Mark Steyn's Blog, page 13

The Twinkie Curtain Descends

From the deplorably parochial coverage in the U.S. media, you'd almost get the impression that those iconic American delicacies of Twinkies and Wonder Bread have ceased production. That's not true. They've just ceased production for Americans. Up north, the streets are paved with Twinkies, and every Canadian is walking in a Winter Wonderbreadland:

Twinkie and Wonder Bread lovers in the U.S. can still head north of the border to stock up on the baked goods even with the bankruptcy of Hostess Brands Inc.

Saputo Inc. (SAP), Canada’s largest dairy processor, has the trademark and brand rights to Hostess CupCakes and Hostess Twinkies in the country and manufactures the products themselves, said Sandy Vassiadis, a spokeswoman for the company.

“It’s totally separate,” she said, in an interview from Saputo’s headquarters near Montreal. “We own the rights in Canada so what’s happening in the U.S. doesn’t affect us.”

Happy the man who can say that as the fiscal cliff looms.

As pitiful Twinkieless Americans stampede for Vancouver, Windsor and Niagara, it would be tempting for gloating Canadians to descend into Twinkie triumphalism. But fortunately they’re mindful of Churchill’s injunction -- in victory, magnanimity:

Sorry, guys, but we continue to beat your asses. (While making them bigger…)

P.S. If you want your authentically all-American Canadian-made Twinkies, my advice is get them soon, before the zealots of U.S. Homeland Security raise them to the threat level of Kinder Eggs.

Pallywood Body Double

So today the Palestinian Association of Hamilton (Ontario) held a rally to protest the brutal Israeli violence rained down on the people of Gaza. To promote the event, they used a heartrending picture of an innocent Palestinian baby bloodily injured by the Israeli war machine's indiscriminate bombing raids on Gaza.

Unfortunately, the innocent Palestinian baby turns out to be an innocent Israeli baby bloodily injured by Palestinian rockets in the Hamas attack on Kiryat Malachi.

Oh, well. Close enough for the western media.

Emotional Bonding

Over at The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz takes issue with Bond's issues in the new 007 film Skyfall, in the course of which he writes (caution - mild spoiler alert):

The film’s climax isn’t set in a hollowed--out volcano, as in You Only Live Twice, or a hollowed-out mountain, as in Diamonds Are Forever, or a space station, as in Moonraker—fashionable facilities featuring thousands of people in kooky costumes shuffling about while a disembodied voice counts down the seconds until the world is to blow up. It takes place in the middle of the night, in the dark, in the tiny stone chapel where Bond was baptized. And there are only three people present. And Bond cries.

JPod reacts like Bernard Lee at mandatory MI6 sensitivity-training.

I rather enjoyed Skyfall, and in particular the Scottish finish. For half a century, the most boring bit in 007 has always been the final 20 minutes when Bond and the girl run around the hollowed-out volcano shooting hundreds of tinfoil-suited extras in golf carts while looking for the big red "Off" button that disconnects the space laser. Personally, I only sit through it for the final line after Bond and the dolly bird are making out in a dinghy or space module unaware that M and the distinguished guests from the Ministry are watching every move: "Just keeping the British end up, sir" (The Spy Who Loved Me); "I think Bond's attempting re-entry" (Moonraker); etc. Gadgets come and go, so do Q and Moneypenny, but the exploding-lair finale has somehow managed to survive every single retooling of the formula - from campy Roger Moore to clunky Timothy Dalton, quippy Pierce Brosnan to gritty Daniel Craig.

So I far preferred Skyfall's end and the reduction in manpower to off-off-Broadway levels. My daughter and I were in a similarly bleak and isolated Highland hunting lodge earlier this year, and I remember thinking at the time that it felt like John Buchan's Scotland - the place where a thriller chase winds up. Wrong author, but right genre.

One-Party Statelets

Earlier this year, up north, I celebrated a modest victory in my battle against Canada's "human rights" commissions, and wrote en passant:

After Hosni Mubarak was “re-elected” with 97.1 per cent of the vote, he was said to be furious with his officials for stealing too much of the election and making him look like one of those crude ham-fisted dictator-for-life types like Saddam and Kim Il-Sung. So next time round his officials arranged for him to “win” with a mere 96.3 per cent of the vote.

Now comes the news that, following his impressive 100 per cent share of the vote in 59 Philadelphia precincts, Barack Obama was able to eke out a 100 per cent total victory in a mere 37 precincts in his home town of Tikrit - whoops, I mean Chicago. NBC reports:

In 37 Chicago Precincts, Romney Received No Votes

Heavy concentration of Big Bird fans perhaps. One commenter observes:

Statistically, even if among 10's of thousands of voters all wanted to vote for Obama, it would not be possible to receive 100% of the vote because at least a few would make a mistake and vote incorrectly for Romney.

Just to be clear: I think Obama won the election, and his victory represents the will of the American people. Which is why the Democrats should have heeded Mubarak's words and not over-stolen it. I was not one of those who objected to the presence of international observers at this month's election, as if the United States were just another banana republic: By comparison with Canada, Australia, and most other free societies, the integrity of the American ballot is a joke, and ought to be a source of shame.

The Twinkie Offense

Competing narratives: Who killed Twinkies? Mitt Romney? Or Dick Gephardt?

Moral of the story:

Sadly, in many ways Hostess is now indicative of that just as insolvent larger corporation, the USA, whose insurmountable balance sheet liabilities will be the eventual catalyst for its collapse, but only once the Income Statement and the Cash Flow sheet join in. For now, the Fed provides the flow needed to avoid the day of reckoning, but everything ends eventually.

Hostess, like Greece, doesn't have a cash-dispensing Fed, so the day of reckoning shows up sooner.

PS The other difference between Hostess and the United States is that when the latter collapses this sentence will be non-operative:

"Most employees who lose their jobs should be eligible for government-provided unemployment benefits," Hostess said.

Tribal America

To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of election-night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal with the reality that America is becoming what she called a “brown country.” Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions that if the share of the “white vote” was held down below 73 percent Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72 percent and he did. Beckel’s assertion -- that if you knew the ethnic composition of the electorate you also knew the result -- turned out to be correct.

#ad#This is what less enlightened societies call tribalism: For example, in the 1980 election leading to Zimbabwe’s independence, Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU-PF got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF secured those of the Shona -- and, as there were more Shona than Ndebele, Mugabe won. That same year America held an election, and Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory. Nobody talked about tribal-vote shares back then, but had the percentage of what Beckel calls the “white vote” been the same in 2012 as it was in 1980 (88 percent), Mitt Romney would have won in an even bigger landslide than Reagan. The “white vote” will be even lower in 2016, and so, on the Beckel model, Republicans are set to lose all over again.

Hence the urge to get on the right side of America’s fastest-growing demographic. Only 27 percent of Hispanics voted for Romney. But all that could change if the GOP were to sign on to support some means of legalizing the presence of the 12–20 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community who are allegedly “social conservatives” and thus natural Republican voters. Once we pass amnesty, argues Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, “future immigrants will be more open to the Republican Party because, unlike many immigrants who are already here, they won’t have been harmed or insulted by Republican politicians.”

So, if I follow correctly, instead of getting 27 percent of the 10 percent Hispanic vote, Republicans will get, oh, 38 percent of the 25 percent Hispanic vote, and sweep to victory.

Everyone talks about this demographic transformation as if it’s a natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, I notice that many of those exulting in the inevitable eclipse of “white America” are the same people who assure me that demographic arguments about the Islamization of Europe are completely preposterous. But in neither the United States nor Europe is it a natural phenomenon. Rather, it’s the fruit of conscious government policy.

According to the Census, in 1970 the “Non-Hispanic White” population of California was 78 percent. By the 2010 census, it was 40 percent. Over the same period, the 10 percent Hispanic population quadrupled and caught up with whites.

That doesn’t sound terribly “natural” does it? If one were informed that, say, the population of Nigeria had gone from 80 percent black in 1970 to 40 percent black today, one would suspect something rather odd and unnatural had been going on. Twenty years ago, Rwanda was about 14 percent Tutsi. Now it’s just under 10 percent. So it takes a bunch of Hutu butchers getting out their machetes and engaging in seven-figure genocide to lower the Tutsi population by a third. But, when the white population of California falls by half, that’s “natural,” just the way it is, one of those things, could happen to anyone.

Every four years, the Republican party pines for another Reagan. But Ronald Reagan, governor of California for eight years, couldn’t get elected in today’s not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam back in the Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire of a malign alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency class that maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly shrinking productive class. As the nation’s demographic profile trends ever more Californian, perhaps Norquist’s predictions of naturally conservative Hispanics pining for a new Reagan will come to fruition. Or perhaps Bob Beckel’s more crudely determinative analysis will prove correct -- that, in a multicultural society, jostling identity groups will stick with the party of ethnocultural spoils.

Once upon a time, the Democrats thought differently. It was their first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, who imposed the concept of “self-determination” on post–Great War Europe, insisting that the multicultural empires of the Habsburgs and Romanovs be replaced by a patchwork of ethnic statelets from the Balkans to the Baltics. He would be surprised to find his own party presiding over a Habsburgian America of bilingual Balkanization as a matter of electoral strategy. 

The short history of the Western Hemisphere is as follows: North America was colonized by Anglo-Celts, Central and South America by “Hispanics.” Up north, two centuries of constitutional evolution and economic growth; down south, coups, corruption, generalissimos, and presidents-for-life. None of us can know the future. It may be that Charles Krauthammer is correct that Hispanics are natural Republicans merely pining for amnesty, a Hallmark Cinco de Mayo card, and a mariachi band at the inaugural ball. Or it may be that, in defiance of Dr. Krauthammer, Grover Norquist, and Little Mary Sunshine, demographics is destiny and, absent assimilationist incentives this country no longer imposes, a Latin American population will wind up living in a Latin American society. Don’t take it from a right-wing bigot like me, take it from the New York Times. In 2009, Jason DeParle filed a story about suburban Maryland, in which he helpfully explained the municipality of Langley Park to Times readers:

Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money-transfer stores. Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city government, few community leaders, and little community.

Golly. You’d almost get the impression that Mr. DeParle thinks that laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional government are somehow characteristic of Central America. That sounds awfully judgmental for a Times man, no?

Republicans think they’re importing hardworking immigrants who want a shot at the American Dream; the Democrats think they’re importing clients for Big Government. The Left is right: Just under 60 percent of immigrants receive some form of welfare. I see the recent Republican proposals for some form of amnesty contain all sorts of supposed safeguards against gaming the system, including a $525 application fee for each stage of the legalization process. On my own recent visit to a U.S. Immigration office, I was interested to be told that, as a matter of policy, the Obama administration is now rubberstamping all “fee waiver” requests for “exceptional hardship” filed by members of approved identity groups. And so it will go for all those GOP safeguards. While Canada and Australia compete for high-skilled immigrants, America fast-tracks an unskilled welfare class of such economic benefit to their new homeland they can’t even afford a couple of hundred bucks for the necessary paperwork.

It’s hardly their fault. If you were told you could walk into a First World nation and access free education, free health care, free services in your own language, and have someone else pay your entrance fee, why wouldn’t you? So, yes, Republicans should “moderate” their tone toward immigrants, and de-moderate their attitude to the Dems who suckered the GOP all too predictably. Decades of faintheartedness toward some of the most destabilizing features of any society, including bilingualism (take it from a semi-Belgian Canadian), have brought the party to its date with destiny. Or as Peggy Lee sang long ago in a lost land, “Mañana is soon enough for me.”

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

Forget Benghazi; What About Our Diplomats in Tampa?

Re the demand by General Petraeus' non-mistress, Jill Kelley, for "diplomatic protection" at her Florida home, this is the old history-repeats-itself trajectory at record speed -- Benghazi as tragedy, Tampa as trouser-dropping sex comedy. According to that TV report:

As the call ends, she makes an apparent reference to her role at MacDill Air Force Base, which the Associated Press has described as an "unpaid social liaison."

"You know, I don't know if by any chance, because I'm an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability, so they should not be able to cross my property.  I don't know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well," she told the 911 dispatcher, who agreed to pass the information along to police.

Mrs. Kelley is not a "consul general." She is to accredited diplomats as our old chum Dr. Michael Mann is to Nobel laureates. She was apparently given a certificate by CentCom as an "honorary ambassador" -- the sort of baloney the U.S. government does far too much of. Hence, the present absurdity:

On the one hand, a real ambassador at a real consulate under siege calls Washington for help and gets crickets chirping.

On the other, a fantasy ambassador who declares her own home her personal consulate gets untold hours of attention from the U.S. commander in Afghanistan and the director of the CIA, both of whom also have time to intervene in her twin sister's custody case. As Victor asks below:

How did a single Jill Kelley warrant hundreds of hours of chat time from our highest generals, engaged in a life and death struggle in the war against terror and Afghanistan? Who was not consulted, not advised, not ordered — in order to free up time for Kelley and Broadwell?

Maybe one of Mrs. Kelley's four-star pals could dispatch a drone or two to hover over her front yard.

The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

Further to my post below, if you were thinking that what the story of the under-the-desk CIA director, the bunny-boiling biographer, the email-crazed Afghanistan commander, the CentCom socialite, and the shirtless FBI agent lacked was a "psychologically unstable twin sister" . . .

Your wish has been granted.

P.S.:

"Paula Broadwell" sounds like if your dad tried to make up a Bond girl name on the spot.

— Alex Baze (@bazecraze) November 13, 2012

It's harder than it looks.

PPS: Picture of the identical twins here. You'd think they could at least do the tilty-head thing at opposite angles.

There's Something About Jill

Charlie, while we're wondering whether Jill Kelley, the woman accused by the mistress of the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is in fact the mistress of the current U.S. commander in Afghanistan, let's not forget the FBI guy who got the Pentagon version of La Ronde rolling:

The FBI agent who started the case was a friend of Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who received harassing, anonymous emails that led to the probe, according to officials . . .

However, supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter, and prohibited him from any role in the investigation, according to the officials.

The FBI officials found that he had sent shirtless pictures of himself to Ms. Kelley, according to the people familiar with the probe.

Say what you like about the Taliban but when Mullah Omar decides to drop a honey trap on the Great Satan he doesn't do things by half.

There was a terrific WWII movie called Four Jills in a Jeep (Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Alice Faye, the works). Maybe they should remake it as One Jill in Four Jeeps.

Sub Mitt

Via the Other McCain, I'm belatedly catching up with this analysis in The Washington Post:

In fact, as the chart below details, Republican Senate candidates under-performed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in most of the important races of 2012.

In five races, the GOP candidate under-performed Romney by at least nine points. This includes Reps. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) and Rick Berg (R-N.D.), who both lost in states that Romney carried by at least 13 points.

In New Hampshire we didn't have any senate races, but the same phenomenon was observable downticket, including for both GOP House seats. Statewide, Charlie Bass, who's a classic RINO squish, and Frank Guinta, who isn't, drew about six per cent fewer votes than Mitt, and both lost. Regardless of what kind of Republican you are, the electorate was antipathetic to you.

In other words, whatever the weaknesses of a supposedly weak candidate, the party was weaker. With hindsight, that first debate performance appears to have made Mitt sufficiently likeable for a narrow slice of voters to overlook the R after his name. The candidate was less of a problem than the Republican brand.