Mark Steyn's Blog, page 16

Mike's Nobel Trick

Previously on Law & Order:

Last Monday, hockey-stick progenitor Michael Mann filed suit in DC Superior Court against me, NR, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg. I noticed on the press release (published on his Facebook page) that Dr Mann claimed to have been "awarded the Nobel Peace Prize", and that on the complaint itself we are accused of the hitherto unknown crime of "defamation of a Nobel prize recipient".

So my colleague Charles C W Cooke decided to call up the Nobel chaps in Oslo and ask them if Dr Mann was, in fact, a Nobel laureate:

Cooke: I was wondering, has Dr. Michael Mann ever won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Nobel Committee: No, no. He has never won the Nobel prize.

Thomas Richard also contacted the Norwegians and asked, "Was Prof Michael Mann 'awarded' a Nobel Prize of any sort at any time? Is he a Nobel Laureate as implied elsewhere in his legal brief?" He received the following email from Geir Lundestad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute:

Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In public, Dr Mann is a-huffin' an' a-puffin' that this is just more smears from Koch-funded climate deniers. But, behind the scenes, a lot of quiet airbrushing of the record seems to be going on. Two days ago, his Penn State bio said he had been "co-awarded" the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, now merely that he "contributed... to the award" (whatever that means). Over at Wikipedia, they're arguing over ever more unwieldy rewrites. Editing a false legal complaint is trickier but by now someone may have snuck into the DC court clerk's office with a gallon of White-Out and amended "defamation of a Nobel prize recipient" to "defamation of a man who received one of two thousand photocopies of a commemorative thank-you certificate run off at the IPCC branch of Kinko's".

So let's see: A week ago, Michael Mann accused us of damaging his reputation - and seems to have made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. A week ago, he was a "Nobel prize recipient". Now he's not. Great work, Mike!

(NB Headline courtesy Dr Phil Jones)

"First Time": The First Time

Important correction: In my weekend column, I wrote that President Obama's virgin-sacrifice campaign ad was lifted from Vladimir Putin. I deeply regret this appalling error. It turns out Putin got it from Australia's Green Party Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young. Our friends at Quadrant have the full story with cringe-making video.

So, if you're an impressionable liberal anxious to lose your virginity to a bold forceful leader, pick a politician who's big Down Under. (Titter.)

If a Drone Falls in the Forest and No Liberal Hears It...

Some analysts wonder why the Obama campaign is talking about Big Bird and deflowering your daughter rather than his many significant accomplishments. For :

For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit.

If you're on the receiving end, it looks a little different. From the same Washington Post story:

In one instance, Mullen, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, returned from Pakistan and recounted a heated confrontation with his counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Mullen told White House and counterterrorism officials that the Pakistani military chief had demanded an answer to a seemingly reasonable question: After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a “top 20” list?

That's some reset button.

But don't worry, libs! It'll sound totally cool when Obama puts it in his next sex ad: Did the earth move for you?

The Incredible Shrinking President

‘We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I’ll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did “have that person arrested.” By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos -- the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one -- bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s reelection campaign.

You’ll recall that a near-month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden’s bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department e-mails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and special forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy -- or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hellhole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’s father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”

#ad#Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaeda affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter -- that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, “have that person arrested.” And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock on the door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall-guy into custody.

This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional story line, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In electoral terms, it’s probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in their 2008 votes. Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.

At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al. seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that at the ceremony Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a “loud and boisterous” voice, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?” One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political bigshot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn’t even manage that.

But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obama’s own cue balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: “Osama’s dead and General Motors is alive.” But, as the al-Qaeda connections to Benghazi dribbled out leak by leak, the “Osama’s dead” became a problematic boast and, left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible. Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird, and binders, and bayonets, just to name the “B”s in his bonnet. At the second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the General Motors of the American abortion industry, half a dozen times, desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap. Yet oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.

Both videos -- the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext -- exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state’s most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer pressure: C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last hold-out?

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it’s very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria’s supposed wedding advice to her daughter: “Lie back and think of England.” Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep with a $16 trillion broke loser twice?

When Nobel Fantasists Attack . . .

Just one more word on Nobel Peace Fauxreate Michael Mann's suit against NR for mocking his hockey stick (I'm plowing through the charge sheet in between a sick kid and other more pressing matters). As we have established, Dr. Mann enjoys passing himself off as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. That's all harmless fun until you make the mistake of believing your own sad fantasy. Paragraph five of the official complaint against me and NR reads:

It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.

Accepting for the purposes of argument that there is such a crime in U.S. law as "defamation of a Nobel prize recipient", don't you have to be a Nobel prize recipient to be the victim of it?

The Nobel Prize committee has no record of a Dr. Michael Mann ever receiving a Nobel Prize. He is a "Nobel prize recipient" only in the canyons of his mind - unless he paid $19.95 for a Nobel diploma from a prestigious online self-help academy in Kazakhstan or some such.

As I said below, I've fended off various legal challenges around the world, but this is a first for me: A man who has declared himself a Nobel laureate is suing NR for refusing to respect him as one.

Litigious Laureate

Jay, one final thing re stickmeister Michael Mann's claim to be have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. You write:

It is stunning that Mann calls himself, or allows himself to be called, in his press releases and so on, a Nobel peace laureate. It almost makes me feel sorry for him. (Maybe I should emphasize “almost” again.) I am no shrink, but — holy Moses, what a claim.

Actually, it's worse than that. I've just read the official indictment or whatever you call it against NR, and he makes the claim that he has been "awarded the Nobel Peace Prize" in the complaint itself (page 2, paragraph 2).

Over the years, I've been sued and threatened with suits in various countries around the world but I've never before seen a plaintiff make such a transparently false assertion right up front in the biographical resumé. If I claim to be the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, can I sue Dr Mann for not calling me Your Highness?

As you say, we're not shrinks but...

UPDATE: On the one hand, Michael Mann's own web page:

He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with other IPCC authors in 2007.

On the other, the Nobel committee:

Only persons named explicitly in the citation may claim to share a Nobel Prize.

So we're being sued for loss of reputation by a fake Nobel laureate. Hilarious.

Deadbeat Prez

Betsy, re that Obama budget projection of $25.4 trillion in federal debt, this story seems pertinent:

Springfield’s budget director says the city is out of options to be reimbursed for expenses associated with hosting then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign stop in the fall of 2008.

And not just any campaign stop but the one that gave us the dream ticket:

Obama introduced his running mate, Joe Biden, at the Old State Capitol in August 2008. About 160 police officers and nine civilians helped provide protection for Obama’s visit, according to an invoice from the city.

Obama’s presidential campaign was sent a bill for $68,139, but still owes $55,457.

The city has tried for years to collect.

Obama doesn't need a plan to reduce that $25.4 trillion because he feels no serious compunction to pay it back, any more than he feels he has to pay that $55,457 back.

When the world figures that out, there goes the dollar, and there goes America.

Nobel Mann Takes On Revolting Peasants

A few readers have asked for my reaction to the news that climatologist Michael Mann has decided to proceed with his suit against NR, me, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for mocking his hockey stick.

I'm still working on my formal, bland, carefully lawyered official response, so for now just let me do cheap ad hominem cracks.

I was intrigued to see in Dr. Mann's press release of his suit the following biographical detail:

Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming."

I confess I wasn't aware Dr. Mann "was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." The official Nobel site makes no mention of him; there are no speeches, no citations, no pictures of him with the King of Norway, no namecheck on the 2007 Nobel diploma.

But it's true he contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And as the IPCC says:

Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis as authors, contributors and reviewers.

In 2007, Dr Mann was one of approximately 700 reviewers to review the findings of approximately 600 authors of one working group of the Fourth Assessment Report. However, he was one of a select group of a mere 2,000 people to receive a "commemorative certificate of involvement" -- not from the Nobel committee, but from Dr Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC.

So, in that sense, yes, indeed, he "was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." Phew. For a moment, I was worried he might be exaggerating a bit -- bending the curve upwards, so to speak.

In the same spirit, I see that I've just been awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Under Ireland's citizenship law, I'm an Irish national (through my father). Ireland is a member of the European Union. The EU has just been given the Nobel Peace Prize. QED. Come to think of it, my mother's Belgian, so I've been awarded two Nobel Peace Prizes.

I defer to the expertise of my colleague Jay Nordlinger in these matters, but I believe this will be an historic trial: The first time one Nobel Peace Prize winner has sued another Nobel Peace Prize winner -- at least until Obama sues Rigoberta Menchu over who's got the fakest fake memoir. I'll bring my Nobel medal if Dr. Mann brings his.

P.S. Given that the New York Times is calling this a 21st-century Scopes monkey trial, I rather like Steve Kates's ingenious headline Down Under: "Inherit The Wind Farm." 

[SEE UPDATE ABOVE: Dr Mann calls himself a Nobel laureate in the official legal complaint against NR.]

War on Women: The Northern Front

For any Corner readers in New Hampshire, I’ll be live in Concord this Friday for an event with the Granite State’s next governor, Ovide Lamontagne. (Details here.) My looming appearance seems to have distressed Kathy Sullivan, former NH Democrat chairwoman and 2008 Hillary campaign honcho:

Ovide addresses huge gender gap by campaigning w/ Mark Steyn, who's attacked SandraFluke/HillaryClinton/ElizabethWarren/MichelleObama

That’s true. I have. I’m so misogynist I’ll take Michele Bachmann over Michelle Obama, Kelly Ayotte over Elizabeth Warren, Julie Bishop (Australia’s Deputy Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister) over Hillary Clinton, and, “war on women”-wise, Ayaan Hirsi Ali over Sandra (“Two’s company, ten’s a sell-out crowd”) Fluke.

It's weird that so-called liberal progressives seem to think women come in one model only, straight off the Democratic Party version of Austin Powers' fembots assembly line. I’ll bet my binder over Kathy Sullivan's any day.

Heigh-ho. I hear the Democrats are working on a devastating attack ad showing Mitt bayoneting Big Bird…

The Remorseless Assault on Free Speech (cont.)

The other day, Andy McCarthy wrote that "it's not just Obama's lies, it's the premise of Obama's lies" - ie, the notion that a video (or a cartoon, or a book, or a play) can legitimately be blamed for murderous violence:

Constitutionally protected speech can never be legitimized as a cause of violence. Period.

It's not a small thing when the President of the United States chooses for political advantage to inflict significant damage on America's commitment to free speech. One thing the western left shares with Islam is a ferocious need to punish dissent - or (to give it its proper name) apostasy. Down Under, something called the "Australian Communications and Media Authority" (that's to say, the usual bunch of statist hacks) has just ordered Alan Jones, the country's Number One morning man, to undergo "factual accuracy training" (that's to say, re-education camp) for saying the following:

'The percentage of man-made carbon dioxide Australia produces is 1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air," Jones told his listeners on March 15 last year. "Nature produces nearly all the carbon dioxide in the air."

Apparently, according to a global warm-monger of dubious provenance himself, the correct figure is 0.45 per cent. So the percentage of non-Australian carbon dioxide in the air is 99.55 per cent rather than 99.99999 per cent. For this outrageous crime, Alan Jones must report for "factual accuracy training".

The death of free speech doesn't seem immediately relevant to people worried about jobs and mortgages, but it is: When it's a crime to be skeptical of "climate change" alarmism, it's harder to object to the diversion of tax dollars from you and yours to Solyndra and other "green" boondoggles. Killing freedom of expression renders honest discussion of everything from the economy to foreign policy all but impossible - which suits both the left and Islam just fine.

If Australia keeps this nonsense up, I may have to come back for another nationwide tour. If they let me in.