Mark Steyn's Blog, page 17

Cold Steel

I doubt President Obama's tossing of the Bayonet Lobby under the bus will prove to be the critical issue with undecided swing voters in Ohio, but, just for the record, bayonets have played a role in both our recent wars. Afghanistan:

The 24-year-old officer [Lt. James Adamson], a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted “have some of this” before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.

Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man’s chest…

“I either wasted vital seconds changing the magazine on my rifle or went over the top and did it more quickly with the bayonet.

“I took the second option. I jumped up over the bank of the river. He was just over the other side, almost touching distance.

“We caught each other’s eye as I went towards him but by then, for him, it was too late.”

And Iraq: 

It was the first British bayonet charge since the Falklands War 20 years ago. And at the end of it some 35 of the enemy were dead in return for three minor wounds on the Argylls' side...

''If you're defending a position and you see someone advancing with a bayonet, you may be more inclined to surrender,'' Col. Ed Brown told the British newspaper the Guardian. ''I've never been bayoneted, but I can imagine it's pretty gruesome.'' Or as Cpl. Jones, veteran of the Sudan, used to say every week on the ancient BBC sitcom ''Dad's Army'': ''They don't like it up 'em.''

As I wrote in the piece above, it's a useful form of psychological warfare. Being willing to run a chap through with cold steel tells the enemy something about you in a way that the more anonymously lethal unmanned drone doesn't.

The Superpower as Bystander

I would like to second what Andy McCarthy says about Bing West's devastating post.

The attack on the Benghazi consulate began at 3.40pm Eastern time.

It was known the Ambassador was missing by 4.30pm.

Obama, Biden and Panetta met in the Oval Office at 5pm. We know Charlene Lamb at the State Dept was watching events in real time. It seems likely Panetta was, too - and perhaps even Obama.

When something bad happens at a consulate on the other side of the world, very few nations have the technological capability to watch it in real time.

Even fewer have fighter jets and special forces within less than 500 miles - or about the distance from Boston to Washington.

Yet the commander-in-chief chose to do nothing. He chose to let the enemy determine the course of events, how long the battle would last, how many Americans would die. The only choice he made was to hold a photo-op at their coffins.

That's a metaphor for an enfeebled superpower: on 9/11/12, America had technological capability and military superiority, but no leadership. Instead, for eight hours, the most powerful men in Washington sat and watched but declined to act. And so in Benghazi as elsewhere in the Obama era, America is a spectator in its own fate.

The failure of leadership on 9/11 Round Two is pathetic, and the subsequent cover-up contemptible.

Democrat Momentum Unstoppable!

This headline in The Reno Gazette-Journal caught my eye:

Fluke Takes Center Stage In Reno

Which sounds kind of a big deal: I mean, the cliché "center stage" implies you're the star, the center of attention, the one everyone's there to see. And sure enough, in the picture underneath, standing in front of an Obama-Biden banner, there she was:

Sandra Fluke, a social justice advocate and campaign surrogate for Democratic President Barack Obama, speaks in Reno on Saturday.

And then I read the first sentence:

Sandra Fluke, the woman at the center of a media firestorm earlier this year after Rush Limbaugh called her a “slut,” spoke Saturday in front of about 10 people at the Sak ‘N Save in north Reno.

Ten people? Does that include the reporter? How small a crowd do you have to draw not to get covered by The Reno Gazette-Journal?

Here's the second sentence:

The speech was part of a daylong effort by Democrats to get Northern Nevadans to the polls on the first day of early voting.

Maybe they should have booked Big Bird.

PS I'll be in Concord, NH on Friday with the Granite State's next governor, Ovide Lamontagne. If The Reno Gazette-Journal wants to send someone, I'm confident we can draw at least twelve.

Binders Full of Women vs Ledgers Full of Nothing

The party that gave us annual trillion-dollar deficits as a permanent feature of life applies the same model closer to home:

The official Federal Election Committee reports for September are out, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s DNC is a complete wreck. The Democrats ended September with cash on hand of $4.6 million, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $82.6 million.

That’s nearly an 18-to-1 cash advantage for Republicans.

Worse still for the DNC, they had to take out loans to pay the bills so that they owed $20.5 million at the end of September, meaning that that (subtracting cash on hand from total debt) they were $15.9 million in the red — essentially bankrupt. Wasserman-Schultz’s committee only raised $3.7 million in September; at that pace, it would take them more than four months to clear their debt, even if they didn’t spend another dime in the meantime.

Is the DNC allowed to do quantitative easing?

Optimal in Benghazi

The mother of Sean Smith, murdered in Libya, gives an interview to my old colleague Toby Harnden at The Daily Mail in London:

Speaking from her home in San Diego, Mrs Smith, 72, continued: 'It's insensitive to say my son is not very optimal - he is also very dead. I've not been "optimal" since he died.'

I wonder if any of the expensively credentialed Columbia Journalism School graduates at dying US monodailies ever reflect on why Americans have to go to the foreign press to find a quote like that.

The Great Binder Blunder

So the other morning a reader e-mails me a picture of a handful of women demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Ohio Republican party -- in what we expert analysts round about this point in the quadrennial election cycle like to call the critical battleground of the Buckeye State. The women each wore two giant pieces of cardboard, front and back. Ah, I thought, a timely protest. These activists understand that, with Obama’s flatline economy drifting inexorably to a $20 trillion federal debt, we’ll soon be living in cardboard shacks in shantytowns in the parking lot of the bankrupt Solyndra factory. Or it’s what they’ll be using for the x-ray plates at your local hospital once the Obamacare rationing kicks in. Or maybe it’s the perfect visual metaphor for the flimsiness of U.S.-government security at its Middle Eastern embassies before the “Death to the Great Satan!” crowd punched through the compound like so much soggy cardboard.

But no. The women were chanting “Equal rights, not binders,” and they were protesting the following remarks by Mitt Romney at the presidential debate:

#ad#“And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Yes!!!!!!! With one bound, Obama was unbound! Romney had just made the worst presidential-debate gaffe since Gerald Ford declared there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In the previous weeks, Obama had attempted to have a serious conversation with the citizenry, as befits the electoral process of a mature republic. He had raised the critical questions of our time -- free contraceptives for middle-aged coeds, the outrageous right-wing Muppophobic assault on Big Bird -- but the public had failed to bite. Now, in one fatal error, Romney had handed him the winning issue: binders!

On the stump, Obama is a man reborn. At a campaign stop outside Cedar Rapids -- in what we expert analysts like to call the critical battleground of the Hawkeye State -- the president declared: “I’ve got to tell you, we don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women.” No, sir! In the Democratic party, driven young women are dropping into your lap. At the Island Grove Regional Park Exhibition Hall in Greeley, Colo., Joe Biden told the crowd: “When Governor Romney was asked a direct question about equal pay, he started talking about binders. Whoa! The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn’t need a binder.” The crowd roared its approval. “What I can’t understand,” continued the vice president, “is how he has gotten in this sort of 1950s time warp in terms of women.”

Yes, indeed. Romney wants to return us to the 1950s, when a woman’s place was in the binder, when every predatory male had his little black binder, and condescending misogynists would interview applicants for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and smirk, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without your binder#...#” It was the age of patriarchal sitcoms when the little lady would greet her man at the front door with his pipe and binders, where girls were told they could aspire no further than to ace Home Ec and thereby persuade some eligible young man to put a ring file on their finger. We all remember the careless sexist assumptions of the so-called family shows of those days -- Leave It to Binder, Ozzie and Binder, Binder Knows Best, My Three Binders, Gilligan’s Binder, The Binder Bunch -- until eventually the mold was broken by The Mary Binder Moore Show in the early Seventies. By then, feminists across the land were burning their binders, and Erica Jong had popularized the “zipless file.” As Gloria Steinem famously said, a woman needs a binder like a fish needs a three-tab manila hanging folder. Soon American wives were filing for divorce.

But now, after four decades of movement on women’s rights, Romney wants to go back to when they were stationary. What sort of man looks to fill his cabinet with binders? As I write, Joe Biden is winding up a barnstormer of a speech before the National Organization of Women: “I wanna tell y’all they’re gonna put y’all back in binders. Yaaaaaaalllll,” he added, helpfully. “What part of ‘y’all’ don’t y’all understand?”

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz deplored Romney’s descent into chauvinist “code words.” “To the sexist Republican base,” said Chris, “‘binders’ is a dog whistle.”

“A wolf whistle,” said Ed.

“Exactly,” said Chris. “It’s like asking for watermelon at the NAACP luncheon, not that I ever did that and it was a long time ago.”

“Or addressing the LGBT group and asking the guy if he’s got the new Judy Garland box set,” said Ed.

“That was you, not me,” said Chris.

“But underneath the code language we all know what’s really being said here,” argued Ed. “Send in the women, and I’ll get out my E-Z one-touch hole punch.”

“Okay, moving on,” said Chris, “here’s a leaked video of Romney addressing the board at Bain Capital while he was closing factories throughout the Midwest. It’s a bit muffled, but if you listen carefully you can hear Romney arguing that it would make more economic sense for him to give every American woman cancer and outsource matrimony to a binder full of mail-order brides from the Philippines.”

“Why do you think they call them Manila folders?” added Ed. “We all know the code words.”

“Why do you think he founded Staples in the first place?” demanded Chris. “What kind of a deal do you figure he’s getting on the binders?”

Sure, the Republicans still insist on bringing up trivial, peripheral distractions like Benghazi, Obamacare, multi-trillion-dollar debt, unsustainable entitlements, permanent long-term unemployment, and the looming January 1 “fiscal cliff.” But Democrats know that, if Romney gets his way, there’ll be nothing at the bottom of the fiscal cliff to break your fall except binders. In RomneyWorld, when the mullahs drop the big Iranian nuke, there’ll be nothing crawling out from the irradiated rubble except cockroaches and binders -- or some hideous mutation of the two: bindroaches, vile creatures prowling the land on three pairs of jointed rings ready to snap shut on your daughters’ ankles as they attempt to access the last Planned Parenthood clinic in America.

Finally, the Democrats have found their voice! From Wisconsin the Badger State to Massachusetts the Binder State, women and sensitive New Age men in touch with their filings are standing up as one to Mitt Romney: Keep your Averys off my ovaries! This is the most important election of our lifetimes: Make it a non-binder resolution.

Some years ago, the then–French defense minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, complained that the Americans were committed to “the organized cretinization of our people.” I’ve never accepted the thesis, but I have to say that, in the final weeks of his reelection campaign, the first man in history to spend $6 trillion and leave no trace is doing a magnificent job of cretinizing his own base. In the binders of history, this one will be worth its own tab.

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

Reader of the Day

So I'm looking at this guy's presser, and I'm thinking wow, he sounds like he's channeling Steyn. At last! A politician who's not only read my book, he totally gets it:

“How long can a government with a $16,000 trillion foreign debt remain a world power?” he asked at a press conference.

Romney? Ryan?

Er, no. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(via Brigitte Pellerin)

Spontaneous Movie Review in Lower Manhattan

From the New York Post:

A terrorist tried to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan with a 1,000-pound bomb this morning, authorities said.

Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, parked a van filled with what he thought were real explosives outside of the Liberty Street building, sources said, then tried to set them off using a cell phone detonator.

So a Muslim guy tries to blow up the Federal Reserve. Did Google take down that YouTube video? And replace it with a Ron Paul speech?

Not to worry. Candy Crowley says the president already declared this an "act of terror" during a champagne reception with Sarah Jessica Parker back in the spring.

Funniest line:

In a statement meant to take responsibility for the attack, Nafis said he wanted to "destroy America," by targeting its economy.

So he parked a van full of Dodd/Frank and Obamacare regulations out on Main Street.

Your Papers, Little Girl

Re Arizona's supposed crackdown on illegal immigration, President Obama just said he objected to asking people for ID because he wouldn't want somebody asking his daughter for her papers just because they thought she might not be a citizen. Very touching, I'm sure.

My own daughter is required by federal law to have her Green Card on her at all times, even when she's walking in the woods behind our house. Indeed, only the other month, a snotty twerp of a Customs officer at Derby Line, Vt., threatened me that, if ICE agents came to my daughter's school and she didn't have her Green Card on her, they could deport her.

But then she's merely a legal immigrant, rather than one of the sainted "undocumented."

President Obama doesn't seem to be aware of his own laws -- even when, as in this case, they were enacted by a Democrat (FDR).

Law Is Hell

If you're wondering what all that butch talk from Obama and Biden about seeing that the Benghazi perps are "brought to justice" actually boils down to, here's a clue:

Though it happened in 2000, Mr Pohl is still working on the case relating to the suicide attack that left 17 American soldiers dead on board the U.S.S. Cole.

Hey, what's the hurry?