Mark Steyn's Blog, page 22

The War on Children

The Democratic party, never inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, does have a tendency to flog him to death. So it is with a fellow called Todd Akin, a GOP Senate candidate who unburdened himself of some ill-advised thoughts on abortion and “legitimate rape,” and put Missouri back in play for the Democrats. Less ambitious political parties would be content with that little windfall, but the Dems have decided to make -- what’s his name again? Oh, yeah -- this guy Akin the face of the Republican party. I mean, Mitt pretty much sees “venture capitalism” as a fancy term for legitimate rape, right?

California’s Barbara Boxer opened the bidding this week in her familiar low-key style. “There is a war against women, and Romney and Ryan -- if they are elected -- would become its top generals,” Senator Boxer told a Planned Parenthood meeting. “There is a sickness out there in the Republican party, and I’m not kidding. Maybe they don’t like their moms or their first wives.” Reichsmarschall Romney and Generalissimo Ryan are both still married to their first wives, so it must be the moms. No wonder Ryan wants to throw his off a cliff.

To win the “war on women,” the party’s general staff are planning their own Normandy invasion, adding to their convention line-up a host of stellar “pro-choice” speakers, including Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria, Planned Parenthood’s head honchette Cecile Richards, NARAL Pro-Choice America abortion supremo Nancy Keenan, and Georgetown Law’s contraceptive coed Sandra Fluke. President Obama’s lavishly remunerated strategists have presumably run the focus groups and crunched the numbers, but, if I were a moderate, centrist, eternally indecisive swing-voter in a critical state and I switched on the Democrat convention to find a bunch of speakers warning about the threat to your abortion rights I would find it a very curious priority in the summer of 2012.

#ad#None of us can know what the world will be like four years from now, but one thing can be said for certain: An American woman will still enjoy her “right to choose.” Whether one supports or opposes abortion, the practical reality is that the biggest “threat” to your “right” to one is that you might have to drive a little bit further for it. Still, one should never underestimate the peculiar lens through which “progressives” view reality: The “war” on women boils down to Sandra Fluke, a 30-year-old schoolgirl, demanding Georgetown Law should pay for its students’ contraceptives -- notwithstanding that the entire cost of that four-year contraceptive bill works out to less than the first week’s paycheck of a Georgetown Law graduate’s first job (average starting salary: $160 grand per year). War is hell.

If you think Barbara Boxer’s right about General Romney’s war on woman, feel free to waste your vote. But what else is likely to happen between now and the next time you cast a presidential ballot? We’ve rehearsed the fiscal stuff in this space before: China becoming the world’s biggest economy, another American downgrade, total U.S. liabilities equivalent to about three times the entire planet’s GDP. A “non-partisan” Pew Research study says the American middle class faces its “worst decade in modern history” -- and the first bump down starts on January 1: The equally “non-partisan” Congressional Budget Office now says that the tax and budget changes due to take effect at the beginning of 2013 will put the country back in recession and increase unemployment. This is a revision of their prediction earlier this year that in 2013 the economy would contract by 1.3 percent. Now they say 2.9 percent. These days, CBO revisions only go one way -- down. They’re gonna need steeper graph paper. In a global economy, atrophy goes around like syphilis in the Gay Nineties: A moribund U.S. economy further mires Europe, and both slow growth in China, which means fewer orders for resource-rich nations.#...#Four wheels spinning in the mud, and none with a firm-enough grip to pull the vehicle back on to solid ground.

Oh, well, it was like that in the Thirties and then, as the ever-optimistic Paul Krugman likes to trill, the Second World War came along to stimulate the economy. Given that in Afghanistan the U.S. and its allies have just taken eleven years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer, I’m not sure I’d want to bet on the global-conflagration chips falling our way next time round.

But don’t worry, Obamacare will “lower costs.” Since passage of the bill in 2010, the CBO has revised its estimate of Obamacare’s gross costs over ten years. Can you guess in which direction, boys and girls? Yes, up from $944 billion to $1.856 trillion. That’s some “revision.” I wonder where it’ll be in another two years.

#page#Well, I’m not the CBO, but I’ll take a wild guess: Obamacare is going to be expensive on a scale unknown to European health systems. Look around you. Americans are not Swedes. Obesity rate in the United States: 36 percent; Sweden: 9.7 percent; Japan: 3.2 percent; China: 2.9 percent; India: 0.7 percent. Ours is a country where 78 million people (or about the entire population of Germany) are classified by the Centers for Disease Control as “obese” -- including over 40 million women. If 40 million women have it, isn’t that a “women’s health” issue? Perhaps even a bigger “women’s health” issue than the right of thirtysomething students to free contraception? It’s the first thing the average American of, say, 1950 would notice if you catapulted him forward from his mid-century Main Street to today: not how amazing all these computer gizmos are, but how large and sick today’s Americans look.

#ad#As George Will pointed out this week, nanny-state solutions (such as Michelle Obama’s current campaign to get us all nibbling organic endives) don’t work: Overweight kids in schools with high-calorie junk food, 35.5 percent; overweight kids in schools that banned all the bad stuff, 34.8 percent. Indeed, the bloating of government, of entitlements, of debt, and the increase in obesity track each other pretty closely over the last four decades. If all those debt graphs showing how we’ve looted our future to bribe the present are too complicated for you, look out the window: We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production. And, to the Chinese and many others around the world pondering whether America has the self-discipline to get its house in order, a trip to the mall provides its own answer.

So we can’t fight a war in Afghanistan, but we can fight a “war on women” that only exists in upscale liberal feminists’ heads. We can’t do anything about exploding rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but, if you define “health care” as forcing a Catholic institution to buy $8 contraception for the scions of wealth and privilege, we’re right on top of it. And above all, we’re doing it for the children, if by “doing it” you mean leaving them with a transgenerational bill unknown to human history -- or engaging in what Boston University’s Larry Kotlikoff, speaking at the International Institute of Public Finance in Dresden last week, called “child fiscal abuse.”

If that sounds a trifle overheated, how about#...#hmm, “legitimate fiscal rape”? No? Then let’s call it a “war on children.” Unlike the “war on women,” it’s real.

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

Howell Raines at the 19th Hole

Ever since the news that Augusta National Golf Club has decided to admit ladies, I've been meaning to dust off my column from a decade ago on The New York Times' deranged obsession with the subject. But I see NR cruiser Ed Driscoll has done it for me. Corner readers may enjoy my statistical analysis of the impact of the Times campaign.

Less Tea, More Flash

I wrote here yesterday about the accelerating campaign of "green-on-blue" violence -- that's to say, NATO-trained, NATO-paid Afghans turning on their western "allies" and killing them. A handful of readers reminded me of this passage from George MacDonald Fraser's very first Flashman novel, set 170 years ago in the First Anglo-Afghan War:

This I will say for the Afghan – he is a treacherous, evil brute when he wants to be, but while he is your friend he is a first-rate fellow. The point is, you must judge to a second when he is going to cease to be friendly. There is seldom any warning.

Indeed. When Fraser wrote those words in 1969, three generations of Indian Army veterans knew exactly what he meant. As I wrote in NR a year-and-a-half ago apropos the then latest grim jest on Western "nation-building":

A dozen pages of a Flashman yarn has a sounder grasp of the Afghan psyche than nine years of multilateral “nation-building”. Which is why we’re going round and round in circles in an almighty Groundhogistan where a man gets sentenced to death for converting to Christianity under a court system created, funded and protected by us.

The phony-baloney Three Cups Of Tea is handed out at American grade schools and by the Pentagon to 'Stan-bound officers. I take it as read that it would be a hate crime to read Flashman in an American schoolhouse, and probably affront the diversity-celebrators at the Pentagon, too. In the end you can be politically correct or you can be a great power -- but not both.

Class Valedictorian

The pitiful self-inflicted tragedy of the west's "strategy" in Afghanistan is summed up in this opening sentence:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A newly recruited Afghan village policeman opened fire on his American allies on Friday, killing two US service members minutes after they handed him his official weapon in an inauguration ceremony.

There's nothing clever or sophisticated about this attack. You don't have to plot, or disguise yourself, or break into a secure facility. They come to you, to your village. They even give you money. And then they give you the gun. And then you shoot them.

Do they cover that in Pentagon-approved must-read Three Cups Of Tea? Afghanistan is just another in the long roll-call of America's un-won wars these past six decades - except that it's taken longer to lose than the others, and in their barbarity the locals demonstrate an almost gleeful contempt for a lavishly endowed enemy with everything except the one thing it needs: strategic purpose. This ought to be a national scandal, but the coverage has dwindled down to nothing but sedating banalities:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A man in an Afghan police uniform shot and killed a U.S. service member on Sunday, a U.S. Defense Department official said, raising the death toll to 10 in such attacks in the space of just two weeks.

The surge in violence by Afghan allies against their international partners has raised doubts about the ability of the two forces to work together at a key transition time.

"International partners... work together... key transition..." As I wrote here five months ago:

Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on September 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.

Re: We Meant to Do That

Jonah, I liked that scene better the first time round:

ROB REINER: The last time Spinal Tap toured America, they were, uh, booked into 10,000 seat arenas, and 15,000 seat venues, and it seems that now, on their current tour they're being booked into 1,200 seat arenas, 1,500 seat arenas, and uh I was just wondering, does this mean uh...the popularity of the group is waning?

BAND MANAGER DAVID AXELROD: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no...no, no, not at all. We have plenty of time for big stadium gigs. But our focus right now is on intentionally limiting crowds by restricting tickets - to allow the band to better connect with fans.

ROB REINER [NODDING]: Yeah.

Dreams From My Father, Calls From My Brother

A few months ago, on the Hugh Hewitt show, I was asked to respond to President Obama's remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast, at which he said that he believed in “living by the principle that we are our brother’s keeper." And I reprised a bit from my book, After America (out next month in paperback!):

In a TV infomercial a few days before his election, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper”.

Hmm. Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When Barack Obama claims that “I am my brother’s keeper”, what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper.

Dinesh D'Souza met Barack's brother, George Obama, earlier this year for his new documentary. A couple of days ago he got a call from him:

He was a bit flustered, and soon informed me that his young son was sick with a chest condition.  He pleaded with me to send him $1,000 to cover the medical bills.  Since George was at the hospital I asked him to let me speak to a nurse, and she confirmed that George’s son was indeed ill.  So I agreed to send George the money through Western Union.  He was profusely grateful.  But before I hung up I asked George, “Why are you coming to me?”  He said, “I have no one else to ask.”  Then he said something that astounded me, “Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.”

In fact, as D'Souza points out, George's actual brother is "a multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world" who talks repeatedly about our obligation to be our brother’s keeper:

Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help.

So much for spreading the wealth around.

Roger Kimball adds:

I’ve long known that abstract benevolence, a specialty of liberals, was eerily compatible with practical indifference or even cruelty. (I go into some of the reasons for this in “What’s Wrong with Benevolence” in my new book The Fortunes of Permanence.) But this spectacle of callous familial neglect by, as Dinesh rightly describes him, the most powerful man in the world is something special.

As Roger says, abstractions are what matter for contemporary liberalism: Slap a "Celebrate Diversity" sticker on your bumper, and you'll barely notice you live in an upscale white enclave and send your kids to a school where the only diversity in view is the janitor. But the gulf between Obama's life and self-mythologizing goes beyond that. He was happy to exploit his exotic Kenyan family as part of his remarkably canny self-promotion, yet in the end the composite characters with invented narratives are far more real to him than a non-composite brother with an actual sick kid. Because the composites know their place - bit-players in The Barack Obama Story.

Obama's "fundamental belief" is that "I am my brother's keeper". Instead, Obama's brother's keeper is "one of the biggest right-wing douchebags of our nation today". As John Hinderaker says, if Mitt Romney's nephew needed an operation and Rachel Maddow had to pay for it, this might be a story.

The Man with No Plan

Americans, according to a Winston Churchill quote of uncertain provenance, always do the right thing after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. More verifiably, Sir Winston, upon being asked if he had any criticism of the United States, replied tersely: “Toilet paper too thin, newspapers too fat.”

But that was then. Today America is a land of two-ply toilet paper and one-ply newspapers. Being made of sterner stuff than Churchill’s posterior, the eco-Left want to ban two-ply bathroom tissue on environmental grounds, which would devastate the economy of Canada, whence comes most American bathroom tissue, at least until the Canadians, being the House of Saud of toilet paper, start shipping it to China, as they’re now doing with their oil ever since Obama told them to go lay pipe somewhere else.

#ad#As for those once-fat newspapers, they’re now so thin that they’ve only got room for the very mostest important news, like whether 30-year-old law-school coeds have sufficient access to federally-mandated contraception and (breaking!) the dog Mitt Romney put on the roof of his car in the early Eighties. You have to be able to prioritize.

That’s the genius of Romney’s vice-presidential pick: It explicitly invites Americans to “do the right thing.” Insofar as he’s known to the electorate at all, Paul Ryan is the man with the plan -- the guy who understands that multi-trillion-dollar spendaholic government cannot continue. On that subject, Obama is the man with no plan, and no plans to get any plan. Yet the mere selection of Ryan has already improved the quality of the Obama campaign: Two weeks ago, they were denouncing Romney for killing a woman by cunningly giving her cancer five years after laying off her husband. Now they’re denouncing Ryan for killing off Medicare. The former is the opening scene from the straight-to-video Carcinogenic Zombie Mormon Venture Capitalist Apocalypse; the latter has a very very teensy-weensy gossamer thread of connection to the issues facing the United States. So we should congratulate the Democrats on a modest re-acquaintance with reality. With Ryan on the ticket, the central question facing America can’t be ducked.

As for the other half of that Churchill line -- exhausting all the other possibilities -- last week a man called Floyd Corkins shot another man called Leo Johnson, the security guard at the Family Research Council, a “conservative” group, according to the muted media coverage, or a “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spray that term around like champagne on a NASCAR podium. Mr. Corkins, an “LGBT volunteer,” told his victim, “I don’t like your politics.” In his backpack, he had one box of ammunition and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Had he had one Chick-fil-A sandwich and 15 boxes of ammunition, he might have done more damage. Or then again perhaps not, given that, as bloggers Kathy Shaidle and “the Phantom” pointed out, he reached his target and then started “monologuing,” as they say in The Incredibles.

Be that as it may, Mr. Corkins decided to shoot people because of a chicken-sandwich-chain owner’s position on same-sex marriage. That’s what Floyd Corkins thinks is the most pressing issue facing the United States. Perhaps he saw himself as the Gavrilo Princip of our time. Like Floyd Corkins, young Princip was not the sharpest knife in the transgender clinic -- the cyanide pill he took after the assassination was past its sell-by date; to evade capture, his co-conspirator jumped into the River Miljacka, but it was only five inches deep, and a man standing up to his ankles in the middle of a river in a large city tends to attract attention. Nevertheless, Princip’s assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand plunged Europe into war and brought down the Austrian, German, Russian, and Turkish empires with consequences that plague us to this day (not least the post-Ottoman Middle East). History does not record whether Princip embarked on his mission with 15 pieces of wienerschnitzel or Sachertorte in his backpack, but he changed the course of history. Perhaps Floyd Corkins had similar dreams: He would be the flamer that lit the fuse to liberate a continent from the oppressiveness of homophobic waffle fries.

I’m not blaming Floyd Corkins’s actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he’s the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities -- the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A non-homophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed-rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities . . .

No sane man could compete on this turf. Romney declined to come out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, but the other week he did come out in favor of gay scoutmasters -- whether just for scouts or for the rest of us too was unclear. But it doesn’t matter. He could announce he was in favor of closing Gitmo and retraining every detainee as a gay scoutmaster, he could declare an amnesty for every undocumented gay scoutmaster north of the Rio Grande -- and it still wouldn’t be enough. He’s still Mitt Romney and he’ll put your dog on the roof, your wife in the ground, and your Negro houseboy in the cotton field out back -- or, as the vice president of the United States told a mostly black crowd in Virginia the other day, “he gonna put y’all back in chains.”

#page#A few years ago, attempting to impose a “European constitution” upon the Continent, the Eurocrat elite took to warning their dull-witted peoples that if they were impertinent enough not to support their betters they’d be on a one-way ticket back to the concentration camps. “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” the Dutch prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, warned the Netherlands before the referendum. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe.” The idea that it’s a choice between an unreadable hyper-statist laundry list or the gas chambers seemed a wee bit overheated. But to their credit (not an expression I have occasion to use very often re the Europeans) the Dutch and even the French rejected this ludicrous rationale. And, to be fair, death camps and Nazi occupation are all well within living memory. Now the vice president is telling Americans it’s a choice between Obama-Biden multi-trillion-dollar shop-till-you-drop spend-till-you-end government#...#or 19th-century slavery. Swing low, sweet vice-presidential chariot.

For the record, Obama has already made $716 billion in Medicare cuts to pay for Obamacare. That’s three-quarters of a trillion. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was in Ottawa last week asking Her Majesty’s Canadian Government to chip in for the euro-zone bailout. The euro zone includes some of the richest nations in history, but it’s still not enough. And the entire euro-zone bailout is $450 billion -- or a little over half the cost of the first Obama stimulus. Under Obama’s no-plan plan, there’s not enough money on the planet.

#ad#Underneath the poseur narcissism, the half-wit demagoguery, and the 13-figure innumeracy is bleak reality: a flatline economy, underwater property, declining social mobility, half the population getting a check each month from the government and with minimum-wage service jobs as the only alternative to long-term dependency.

If you seriously think this election is about gay marriage or affordable contraception, you’re about to do to America what Gavrilo Princip did to the Habsburg Empire. 

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

The Law Is a Culturally Significant Ass

Saddam Hussein's bottom has wound up costing British taxpayers thousands of pounds. From London's Daily Mail:

Soldier who took buttocks from Saddam Hussein statue has charges against him dropped

In fact, it was a fellow from the SAS, Britain's special forces, and he only took the left buttock. As far as I can deduce from the story, the whereabouts of Saddam's right buttock are unknown. Anyway:

Officers arrested Nigel Ely after Iraqi officials claimed he had 'illegally removed cultural property'... Mr Ely, 52, from Derby, lambasted the case as a waste of time and money.

He said: 'This is ridiculous. The police investigation cost tens of thousands of pounds and my fees are being paid by legal aid. Where’s the common sense?

'The case was a complete waste of police time and my time. Having part of the statue of Saddam is like having a piece of the Berlin wall. It is a historical artifact...' He helped himself to the 2ft left buttock by using a hammer and crowbar to prise off the piece after American soldiers overturned the former Iraqi leader's statue in Baghdad in 2003...

Iraqi leaders made a complaint via the Iraqi Embassy, claiming that the piece was part of the country's heritage.

Saddam's left buttock is certainly part of the country's heritage, but it seems an odd priority for the Iraqi government. Nevertheless:

Derbyshire police launched an investigation and arrested Mr Ely on suspicion of breaching Section 8 of the Iraqi Sanctions Order 2003 earlier this year.

Under the order, anyone possessing Iraqi cultural property must give it to the police.

Officers searched Nigel’s Herefordshire cottage but failed to find it. Mr Ely was released without charge.

Police now say they are not convinced the metal is from the Saddam statue.

A spokesman for Derbyshire police said: 'Despite a thorough investigation, the piece alleged to be from the statue has not been recovered and we found evidence to cast doubt on the authenticity of its origin."

Hmm. If you've never seen it, how can you know it's not the authentic left buttock? And why's the guy holding it in the accompanying photograph? And how come Derbyshire constabulary are searching a Herefordshire cottage over a theft from Iraq a decade ago? No matter. I'm sure everyone had a grand old time. The British police are among the most useless in the world and launching an in-depth investigation into Saddam Hussein's missing rear end seems almost too perfectly symbolic.

P.S. I gather the elusive right buttock, cursed by a powerful imam to reign down death on any who try to tap its destructive powers, has been optioned by Harrison Ford for Indiana Jones And The Buttock Of Doom.

International Jewish Conspiracy Deepens

Hungarian parliamentarian Csanad Szegedi, who famously railed about the "Jewishness" of the political class, finds himself facing a sudden mid-life career change:

Leader Of Anti-Semitic Party In Hungary Discovers He's Jewish

I wrote about Mr Szegedi's Jobbik Party a couple of years back:

Krisztina Morvai, the attractive blonde Jobbik member just elected to the Euro-parliament, is a former winner of the Freddie Mercury Prize for raising AIDS awareness. I can’t be the only political analyst who wishes that, instead of a victory speech last Sunday, Doktor Morvai had stood on the table in black tights and bellowed out, “We Are The Champions.”

Like our chums at Canada’s “human rights” commissions, Doktor Morvai is a “human rights” activist—and, indeed, a former delegate to the UN Women’s Rights Committee. One thing a woman has a right to is an uncircumcised penis. In the course of her successful election campaign, the good doctor told Hungarian Jews to “go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails.”

Looks like Mr Szegedi will be out of luck at this year's Jobbik Christmas party.

Cliff Notes

The grannycidal maniac is back:

The new 41-second spot begins by showing new text that asks: “Remember what Paul Ryan did to Granny?”

After again showing a man in a dark suit pushing a frightened elderly woman in a wheelchair to the edge of a cliff, the new text reads: “Mitt Romney made his choice...”

Once the man has again thrown the woman over the edge, the text continues: “Now you have to make yours,” and concludes by asking: “Is America beautiful without Medicare?”

Chris Matthews gets leg tingles just thinking about it:

The commercial shows a Ryan stand-in sending a grandmother to her screaming death. Matthews gushed, "That ad reflects what the Ryan budget is all about. If you're rich, we take care of you. If you're poor, off the cliff."

Since the Dems have decided to take out a 24/7 ad buy at KLIF, where the hits just keep on coming, we might as well meet them halfway:

Yes, there is a cliff. We're all headed for it, we're all going over, we're all gonna die. Obama has spent the last four years building an expressway to the cliff, ending in a ski-jump into the abyss.

If the media-Democrat alliance want a clifftop election, bring it on. If the Dems are determined to make Ryan own the plummeting granny, make them own the cliff. Unlike the plummeting granny, the cliff is real.