Eleven-year-old girls fined for rescuing woodpeckers, serving Marines put on the no-fly list, and fifth-generation family cats being ordered into separate compounds with “electric wire” fencing can all testify to how near that point America is. But nothing “raises awareness” like a celebrity spokesman. Step forward, David Gregory! Dare the prosecutor to go for the death penalty -- and let’s make your ammo the non-shot heard round the world!

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Sleigh Bells in the Snow

I feel like Rudolph to Rich Lowry's Santa this Christmas. Of all the other reindeer in the NR herd - Dasher Ponnuru, Dancer Goldberg, Prancer Davis Hanson, etc - Rich chose me to quote in his Yuletide column, which is all about "White Christmas".

If you're interested, the podcast with me and Irving Berlin's daughter (and his piano) to which Rich refers can be found here. And I see my old friends at The Spectator in London have dusted off an ancient essay of mine on "White Christmas" from a bazillion years ago.

I agree with Rich's point about the declining quality of Christmas songs. Most recent ones seem to boil down to: Christmas is like a really great day to be with the one you love, just like all the other days you're with her, only even more so - which doesn't seem quite sufficient to keep the genre in business. And don't get me started on that "Christmas In The Sand" thing.

With that out the way, Merry Christmas to all.

Hack of the Year!

Christmas came early for me this year. I'm thrilled to find I'm one of four National Review writers to be honored by The Atlantic in The 50 Worst Columns of 2012. Let's go for a clean sweep next year!

My elation is only slightly muted by the vague feeling, as an old Fleet Street hand, that the usually reliable year-end fake-awards routine requires a defter touch than Mr Wagner's. Indeed, his almost paralyzed conformism is a minor example of the point I was making in that column. But what do I know?

The Massacre of the Innocents

‘Lullay, Thou little tiny Child, by by, lully, lullay#...#”

The 16th-century Coventry Carol, a mother’s lament for her lost son, is the only song of the season about the other children of Christmas -- the first-born of Bethlehem, slaughtered on Herod’s orders after the Magi brought him the not-so-glad tidings that an infant of that city would grow up to be King of the Jews. As Matthew tells it, even in a story of miraculous birth, in the midst of life is death. The Massacre of the Innocents loomed large over the Christian imagination: In Rubens’s two renderings, he fills the canvas with spear-wielding killers, wailing mothers, and dead babies, a snapshot, one assumes, of the vaster, bloodier body count beyond the frame. Then a century ago the Catholic Encyclopedia started digging into the numbers. The estimated population of Bethlehem at that time was around a thousand, which would put the toll of first-born sons under the age of two murdered by King Herod at approximately 20 -- or about the same number of dead children as one school shooting on a December morning in Connecticut. “Every man a king,” promised Huey Long. And, if it doesn’t quite work out like that, well, every man his own Herod.#ad#

Had my child been among the dead of December 14, I don’t know that I would ever again trust the contours of the world. The years go by, and you’re sitting in a coffee shop with a neighbor, and out of the corner of your eye a guy walks in who looks a little goofy and is maybe muttering to himself: Is he just a harmless oddball -- or the prelude to horror? The bedrock of life has been shattered, and ever after you’re walking on a wobbling carpet with nothing underneath. For a parent to bury a child offends against the natural order -- at least in an age that has conquered childhood mortality. For a parent to bury a child at Christmas taints the day forever, and mocks its meaning.

For those untouched by death this Christmas, someone else’s bewildering, shattering turn of fate ought to occasion a little modesty and circumspection. Instead, even by its usual execrable standards, the public discourse post-Newtown has been stupid and contemptible. The Left now seizes on every atrocity as a cudgel to beat whatever happens to be the Right’s current hottest brand: Tucson, Ariz., was something to do with Sarah Palin’s use of metaphor and other common literary devices -- or “toxic rhetoric,” as Paul Krugman put it; Aurora, Colo., was something to do with the Tea Party, according to Brian Ross of ABC News. Since the humiliations of November, the Right no longer has any hot brands, so this time round the biens pensants have fallen back on “gun culture.” Dimwit hacks bandy terms like “assault weapon,” “assault rifle,” “semiautomatic,” and “automatic weapon” in endlessly interchangeable but ever more terrifying accumulations of high-tech state-of-the-art killing power. As the comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted, “When the 2nd Amendment was written the most lethal gun available was the musket.”

Actually, the semiautomatic is a 19th-century technology, first produced in 1885. That’s just under half a century after the death of Madison, the Second Amendment’s author, and rather nearer to the Founding Fathers’ time than our own. And the Founders were under fewer illusions about the fragility of society than Hollywood funnymen: On July 25,1764, four Lenape Indians walked into a one-room schoolhouse in colonial Pennsylvania and killed Enoch Brown and ten of his pupils. One child survived, scalped and demented to the end of his days.

Nor am I persuaded by the Right’s emphasis on preemptive mental-health care. It’s true that, if your first reaction on hearing breaking news of this kind is to assume the perpetrator is a male dweeb in his early twenties with poor socialization skills, you’re unlikely to be wrong. But, in a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who’s to say what’s odd? On 9/11, the agent at the check-in desk reckoned Mohamed Atta and his chums were a bit strange but banished the thought as shameful and discriminatory. In a politically correct world, vigilance is a fool’s errand. The US Airways cabin crew who got the “flying imams” bounced from a Minneapolis plane for flamboyantly, intimidatingly wacky behavior (praying loudly, fanning out to occupy all the exit rows, asking for seatbelt extenders they didn’t need) wound up in sensitivity-training hell. If a lesbian thinks dragging your wife around in a head-to-toe body bag is kinda weird, she’s being “Islamophobic.” If a Muslim thinks taking breast hormones and amputating your penis is a little off, he’s “transphobic.” These very terms make the point that, in our society, finding somebody else odd is itself a form of mental illness. In an unmoored age, what’s not odd? Once upon a time, TV viewers from distant states descending on a Connecticut town to attend multiple funerals of children they don’t know might have struck some of us as, at best, unseemly and, at worst, deeply creepy -- a Feast of the Holy Innocents, so to speak.#page#

Okay, what about restricting it to wishing murderous ill upon someone? In her own response to the Sandy Hook slaughter, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that hopes for gun control would be greatly advanced “if sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims.” Who’s to know when violent fantasies on social media prefigure a loner getting ready to mow down the kindergarten or just a critically acclaimed liberal novelist amusing her friends before the PEN Awards cocktail party? As it is, in American schools, mental-health referral for “oppositional defiance disorder” and the like is a bureaucratic coding racket designed to access federal gravy. Absent widely accepted cultural enforcers, any legislative reforms would quickly decay into just another capricious boondoggle.#ad#

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints, and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else’s, until after Christmas -- except to note that the media’s stampede for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. Like most mass shootings, his was an exercise in hyper-narcissism -- 19th-century technology in the service of a very contemporary sensibility.

Meanwhile, the atheists have put up a new poster in Times Square: Underneath a picture of Santa, “Keep the Merry”; underneath a picture of Christ, “Dump the Myth.” But in our time even Christians have dumped a lot of the myth while keeping the merry: Jesus, lambs, shepherds, yes; the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, kind of a downer. If the Christmas story is a myth, it’s a perfectly constructed one, rooting the Savior’s divinity in the miracle of His birth but unblinkered, in Matthew’s account of Herod’s response, about man’s darker impulses:

Then woe is me

Poor Child, for Thee

And ever mourn and may

For Thy parting

Nor say nor sing

By by, lully, lullay.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

The Age of Aquarius

Jay Nordlinger permitted himself a P.S. on Bob Bork, so I'd like to treat myself to one, too. Our friend Charles Crawford, sometime NR cruiser and formerly Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador in various parts of Eastern Europe, reprises a great Bork line:

He told me about his astonishment as he got closer and closer to the top of the US legal establishment to discover that so much of the legal thinking there was explicitly politicised: "It's as if you wanted all your life to be a top astronomer, only to find that many of the top astronomers in fact practise astrology".

Just so. Somewhere in my book, I quote President Obama on what he's looking for in a Supreme Court justice: "the depth and breadth of one's empathy." That's a soft-focus euphemism for the subordination of law to political ideology. Bob Bork found such a reductio not just contemptible but, for any serious jurist, utterly banal.

Judge Bork, R.I.P.

As Andy says, Robert H Bork was part of the National Review circle, a longtime fixture on NR cruises and at other events. I will leave it to Andy, Ed Whelan, and others to discuss his merits as a jurist, but one reason he would have made a great Supreme Court justice is that he had terrific comic timing. If you were on a panel with him, he was lethally economical: He gave the shortest answers and got the biggest laughs.

Off-stage, he was even more convivial. Away from formal portraits, he had a rogue-ish expression, in contrast to his wife Mary Ellen's very saintly mien -- they were a striking couple in that respect. Like many great minds, he had an appetite for murder mysteries and the like. I was impressed to find he'd read not only John Buchan's famous "shockers" but also his wonderfully evocative memoir, Memory Hold-The-Door. Published after Buchan died in office as Canada's viceroy, it was said to be John F Kennedy's favorite book - which small but improbable point of mutual enthusiasm would seem to be at odds with the monstrous dehumanization of Bob by JFK's brother. Like Buchan's, Bob's memoir will now be published posthumously.

One night at dinner, during my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions, I said that it had changed how I felt about my country. Bob chuckled and said he didn't think that was a good idea. He was treated disgracefully by the most eminent persons in the land - okay, make that the most "eminent" - (Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, Arlen Specter, Bob Packwood, a veritable pantheon of eminences), and after such a perverse tribute to the corrupt dysfunction of American civic discourse it would surely have been easy to have been consumed by bitterness. But he wasn't. He liked good spirits and good music, and lived well. On one NR cruise, in the cocktail lounge in the wee small hours, the pianist asked those of us who were closing out the bar if there were any number he'd like us to play as his last song. Bob piped up with "Bye Bye, Blackbird" and sat there contentedly as softly we all sang along:

Pack up all my care and woe

There I go

Singing low...

Rest in peace.

Shoe-Fly Pie

On al-Jadeed TV, geopolitical analyst Dr Taleb Ibrahim debates the future of Syria with Lebanese Member of Parliament Khaled al-Dhaher:

Shut up, you ape..! My shoe and my urine are more dignified than you... We will crush you like cockroaches!

 If I were the new programmer at poor doomed CNN, I'd be suggesting David Gergen try that line on Wolf Blitzer.