Mark Steyn's Blog, page 18

Ten Thousand Thumbs Down

So there was no movie protest in Benghazi, but there was in London, England. To register their objections to the "film" (a.k.a. YouTube trailer) Innocence Of Muslims, 10,000 British Muslims besieged Google's U.K. headquarters. They're planning a Million Muslim March in Hyde Park in a few weeks' time.

Speaking of free speech (as I was just below), 10,000 Muslims demanding censorship in London is far more disturbing than 10,000 Muslims doing the same in Lahore or Sana'a. When a private company finds itself with thousands of highly motivated protesters on its doorstep, it can take up the torch for a core principle of liberty -- or it can opt for a quiet life. Following Obama's prostrations before the U.N. and the Barack & Hillary apology ad on Pakistani TV, Western Muslims have made a bet on which way the necessary distributors of free speech -- the ISPs, the TV networks, the publishers -- will jump. As Jonathan Turley wrote in in the Washington Post this weekend: "Shut Up and Play Nice.”

It won't work. But by the time we've figured that out it will be too late. That's why it's essential to push back now.

[UPDATE, from my Scandinavian pals Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard: In a far smaller city, Copenhagen, 2,000 Muslims gather to call for restrictions on freedom of expression, supported by a Christian minister who compares free speech to a "kitchen knife".]

Capital Crime

Following my weekend column on the administration's disgraceful behavior over Benghazi, a commenter called Pilipo Underwood pops up:

Mawk Steyn's sophistry is simply astounding! Willard Romney started the politics before we even knew the basics of the attack in Benghzi. And his essays just drip with vituperation. Such a chip on his shoulder, one thinks he would have learned after his Conviction for Hate Speech.

If only Capitalization could Make It So. I've never been Convicted of Hate Speech. Just for the record, the Canadian Islamic Congress took their case to the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission, the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal, and the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, and struck out every time. After which, they stopped trying. As a result of the case, the censorship law became so discredited that the Canadian Parliament repealed it.

So the reason I haven't "learned," as Mr. Underwood puts it, is because it was game, set, and match to me.

Alas, so much of contemporary liberalism depends on a kind of invincible ignorance. In that sense, Benghazi is a test case of the Left's defining technique: simply saying the same thing over and over and louder and louder will make it true.

If I were as sensitive and thin-skinned as global warm-monger Dr. Michael Mann, I'd probably threaten to sue Mr. Underwood for defamation, but that's a whole other story.

Joe Biden's 'Intelligence'

Andy McCarthy and yours truly both devote our weekend columns to the Benghazi debacle. I mention the relevant exchange in the vice-presidential debate, when Joe Biden was asked why the administration had blamed the murderous assault on an obscure YouTube video. He replied:

Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.

The State Department has now released a background briefing from Tuesday at which an AP reporter put the same question, more or less:

OPERATOR: The next question is from the line of Brad Klapper with AP. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hi, yes. You described several incidents you had with groups of men, armed men. What in all of these events that you’ve described led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: That is a question that you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion. I’m not saying that we had a conclusion, but we outlined what happened. The Ambassador walked guests out around 8:30 or so, there was no one on the street at approximately 9:40, then there was the noise and then we saw on the cameras the – a large number of armed men assaulting the compound.

There was no "intelligence" suggesting a movie protest in Benghazi. All the on-site reports made plain what had happened -- and by the following morning. The second highest official in the Government of the United States looked the citizenry in the eye on Thursday and said something he knew to be completely false. If Biden's statement was agreed with Obama and not just ol' Joe wingin' it, they're gonna need a bus with Truckosaurus-high wheels to get the State Department, the intelligence guys, and everyone else they're planning on throwing under there.

Surely, even among Obama's media sycophants, there must be someone who recognizes that all the cushy court eunuch posts are filled and, rather than being the umpteenth extra in the crowd scene, there's a reputation, a Pulitzer and maybe a movie deal to be made here.

Mystic Giver

In the film of Paint Your Wagon, Clint Eastwood sang:

I talk to the trees

But they don't listen to me...

Neither do the media left. They were all agreed that Clint's empty chair routine was a bust. A month later, Obama shows up for the first debate as the empty chair.

So, in that apparently disastrous and embarrassing appearance at the GOP, did Clint have anything to say about Joe Biden? Why, yes, he did:

Just kind of a grin with a body behind it.

And what does Biden show up as?

This guy is some kind of genius.

(PS I thought the Vice-President's impressive dentistry was oddly reminiscent of Clint's film, The Bridgework Of Madison County.)

Who’s ‘Politicizing’ Benghazi?

‘The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”

She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets. Sure, Caligula put his horse in the senate, but it was a real horse. At Ohio State University, the rapper will.i.am introduced the president by playing the Sesame Street theme tune, which oddly enough seems more apt presidential-walk-on music for the Obama era than “Hail to the Chief.”

#ad#Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects. But, alas, it was her boss who chose to “politicize” a security fiasco and national humiliation in Benghazi. At 8:30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9:40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose -- a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

This was confirmed by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video -- even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12, by which point the consulate’s survivors had landed safely in Tripoli.

To “politicize” means “to give a political character to.” It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: “Gee, they nuked Israel. D’you think that will hurt us in Florida?” So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be “bad” for Obama -- by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, it’s real bad. They’re dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as “Chris,” as if they’ve known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died? You want “politicization”? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base -- even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

In the vice-presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply: “Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.” That too is false. He also denied that the government of which he is nominally second-in-command had ever received a request for additional security. At the risk of “politicizing” things, this statement would appear also to be untrue.

#page#Instead, the State Department outsourced security for the Benghazi consulate to Blue Mountain, a Welsh firm that hires ex-British and -Commonwealth special forces, among the toughest hombres on the planet. The company’s very name comes from the poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand,” whose words famously adorn the regimental headquarters of Britain’s Special Air Service in Hereford.  Unfortunately, the one-year contract for consulate security was only $387,413 -- or less than the cost of deploying a single U.S. soldier overseas. On that budget, you can’t really afford to fly in a lot of crack SAS killing machines, and have to make do with the neighborhood talent pool. So who’s available? Blue Mountain hired five members of the Benghazi branch of the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade and equipped them with handcuffs and batons. A baton is very useful when someone is firing an RPG at you, at least if you play a little baseball. There were supposed to be four men heavily armed with handcuffs on duty that night, but, the date of September 11 having no particular significance in the Muslim world, only two guards were actually on shift.#ad#

Let’s pause right there, and “politicize” a little more. Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” -- selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory -- no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales. 

In the days before the attack Joe Biden had been peddling his Obama campaign slogan that “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” The first successful terrorist attack on U.S. sovereign territory since 9/11, and on the very anniversary and by al-Qaeda-linked killers, was not helpful to the Obama team. And so the nature of the event had to be “politicized”: Look, over there -- an Islamophobic movie! “Greater love hath no man than this,” quoth the president at Chris Stevens’ coffin, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Smaller love hath no man than Obama’s, than to lay down his “friend” for a couple of points in Ohio.

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

Laughing All the Way to the Bank Collapse

In this space a while back, I reprised a favorite Paul Ryan moment:

At the House Budget Committee on Thursday, Chairman Paul Ryan produced another chart, this time from the Congressional Budget Office, with an even steeper straight line showing debt rising to 900 percent of GDP and rocketing off the graph circa 2075. America’s treasury secretary, Timmy Geithner the TurboTax Kid, thought the chart would have been even more hilarious if they’d run the numbers into the next millennium: “You could have taken it out to 3000 or to 4000” he chortled, to supportive titters from his aides. Has total societal collapse ever been such a non-stop laugh riot?

“Yeah, right.” replied Ryan. “We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.”

The U.S. economy shuts down in 2027? Had you heard about that?

We could have used something like that last night. Once it became clear Joe Biden was going to respond to every serious Ryan point by dialing the smirk up another notch, the congressman should have thrown it back at him -- on Libya, Iranian nukes, debt, or any of the other stuff Joe was yukking it up about. "I'm glad the vice president finds Medicare insolvency so funny. It's not so funny if you're the average American man, woman or child, whose share of the total debt is $185,000 and rising. But I guess if you're inside the vice-presidential motorcade looking out it's a real thigh-slapper, isn't it? This may be a joke to you, Mr. Vice President, but it's deadly serious to the millions of young Americans whose future you spent." Etc.

Ryan isn't a funny guy. But, when you're earnest and a bit wonky and up against a smarmy third-rate lounge-act flashing his dentistry, you don't have to be funny. A bit of righteous indignation would have helped.

An opportunity missed.

Disgrace in Benghazi (contd.)

A couple of days after the Benghazi fiasco, I wrote here:

The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

Four weeks on, the official spokespersons of the government of the United States are belatedly catching up to this third-rate foreign hack's version of events. The State Department has now conceded that there was no movie protest at all, and that it was, in fact, one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

Both these very obvious points were surely known to Washington by 6 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday September 12, by which time the surviving consulate staff had been evacuated to Tripoli. Yet Ambassador Rice, President Obama, et al., were still blaming the video days later. Obama and Secretary Clinton always refer to Ambassador Stevens as "Chris" -- Chris this, Chris that -- as if he were a treasured friend or intimate. Yet they and the sad hollow men around them dishonor their "friend" in death.

Given the conflicting reports on the manner of his demise, any chance of an autopsy? Or is that also politically inconvenient?

L is for Loser

Katrina, re that ruthless Obama attack ad hanging the albatross of Big Bird round Romney's neck, can anyone play this game?

"Vote Obama: He didn't cancel Big Bird, just the Benghazi consulate security."

"Vote Obama: He knows how small the PBS subsidy is, but he can't get the national debt correct to the nearest six trillion - even when he's the guy who spent it."

Give it a week or so, and, in a grand harmonic convergence of Democrat talking points, Big Bird will be dating Sandra Fluke.

Re: Benghazi Consulate Was Under 'Lower Security Standard'

Patrick, it is depressing to find the Government of the United States has taken two weeks to confirm what I wrote a couple of days after the slaughter in Libya:

We’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under.

Big, money-no-object government will inevitably tend to the stupid, and the biggest, most lavishly funded government on the planet is certainly no exception to the rule. But it is a near parodic example of rule-by-moronized-bureaucracy that if you build a US consulate in the provincial cities of peaceful allies throughout the developed world you are required to turn it into an eyesore fortress loathed by the locals, but if you're in a hotbed of jihadism emerging from a bloody civil war all security considerations can be waived.

The "bumps in the road" (in the President's exquisite formulation) are not just the corpses of real Americans but the charred husk of superpower credibility.

But hey, don't worry! Didn't he look great sitting between Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg on "The View"? 

The Health System That Ate America

If you'll forgive a teensy-weensy plugette for the new paperback edition of my latest book, somewhere in there I mention that health spending in Canadian provinces has increased over the last decade from an average of 35 percent of government budgets to 46 percent today. In Ontario, it's predicted to consume 80 percent of tax revenues by 2030. Across the pond in London, the NHS is famously the third biggest employer on the planet, after the Chinese army and the Indian railways.

I used to cite these comparisons as a cautionary tale to Americans. But a couple of years back I concluded Obamacare is going to leave these Anglo-Euro-Canadian pikers for dust. If you want a sentence that encapsulates the monster growing in the government basement, this one from Avik Roy's post below is pretty good:

According to an analysis by Representatives Wally Herger (R., Calif.) and Dave Reichert (R., Wash.), Obamacare’s cuts to the Medicare Advantage program, by driving seniors out of that program and back into traditional Medicare, could earn AARP over $1 billion over the next ten years, because AARP makes nearly half a billion dollars per year collecting royalties from supplemental Medigap policies sold by private insurers.

As Avik points out, the AARP makes roughly twice from Medigap "royalties" what it collects in membership dues. There is an argument to be made for a genuinely private health system -- the market determines the rate for mending a broken leg or curing your incontinence. There is an argument, if one is so inclined philosophically, to be made for a public health system of the Continental kind -- simple, universal, and "free" at the point of demand. But there is very little to be said for the malign mutation of pseudo-public and ersatz-private health care that Obamacare massively expands, one that piles third party upon third party and ensures that the paperwork and cronyism will metastasize faster than any cancer and that America winds up with a system that has all the worst aspects of a government program -- delays, bureaucracy -- without even the redeeming features of universal access and an equality of awfulness.

And, given the starting point of our overall societal health (the worst obesity rates, childhood diabetes, etc), the upshot isn't likely to be pretty. This will be a disaster way beyond that Ontario 80-percent-of-revenue stuff.