Mark Steyn's Blog, page 21

A Nation of Sandra Flukes

According to Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, invited to address the Democratic convention and the nation, America faces a stark choice this November. “During this campaign, we’ve heard about two profoundly different futures that could await women in this country -- and how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past,” she cautioned. “That future could become real.”

In one of those futures, women will be “shut out and silenced,” rape victims will be “victimized all over again,” pregnant women will “die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms,” and “access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it.” If you’re wondering where all that is on your ballot form, just check the box marked “R.”

“We know what this America would look like,” warned Miss Fluke sternly. “In a few short months, that’s the America that we could be. But that’s not the America that we should be. And it’s not who we are.”

Fortunately, the America that we could be that isn’t the America that we should be doesn’t have to be the America that we would be. The good news is that “we’ve also seen another America that we could choose. In that America, we’d have the right to choose,” said Miss Fluke. This would be “an America in which our president, when he hears that a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters, not his delegates or his donors. And in which our president stands with all women. And strangers come together, and reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here, and you give me this microphone -- to amplify our voice. That’s the difference.”

#ad#So, if you’re looking for an America where strangers lift up Sandra Fluke and amplify her voice, that would be the box marked “D.”

“I’ve seen what these two futures look like,” she said. “And six months from now, we’re all going to be living in one future, or the other. But only one.” Because you can’t have two futures simultaneously, even under Obamacare.

With respect to Sandra Fluke, I think there’s a third future looming. The paperback edition of my book comes out in a week or so, and you can pretty much get the gist of it from the title: After America. For me, the likely scenario isn’t that the Republicans will be terrorizing rape victims or that the Democrats will finally pass the necessary legislation to make contraception available for the contraceptively starved millions crying out for it, but that America will be sliding off the cliff -- literally, as Joe Biden would literally say. And when America slides off the cliff it lands with a much bigger thud than Greece or Iceland. I’m not certain that the Republicans will be able to prevent that happening. But I know that the Democrats can’t. America owes more money than anybody has ever owed anyone in the history of the planet. But millions of Americans don’t see it, and millions of those who do see it don’t see it as a problem.

Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago -- at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light B.S. in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum -- first job, first paycheck.

So this is America’s best and brightest -- or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” -- and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”

#page#America is so broketastically brokey-broke that one day, in the grim future that could be, society may even be forced to consider whether there is any meaningful return on investment for paying a quarter-million bucks to send the scions of wealth and privilege to school till early middle age to study Reproductive Justice. But, as it stands right now, a Cornell and Georgetown graduate doesn’t understand the central reality of the future her elders have bequeathed her. There’s no “choice” in the matter. It’s showing up whatever happens in November. All the election will decide is whether America wants to address that reality, or continue to live in delusion -- like a nation staggering around with a giant condom rolled over its collective head.

#ad#Any space aliens prowling through the rubble of our civilization and stumbling upon a recording of the convention compatible with Planet Zongo DVD players will surely marvel at the valuable peak airtime allotted to Sandra Fluke. It was weird to see her up there among the governors and senators -- as weird as Bavarians thought it was when King Ludwig decided to make his principal advisor Lola Montez, the Irish-born “Spanish dancer” and legendary grande horizontale. I hasten to add I’m not saying Miss Fluke is King Barack’s courtesan. For one thing, it’s a striking feature of the Age of Perfected Liberalism that modern liberals talk about sex 24/7 while simultaneously giving off the persistent whiff that the whole thing’s a bit of a chore. Hence, the need for government subsidy. And, in fairness to Miss Montez, she used sex to argue for liberalized government, whereas Miss Fluke uses liberalism to argue for sexualized government.

But those distinctions aside, like Miss Fluke Miss Montez briefly wielded an influence entirely disproportionate to her talents. Like Miss Fluke, she was a passionate liberal activist who sought to diminish what she regarded as the malign influence of the Catholic Church. Taking up with Lola cost King Ludwig his throne in the revolutions of 1848. We’ll see in a couple of months whether taking up with Sandra works out for King Barack. But what’s strange is that so many people don’t find it strange at all -- that at a critical moment in the affairs of the republic the ruling party should assemble to listen to a complacent 31-year-old child of privilege peddling the lazy cobwebbed assumptions of myopic narcissism. Lola Montez was what botanists would call a “sport” -- morphologically distinct from the rest of the societal shrub. The tragedy for America is that Sandra Fluke is all too typical.

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

Sous les ponts de Barry

Nicole, re Elizabeth Warren's urge for us to build bridges together, I see Jonah quoted from his book the other day, so let me quote from mine. After America comes out in paperback in ten days and includes, toward the end, this passage:

A friend of mine is a New Hampshire “selectman”, one of those municipal offices Tocqueville found so admirable. In 2003, a state highway inspector rode through town and condemned one of the bridges, on a dirt road that serves maybe a dozen houses.

That’s the bad news. The good news was the 80/20 state/town funding plan, under which, if you applied to Concord for a new bridge, the state would pay 80 per cent of the cost, the town 20. So they did. The state estimated the cost at $320,000, so the town’s share would be $64,000. Great. So the town threw up a temporary bridge just down river from the condemned one, and waited for the state to get going. Six years later, the temporary bridge had worn out, and the latest revised estimate was $655,000, such that the town’s share would be $131,000.

That’s the bad news. The good news was that, under the “stimulus” bill, they could put in for the 60/40 federal/state bridge funding plan, under which the feds pay 60 per cent, and the state pays 40, and thus the town would be on the hook for 20 per cent of the 40 per cent, if you follow. If they applied for the program now, the bridge might be built by, oh, 2018, 2020, and it’ll only be $1.2 million, or $4 million, or $12 million, or whatever the estimate’ll be by then.

But who knows? By 2018, there might be some 70/30 UN/federal bridge plan, under which the UN pays 70 per cent, and the feds pay 30, and thus the town would only be liable for 20 per cent of the state’s 40 per cent of the feds’ 30 percent. And the estimate for the bridge will be a mere $2.7 billion.

While the Select Board was pondering this, another bridge was condemned. The state’s estimate was $415,000, and, given that the previous bridge had been on the to-do list for six years, they weren’t ready to pencil this second one in on the schedule just yet. So instead the town put in a new bridge from a local contractor. Cost: $30,000. Don’t worry; it’s all up to code—and a lot safer than the worn-out temporary bridge still waiting for the 80/20/60/40/70/30 deal to kick in. As my friend said at the meeting:

'Screw the state. Let’s do it ourselves.'

I prefer that to "Let's do it together."

Contemporary American liberalism can't build bridges. Its language is now so divorced from action that it thinks "bridge-building" is a term of outreach: Barack Obama is building bridges to the Muslim world, or the transgendered community or whatever. Big Government builds metaphorical bridges, and that's it.

Going Ape

Before the Democratic convention gets into its second trimester -- whoops, I mean second day -- many readers have asked me how Michael Mann's lawsuit is shaping up. As you know, Dr. Mann has threatened to sue National Review over a Corner post of mine about his famous "hockey stick" graph.

I don't really have anything terribly new to add, other than that I'm looking forward to it. So I'll point you to some other commentary on the forthcoming trial of the century. From the New York Times:

For Climate Change, A Possible Trial Could Echo The Scopes Monkey Case

Up to a point, says the St. John's Telegram of Newfoundland & Labrador:

The Only Monkey In This Trial Will Be Mark Steyn

Oh, dear. Speaking of animals, several bloggers note that Dr. Mann's lawyer's last celebrity client was Joe Camel -- the tobacco industry's anthropomorphized dromedary. By "anthropomorphized dromedary," I mean they put him in a suit and got rid of the hump -- in much the same way that the "hockey stick" graph got rid of the hump of the Medieval Warm Period.

Coincidence? Hmm.

A True Word Spoken in Jest

For every 99,999 "edgy" "transgressive" comedians  who claim that there are no jokes to be made about President Obama because he's just that good, there's one who'll give it a go. This is from Andrew Ferguson's review of James Fallows' Obama apologia:

The book is worth a download for what it tells us about liberal disenchantment with President Obama—that is, how one of his sophisticated admirers perceives the president’s failure to reconcile his uninspiring presidency with the dizzying expectations he goosed them all into way back in 2008.

Fallows nicely illustrates this liberal consternation with a joke that the comedian Seth Meyers addressed to the president at a Washington ballroom dinner. This was in 2011, when even his most ardent admirers were beginning to wonder where the hell all that hope and change had got to.

“I’ll tell you who could definitely beat you,” Meyers said to Obama, referring to the upcoming election. “2008 Barack Obama. You would have loved him.”

I would like to have been in the room when that went down.

You Might Want to Put Some ICE on That

Over at Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security, the war on women claims another victim:

A top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement has resigned following allegations by several subordinates of lewd behavior. 

ICE Chief of Staff Suzanne Barr submitted her resignation in a letter, obtained by FoxNews.com, to ICE Director John Morton. She rejected the allegations against her as "unfounded" but said she didn't want to distract from the agency's mission... 

The resignation comes nearly three weeks after Barr went on leave over the allegations. The questions about Barr's conduct were first raised in a lawsuit filed by an ICE official against Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano -- the lawsuit, which alleged discrimination and retaliation, listed among the complaints that Barr cultivated a "frat-house"-style work environment. 

That accusation was supplemented by two affidavits recounting incidents allegedly involving Barr in 2009. 

In the affidavits, one of the ICE employees claimed that in October 2009, while in a discussion about Halloween plans, the individual witnessed Barr turn to a senior ICE employee and say: "You a sexy" (expletive deleted). 

"She then looked at his crotch and asked, 'How long is it anyway?'" according to the affidavit. 

Outrageous. If the ICE Chief of Staff wants to talk like that, she should transfer to the TSA.

Dog-Whistling Past the Graveyard

American racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as “liquid bread” and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three to four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other developed nation -- around 164 groups per million people. France, which drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth the number of support groups. The French and Italians enjoy drinking, the English and Irish enjoy getting drunk, and Americans enjoy getting drunk on ever more absurd stigmatizatory excess. At Walmart they card you if you “appear to be under” -- what is it up to now? 43? 57? And the citizenry take this as a compliment: Well-preserved grandmothers return from failed attempts to purchase a bottle of wine with gay cries of, “I was carded at Costco! They’ve made my weekend!”

And so it goes with American racism: The less there is, the more extravagantly the racism-awareness lobby patrols its beat. The Walmart carding clerks of the media are ever more alert to those who “appear to be” racist. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use “Chicago” as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O’Donnell pronounced “golf” a racist code word. When Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was “working to earn a spot on the PGA tour,” O’Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word “golf” is subliminally associated with “Tiger Woods,” and the word “Tiger” is not so subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc., etc. So by using the word “golf” you’re sending a racist dog-whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.

#ad#While we’re on the subject of GOP white supremacists, former secretary of state Condi Rice spoke movingly of her rise to the top from a childhood in segregated Birmingham, Ala. But everyone knows that’s just more Republican racist dog-whistling for “when’s Bull Connor gonna whistle up those dogs and get me off stage?” Meanwhile, over at the Huffington Post, Geoffrey Dunn, author of The Lies of Sarah Palin (St. Martin’s Press, 2011, in case you missed it), was scoffing at Clint Eastwood’s star turn at the convention -- “better known as the Gathering of Pasty White People,” added Mr. Dunn, demonstrating the stylistic panache that set a-flutter the hearts of so many St. Martin’s Press commissioning editors. Warming to his theme, Mr. Dunn noted that Clint had been mayor of “the upscale and frighteningly white community” of Carmel, Calif..

To judge from his byline photo, Geoffrey Dunn is not only white but “pasty white.” So too is Lawrence O’Donnell. If I recall correctly from the last time I saw his show (1978 -- the remote had jammed), Chris Matthews is not just “pasty white” but “frighteningly white.” I happen to be overseas right now, so perhaps that’s the reason that all these “upscale and frighteningly white” American liberals seem even crazier than usual in their more-anti-racist-than-thou obsessions. To me, the word “Clint” is racist dog-whistling for “Play ‘Misty’ for Me,” which is racist dog-whistling for “Erroll Garner,” which is racist dog-whistling for “black pianist way better than Liberace.” Clint took The Bridges of the Frighteningly White Madison County and gave it a cool Johnny Hartman soundtrack. Clint introduced the world to Roberta Flack’s killer song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

But, as Geoffrey Dunn can explain, that’s racial code for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face I Was Pleasantly Reassured by How Pasty White It Was.” Also, Clint starred in The Eiger Sanction, a mountaineering thriller set on an Alp that was “upscale and frighteningly white.”

On the matter of those racist dog-whistles all these middle-aged white liberals keep hearing, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto put it very well: “The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else,” he wrote. “The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.” And a very rare breed at that. What frequency does a Mitch McConnell speech have to be ringing inside your head for even the most racially obsessed Caucasian MSNBC anchorman to hear the words “PGA tour” as “deep-rooted white insecurities about black male sexuality”? That’s way beyond dog-whistling, and somewhere between barking mad and frothing rabid.

#page#Still, now that “golf” and “Chicago” -- along with “Clint,” “Medicare,” “debt,” “jobs,” “foreign policy,” and “quantitative easing” -- are all racist code words, are there any words left that aren’t racist? Yes, here’s one:

“Negrohood.”

Not familiar with it? New York Assembly candidate Ben Akselrod used it the other day in a campaign mailout to Brooklyn electors, arguing that his opponent “has allowed crime to go up over 50 percent in our negrohood so far this year.”

Like Messrs. Dunn, Matthews, and O’Donnell, Ben Akselrod is frighteningly pasty white, and a Democrat, and so presumably has highly refined racial antennae. Had a campaign staffer suggested that Mr. Akselrod’s opponent was wont to wear “plus-fours” and had a “niblick,” obviously such naked racism would have been deleted in the first draft. But the more subtly allusive “negrohood” apparently just slipped through.

Mr. Akselrod now says it was a “typo.” Could happen to anyone. You’re typing “neighborhood,” and you leave out the “i,” and the “h” and “b,” and the “o” and “r” get mysteriously inverted. Either that, or your desktop came with Al Sharpton’s spellcheck. And then nobody at the campaign office reading through the mailer spotted it. Odd.

#ad#It’s only the beginning of September. So we’ve got two more months of this. I don’t know how it will play in the negrohoods of Chicago -- whoops, sorry, I apologize for saying “Chicago” -- but let me make a modest observation from having spent much of the last few months traveling round foreign parts. When you don’t have frighteningly white upscale liberals obsessing about the racist subtext of golf, it’s amazing how much time it frees up to talk about other stuff. For example, as dysfunctional as Greece undoubtedly is, if you criticize the government’s plans for public-pensions provision, there are no Chris Matthews types with such a highly evolved state of racial consciousness that they reflexively hear “watermelon” instead of the word “pensions.” So instead everyone discusses the actual text rather than the imaginary subtext. Which may be why political discourse in the euro zone is marginally less unreal than ours right now: At least they’re talking about “austerity”; over here we’re still spending, and more than ever.

Time’s Mark Halperin wrote this week that “Obama can’t win if he can’t swing the conversation away from the economy.” That’s a pretty amazing admission. The economy is the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters, and, beyond that, the central reality of Obama’s America. But to win the president has to steer clear. That doesn’t leave a lot else. Hence, the racism of golf, the war on women, the carcinogenic properties of Mitt Romney. Democrat strategy 1992: It’s the economy, stupid. Democrat strategy 2012: It’s the stupidity, economists.

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

Play Clinty For Me

Like William F. Gavin, I hugely enjoyed Clint Eastwood's turn last night, but I'm not sure I agree that it was "unintentionally hilarious" and that "he forgot his lines, lost his way." Clint is a brilliant actor, and a superb director of other actors (and I don't just mean a quarter-century ago: In the last five years, he's directed eight films). He's also, as Mr. Gavin observed, a terrific jazz improviser at the piano -- and, in film and music documentaries, an extremely articulate interviewee. So I wouldn't assume that the general tenor of his performance wasn't exactly as he intended. The hair was a clue: No Hollywood icon goes out on stage like that unless he means to.

John Hayward writes:

The intended recipient was not Mitt Romney, the convention delegates, or even Republican voters, but rather wavering independents. Clint was there to tell them it’s OK to find Obama, his ugly campaign operation, and his increasingly shrill band of die-hard defenders ridiculous. It’s OK to laugh at them.

I'm not sure he could have pulled that off if he'd delivered a slick telepromptered pitch. As Mr. Hayward suggests, the hard lines packed more of a punch for being delivered in the midst of a Bob Newhart empty-chair shtick from the Dean Martin show circa 1968. Indeed, they were some of the hardest lines of the convention and may well prove the take-home ("We own this country . . . Politicians are employees of ours . . . And when somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go"), but they seemed more effective for appearing to emerge extemporaneously from the general shambles.

The curse of political operatives is that they make everything the same. A guy smoothly reading platitudinous codswallop while rotating his head from the left-hand teleprompter to the right-hand teleprompter like clockwork as if he's at Centre Court watching the world's slowest Wimbledon rally is a very reductive idea of "professionalism." Even politicians you're well disposed to come across as slick bores in that format. Which is by way of saying Clint is too sharp and too crafty not to have known what he was doing.

Oh, and next time ’round, he should sing.

Incidentally, I'm not generally in favor of what Rob Long would call "working blue," but, if you're going to do it, doing anatomically impossible sex-act cross-talk with an invisible presidential straight-man in front of the Republican Convention is definitely the way to go.   

Rain of Terror

I would like to second Dennis Prager’s embarrassment at the cancellation of GOP Day One due to a little light drizzle. The symbolism is wretched: Digging America out of its multi-trillion-dollar hole requires boldness and bravery, not a compliant safety-first mentality that shuts down the town on the first drop of rain.

I live in a part of the United States where Mother Nature spends six months of the year trying to throttle the life out of you, and I reckon half the “severe” weather advisories issued by the National Weather Service for my neck of the woods are preposterous. No dictator will ever need to declare martial law in America. All he’ll need to do is issue a “severe weather advisory” and everyone will stay indoors until they're told it's safe to come out.

Cheek to Cheek

In America's longest war, no hearts and minds but plenty of heads:

Officials in southern Afghanistan say Taliban insurgents have beheaded 17 Afghan civilians. Authorities in Helmand province say the militants killed the 15 men and two women in Musa Qala district late Sunday because the group had organized a mixed-sex party with music and dancing - activities the Taliban disapproves.

As the blogger Scaramouche notes, "disapproves”?

This is the so-called "Voice of America." The attenuated euphemistic Princess Fairypants "voice" of the American media is part of the problem. Maggie Gallagher and the Taliban both disapprove of gay marriage, but only one of them's gonna chop your head off for it. And, if your vocabulary's so shrunken you only have one word for the two of them, you're doing something wrong.

Other than that, this short VoA report is pretty much business as usual. Aside from the decapitated civilians, how's that expensively trained Afghan security force holding up?

Hours after the beheadings, Taliban insurgents overran an Afghan military post in Helmand's Washir district in a pre-dawn attack, killing 10 Afghan troops.

Oh, well. Fortunately, not every Afghan soldier has quite so little to show for his training. This guy, for example:

Meanwhile, in eastern Afghanistan, NATO officials say an Afghan National Army soldier turned his weapon on two of the coalition's service members, killing them. NATO says its troops returned fire, killing the soldier.

The attack in Laghman province is the latest in a string of insider attacks this year, damaging trust between the two allies.

"Damaging trust"? See note above on anodyne, evasive language. They're not damaging their allies' trust, they're damaging their internal organs.

Democratic Women for Romney*

The Democrats have just released an ad called "Republican Women for Obama", in which a handful of women explain that they've voted Republican their entire lives until this Mitt Romney fellow came along and they decided he was just way too extreme. Also, they're shocked to discover, after voting Republican non-stop for the last 40 years, that apparently the GOP is opposed to abortion. Who knew?

Prominently featured among these lifelong Republican women is a striking brunette who is aghast to find out that Romney wants to reverse Roe v Wade. This totally Republicanly Republican GOP-type conservative-to-the-hilt woman has since been identified as Maria Ciano of Colorado. She's a registered Democrat, but don't let that fool you. Her accumulated Facebook "likes" over the years testify to her rock-ribbed Republicanism. They include Amy Goodman, MoveOn.org, Bernie Sanders, and a Facebook page called "I Love It When I Wake Up In the Morning and Obama Is President".

Wouldn't it be easier for the Dems just to hire Tina Fey to star in "Sarah Palin for Obama"?

(*forthcoming Romney ad featuring endorsements from lifelong liberal Democrat women Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Bush, Phyllis Schlafly, and me in a black cocktail dress)