Mark Steyn's Blog, page 23

The Real Racism in This Rotten Racist Country

While Harry Reid & Co obsess about color, the world is silent about the all too real racism in solidly Democrat Washington State, where progressives celebrate every diversity but one - "Americans Demand Canadian-Free Shopping At Costco":

Annoyed at parking problems and long lineups at the stateside Costco in Bellingham, Wa., some residents there have set up a Facebook page calling for American-only hours when they can shop Canadian-free.

"Them Canadians can be rude. The lines are crazy. We aren't on a vacation and have an RV to hang out in like those Canadians," the page states.

Plenty of Canadians, however, expressed outrage.One self-identified Canuck went so far as to report the page to Facebook administrators, saying it "clearly supports racism, harassment."

Another, identified in his profile as Andre Rheaume, launched into an attack.

"It just comes down to flat broke ... jealous americans that really can't afford to go shopping anymore so they need to put the blame on Canadians where the economy is in much greater shape. Sour grapes I say! Here's a loonie... go buy yourself a life (sic)!"

But Bellingham residents are sick of having to listen to pushy foreigners talking Canadian in a loud voice and waving their stupid-colored money around as if anybody knows what it is:

How do so many middle-aged Canadians get time off from work on weekdays?

We say we have a doctor's appointment and we may be some time. Next?

A Canadian woman made a U-turn in front of me on Guide Meridian across all 4 lanes of traffic!

Yeah, baby! Street signs are for compliant, submissive American types not wild, crazy Vancouver housewives.

But local business leaders say they need Canadians to come here to do the shopping Americans won't do:

Business leaders in Whatcom county responded quickly, denounced the page and insisted that the opinions posted there did not reflect the community at large. Moorlag called the page "unrealistic" in its expectations.

"I've heard some Americans say, 'I just want to go to Costco and be by myself when I'm doing my shopping and not have to run into 18,000 people,' " he said. "But if [only a handful of people are] shopping in that store, it won't be in business very long."

Dodson also stressed the need for the county's business community to dispel what he called "anti-Canadian" mentalities...

The President, meanwhile, has yet to say a word on this epidemic of Canuckophobia, too busy holding his Ramadan banquet to host a single stereotype-dispelling Victoria Day cook-out and massive storewide clear-out sale on the White House lawn.

UPDATE: The War of 1812 Redux? (You may get the impression that for some Bellingham residents "Canadian" is, as the professional race types say, a code word.)

The Veep and the Stakes

My weekend column was, as they say, overtaken by events, and pretty dramatically so. But, given that its central point was that multi-trillion-dollar spendaholic government is an existential threat, if it had to be overtaken by events, I'd rather it was overtaken by Paul Ryan than by almost anyone else.

Republicans won big in 2010 because the issues were front and center. In presidential years, personalities tend to be front and center, and, for whatever reason, the GOP is prone to problems on that front. Putting Ryan on a national ticket ensures that the critical issue of our age will be on the ballot this November. Whatever the outcome, it has the measure of the times, and for that I salute Romney. If the Democrats are frantically trying to reduce Ryan to his plan, then Obama is the no-plan candidate, and we'll see how that pans out.

I have a lot of favorite Ryan moments, but this is one of them:

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?

Now we will. If the American people vote for the no-plan team, they can't say they weren't warned.

Milquetoast Mitt

The other day, I passed a Republican-party county office here in my home state, its window attractively emblazoned with placards declaring “Believe in America. Romney 2012” and “New Hampshire Believes. Romney 2012.” There’s not a lot of evidence for the latter proposition, but I’m certainly willing to believe that Romney believes that New Hampshire believes. An hour or two later, I chanced to be passing a television set just as the station went to break. The words “WE BELIEVE” appeared on the screen, followed by youthful hands raised to a clear blue sky at the dawn of a new day, shafts of sunlight gleaming through ears of corn, a puppy gamboling across a meadow, a kitten playfully pawing, happy green-T-shirted volunteers of many races unloading a recycling carton#...#and I thought, despite myself, “Well, say what you like, but the reassuring vapidity of the Romney campaign is at least getting more professional.” At the end, in the spot where the off-screen voice is supposed to say “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message,” it instead said: “Introducing Purina One Beyond: a new food for your cat or dog.”

Well, what do I know? By contrast, the Obama campaign’s theme is “Forward” -- which, in the context of a second term for Mister You-Didn’t-Build-That, I’d carelessly assumed was a poignant allusion to “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

#ad#But apparently the focus groups are oblivious to Lord Tennyson, and “Forward” is seen as sunny and optimistic rather than a deranged lemming-like march into the abyss. In that sense, “Forward” is unusually honest for the Democrats, at least compared with their recent assertions that Romney hasn’t paid any taxes in ten years and personally gives women terminal cancer. “Forward” means “Even more of the same”: You can’t say he isn’t warning us.

Against this Romney offers “Believe in America.” It’s a slogan designed not to frighten the horses and, like Purina One Beyond, appeal to both cats and dogs, Republicans and Democrats -- or at least those mercurial “independents” on whose whims and fancies the fate of the republic depends. If it were up to me, the campaign slogan would be “You’re screwed, losers. Steyn 2012” -- or, after yielding to the consultants’ internals showing that moderates want something more sunny and upbeat, maybe “Get real, you chumps. Steyn 2012.” That’s the reason I’m not running. Well, that and the Hawaiian birth certificate.

I wouldn’t claim to know what America believes or even what “New Hampshire Believes,” but this is what I believe -- that another four years of the present statist ascendancy will seal America’s fate. As noted here previously, the International Monetary Fund predicts that China will become the world’s dominant economic power by 2016. So the guy elected in November will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to know what it feels like to be the global also-ran. Even this, however, understates the size of catastrophe the United States faces. There are no precedents in history for a great power spending itself to death on the scale America is doing. Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Personal debt per citizen is currently about 50 grand, but at least you got a La-Z-Boy recliner and a gas-fired barbecue out of it. Obama has spent America’s future, and left no more trace than if he and his high-school “choom gang” had wheeled a barrow of 5 trillion in large notes behind the gym and used them for rolling paper. Right now, combined total debt in the United States is just shy of $700,000 per family. Add in the so-called “unfunded liabilities” that a normal American business would have to include in its SEC filings but that U.S.-government accounting conveniently absolves itself from, and you’re talking about a debt burden per family of about a million bucks. In other words, look around you: the paved roads, the landscaped shopping mall, the Starbucks and the juice bar and the mountain-bike store#…#There’s nothing holding the joint up.

Hmm. “There’s nothing holding the joint up. Steyn 2012”: How’s that poll with the focus groups? Not exactly “Morning in America,” is it? But what happens when you blithely ignore debt for a few decades? Here’s a headline from the Wall Street Journal’s “Smart Money” this very week: “More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits.” Maybe that’s the slogan. “It’s twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt.”

Half the country is entirely unaware of the existential threat Obama-sized government represents, and Mitt seems in no hurry to alert them to what’s at stake, save for occasional warnings that if we’re not careful America will end up like Europe. We should be so lucky. The more likely scenario is something closer to the more corrupt and decrepit fiefdoms of Latin America. Look at the underlying assumptions of the Mitt-gives-you-cancer ad -- that in America a businessman is somehow responsible not only for his employee’s health, but that of the employee’s family members years after said employee has left said employ. No Euro-socialist would even understand the basis of the attack: In its assumptions about the ever more tortuous and farther flung burdens the state can place upon private business, it is quintessentially American.

This election represents the last exit ramp before the death spiral. (Yes, yes, I know: too long for a campaign button.) Obama has spent the last four years making things worse. More debt, more dependency, more delusion. For Act Two, he’s now touting the auto bailout as a model for#…#everything! “I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” In the last three years, he has “created” 2.6 million new jobs -- a number that does not even keep up with the number of (legal) immigrants who arrive each month. Obama does not “create” jobs, he creates disabled people: In the same period as 2.6 million Americans signed on with new employers, 3.1 million signed on at the Social Security Disability Office. Obama is the first president in history to create more disabled people than workers. He is the biggest creator of disabled people on the planet. He has disabled more people than the Japanese tsunami. More Americans have been disabled by Obama than have been given cancer by Mitt Romney. “Ask yourself, ‘Are you more disabled now than you were four years ago?’ Obama 2012.” Followed by the wheelchair logo with the Obama “O” where the wheel should be. In the Democrats’ Dependistan, the wheelchair ramp is downhill all the way.

I support Romney, and I’m not rattled by a bad week’s polls. But I am bothered that Romney’s insipid message does not rise to the challenge this nation faces. Maybe the milquetoast pantywaist candy-assed soft-focus “Believe in America” shtick will prove sufficient under a relentless barrage of nakedly thuggish attack ads designed to Barry Goldwater the guy. But John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, thinks not: “This is a race he should be able to win,” he wrote, “so if he loses, it won’t be because Obama won it. It will be because he lost it.”

Just so. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour is late, and the man needs to get in the game.

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

Novel Theory

The prime minister of Canada's cuts to climate-change research led to the Colorado movie massacre.

Re: To Hell with You People, Again

Jonah, it's not just that Mitt Romney hasn't paid any taxes since 1975 and that Bain Capital is the planet's largest distributor of E. coli which it manufactures in petri dishes offshored to Mitt's safe deposit box in the Cayman Islands, but that Mitt will kill your loved ones five years after his minions lay you off. Just because he can. He doesn't have to meet you. You might show no outward signs of ill health. You might even have a job and health insurance. But you bear the Mark of Mitt, and decades later when you keel over and expire it'll be because he once laid off your brother, or your cousin, or your hairdresser's sister, or someone who once heard something from someone who knows Harry Reid.

Don't get hung up on details, folks. Details are how the vampire capitalist seduces you into surrendering to his vise-like death grip. Remember, when Obama was a youngster, he fought for social justice and opened up a Jakarta dog shelter in his digestive tract. But the young Romney traveled around Europe opening numbered bank accounts in Zurich and biting women in the neck.

So don't fall for esoteric concepts like details. Details are for subprime mortgages. Like David Axelrod says, keep to the big picture here. Mitt Kills. Warning From The Surgeon General: Voting For Romney Will Result In Death. Voting For Romney While Pregnant Will Result In Your Unborn Child's Death. Mitt = Death. Silence = Acceptance.

And when Mitt responds by chuckling and saying, "Well, I can't comment because a mass killing spree's not part of my campaign, and Nancy and Harry and the oppo-research lads at that super PAC are all good friends of mine", that just shows how vicious and murderous he is. 

Pipe Dreams

Previously on Dallas:

Only six months ago the Canadians were planning to ship nearly all of this newly developed oil to Texas via the Keystone Pipeline. Environmentalists, however, swore the pipeline would be built over their dead bodies and President Obama, not wanting to be left with no natural constituencies except single mothers and minorities, decided to appease environmentalists and block the pipeline.

The Canadians were shocked. They had long planned to sell this oil south of the border. Canada is already our largest supplier of foreign oil and it was inconceivable that we wouldn't want to take more it instead of relying on Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, and other unpredictable sources.

America had been offered first refusal, and had refused it. So, after they got over being shocked, Canada looked elsewhere for business partners. Last week, the Chinese announced they were buying a Canadian company with major interests in those oil sands that Obama & Co have no interest in. Whatever one's feelings about this Sino-Canuck deal, it does not appear to fall under the jurisdiction of a New York senator and a Massachusetts congressman. Nevertheless:

I am speaking, of course, of Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, both of whom have decided we are in a position to tell a Chinese company that it cannot acquire a Canadian company because… well, because we're Americans and the world has to pay attention to what we say.

My weekend column concludes with a tweet from Huffington Post/MSNC honcho Howard Fineman on what Washington can learn from the London Olympics:

“Brits long ago lost their empire,” he tweeted, “but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.”

Fineman and other lefties who commend this line might want to ponder on the likelihood of America declining "gracefully" as opposed to imploding through a pitiful Schumeresque combination of hollow bullying and self-destructive buffoonery: The Brokest Nation in History thinks it can dictate to its principal energy supplier and its principal loan shark what business deals it will permit them to do. Good luck with that.

Donner und Blitzen!

The last time I had cause to mention the Dutch politician Piet Hein Donner was in my foreword to Geert Wilders' book:

In the “most tolerant nation in Europe,” there’s still plenty of tolerance. What won’t the Dutch tolerate? In 2006, the justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, suggested there would be nothing wrong with sharia if a majority of Dutch people voted in favor of it — as, indeed, they’re doing very enthusiastically in Egypt and other polities blessed by the Arab Spring. Mr. Donner’s previous response to “Islamic radicalism” was (as the author recalls in the pages ahead) to propose a new blasphemy law for the Netherlands.

But a few weeks back Mijnheer Donner started singing a different tune. No more Sharia and Islamic blasphemy laws. Instead, "the Dutch Interior Minister is sounding an awful lot like Geert Wilders”:

The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.

A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: "The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society..."

The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because, according to Donner, "it is not the government's job to integrate immigrants." The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and will also impose tougher measures against Muslim immigrants who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress. More specifically, the government will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013.

If necessary, the government will introduce extra measures to allow the removal of residence permits from immigrants who fail their integration course...

Whatever the practical effect of these measures, Mr. Donner joins the German chancellor, the British prime minister and the then-French-president in at least rhetorically abandoning multiculturalism. Here's how the interior minister used to talk:

After applauding Queen Beatrix for respecting Islam by not insisting that a Muslim leader shake hands with her during a visit to the Mobarak Mosque in The Hague, Donner said: "A tone that I do not like has crept into the political debate on integration. A tone of: 'Thou shalt assimilate. Thou shalt adopt our values in public. Be reasonable, do it our way.' That is not my approach."

But it is now. We'll see how long Mr. Donner's new approach lasts. In France, M Sarkozy's momentary butchness ended with his ejection from office, in an election in which (according to some analysts) the Muslim vote provided M Hollande with his margin of victory. The slow dawn of reality about "multiculturalism" may yet be eclipsed by demographic calculations of electoral viability.

If Wishes Were Prompters...

Barack Obama rebuking Hillary Clinton in February 2008:

Don’t tell me that words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words?

President Obama in February 2009:

Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office.

Just words?

Deficit in January 2009: $800 billion.

Deficit promised by Obama for January 2013: $400 billion.

Actual deficit right now: $1.26 trillion.

So he increased the deficit he inherited by half. So all his words were accurate except "cut".

Whether or not words don't matter, Barack Obama's words don't.

Bonus: Neither do his graphs:

Unemployment Rate With And Without The Recovery Plan

Unemployment rate Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed his recovery plan: 5.6%

Unemployment rate Obama predicted in July 2012 if NO stimulus: 6%

Actual (official, understated) unemployment rate for July 2012: 8.3%

This should not be a close race.

Olympic Spectacle

I scrammed out of London a few days before the Olympics began, but after getting an earful on what the locals make of it. On the whole, the residents of that great city would rather the honor of hosting the world’s most disruptive sporting event had gone to some joint that needs the publicity more -- Alma Ata, or Ouagadougou, or Oakland. In 21st-century London, traffic moves at fewer miles per hour than it did before the internal-combustion engine was invented without the added complication of fleets of Third World thug bureaucrats and the permanent floating crap game of transnationalist freeloaders being dumped on its medieval street plan. Nevertheless, having drawn the short straw of hosting the games, Londoners felt it a point of honor that the city be able to demonstrate the ability to ferry minor globalist hangers-on from their favorite whorehouse in Mayfair to the Olympic Village in the unfashionable East End in time for the quarter-finals of the flatwater taekwondo.

#ad#The psychology of the traffic cop enters into the opening ceremony, too. One becomes inordinately fearful that the giant Middle Earth trash compactor will not arise on cue, or the dry-ice machine will fail to blow smoke up Voldemort’s skirt, or one of the massed ranks of top-hatted mutton-whiskered extras recreating the Industrial Revolution in hip-hop will miss a stomp. And you’re so grateful to have dodged these calamities that it never occurs to you to wonder whether taking 40 minutes to do the Industrial Revolution in interpretive dance was a good idea in the first place. Britons seem unusually touchy on the subject, touchier than they’ve been since the week of the Princess of Wales’s death, when the prudent pedestrian on the streets of Kensington avoided catching the eye of the natives, lest they club one to a pulp for being insufficiently maudlin and lachrymose. A Conservative member of parliament who made the mistake of tweeting his thoughts without running them by the party’s focus groups was disowned by his colleagues and forced into groveling public recantation. It seems his now-disowned tweet that the whole thing was a load of codswallop was an unfortunate typing error and that what he’d actually meant to say was that the highlight of the evening, Government Health Care: The Musical, was far too riveting to be confined to a mere two and a half hours.

I would be intrigued to know what the Queen made of it, once safely back at the Palace with a stiff drink. The last time Her Majesty opened an Olympics, in Montreal in 1976, she did a quick bienvenue and left it at that. This time round she was inveigled into participating in a kind of upmarket variety-show sketch in which James Bond (Daniel Craig) called at Buckingham Palace to escort her to the stadium. Very droll -- although one felt a little queasy watching it, as if this was one of those late-night ideas kicked around by producers and directors (“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get the Queen to do a bit with Daniel?”) that might have been better left on the fantasy wish list.

Turning the Queen into her own Queen impersonator (as Commentary’s John Podhoretz put it) underlined that vague unsettling feeling you get walking around Central London that these days it’s the theme park of a great capital rather than an actual one. The iconic red telephone boxes, for example, are currently the home of eccentric “artwork” -- in Covent Garden, a statue of a giraffe busts through the roof of one and nibbles the leaves overhead. Meanwhile, the red boxes without giraffes have non-working phones, stink of urine, and are plastered with prostitutes’ business cards -- though even these have a quaintly dated, semi-parodic quality about them: In the one round the corner from the Houses of Parliament, a Russian lady promises clients “the ultimate Soviet Union.” Like the Queen’s, it’s a 007 gag, but from the Roger Moore era.

#page#Yes, yes, London is doing a better job than most Olympic hosts of subverting the Games’ totalitarian aesthetic -- deflating the synthesized bombast of the Chariots of Fire theme through the presence of Mr. Bean suggested a rare sense of proportion about the whole circus. “Do you like the way we’re not deliberately winning all the medals?” my old friend Boris Johnson, now and somewhat improbably the mayor of London (and even more incredibly Britain’s prime minister–in–waiting), said to a reporter from the Irish Times the other day. But where was that much-vaunted British sense of irony on opening night? The overhead camera settled on robotic formations of grateful apple-cheeked urchins in a giant children’s ward spelling out the letters N-H-S like a Busby Berkeley chorus in Gold Diggers of 1935 -- and, horrifyingly, they seemed to mean it. Had the pageant been truer to life, the patients would have left their hospital beds riddled with C. difficile, MRSA, septicemia, and the other parting gifts that attend a stay in an NHS hospital. But no; when the state religion of government medicine comes up, the dark irony of Danny Boyle, the epitome of Blair-era Cool Britannia, withers and dies like a geriatric waiting for her hip replacement. And all this in the week that the nation’s doctors are going on strike.

#ad#The lack of basic awareness is remarkable. To that ever-dwindling band of Americans who believe in truly private health care, the NHS is a byword for disease and degradation. On the other hand, to Continentals who believe in clean, efficient universal health care, the NHS is a byword for disease and degradation. Yet the British delusion that the NHS is “the envy of the world” is indestructible. Years ago, in London’s Daily Telegraph, I carelessly remarked that, while one might be able to find a Bhutanese yak farmer somewhere upcountry who envied Britons the NHS, nobody else on the planet did. A couple of days later, the paper printed a letter from Mr. Sonam Chhoki, a Bhutanese gentleman who, while not a yak farmer himself, came from generations of sturdy yak-farming stock. He reported that his British in-laws were still waiting for their operations after two years, and that based on his experience Bhutan’s health service was superior. Whether or not Danny Boyle’s NHS musical will run longer than Cats, the waiting list already does. Yet there they were, dozens of Mary Poppins figures descending into the Olympic Stadium on unfurled umbrellas, like British paratroopers behind German lines on D-day. When everywhere’s a nanny state, inventing the great iconic nanny is a source of national pride.

Britain may not be able to match the Continentals at music and art, but it gave us the language of global business, of global culture, of law and democracy, the language of liberty, of the modern world. And yet, aside from a perfunctory bit of the Bard, words were oddly avoided, save from the finale when the audience joined Sir Paul McCartney in a mass singalong of the universal message:

“Na na na, na-na, na na, na-na na na#...#”

Hmm. What can Americans learn from the Olympics spectacle? According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was anxious to pick up tips. “Brits long ago lost their empire,” he tweeted, “but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.”

So there’s that.

Na-na na na.

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

Re: Put Up or Shut Up

Sorry, Katrina, that Romney response seems weak tea to me. For a start, what's with all the "Harry this" and "Harry that" stuff? Why maintain a pretense of cozy clubbability when some slug's defaming you? He should call him "Reid", and with a curled lip. Mitt is Mister Cautious, and I can understand that to a degree when you're dealing with Obama and everything you say risks shrieks of "Racist!", but if you can't be rude about a seedy, unloved, timeserving hack like Reid, who can you be rude about?

Has Harry Reid paid any tax in the last 40 years? Who knows? He's never released his tax returns, so we have no idea by what fortuitous process a lifelong "public servant" becomes a multi-millionaire. How does that happen?

Harry Reid has earned his net worth through his lucrative career in politics, and as a city attorney in his early years.

Oh. A career on the Nevada Gaming Commission and U.S. Senate Ethics Committee is not yet as happily "lucrative" as one in, say, Palestinian public service, but it's getting there. Joe Biden has been in public service all his life, save a brief period in a small undistinguished law practice. His wife is a high school teacher who also worked in a psychiatric hospital. This is where they live.

Vice President Biden has been drawing government paychecks since 1970. He has some private income - for example, he rents a cottage on his estate to the Secret Service, who have to live there to protect him. So we pay his rental income, too.

Mitt Romney lives somewhat less lavishly than one would expect a man with his curriculum vitae to live. The opposite is true of many members of America's lifelong legislative class. If ever there were a time when a bit of righteous anger and fire in the belly wouldn't go amiss from Mitt, this is it.