Mark Steyn's Blog, page 24

The Committee on Un-Chicagoan Activities

Excellent stuff re the Commissars of Chicken Sandwiches from the Archbishop of Chicago:

Recent comments by those who administer our city seem to assume that the city government can decide for everyone what are the “values” that must be held by citizens of Chicago. I was born and raised here, and my understanding of being a Chicagoan never included submitting my value system to the government for approval. Must those whose personal values do not conform to those of the government of the day move from the city? Is the City Council going to set up a “Council Committee on Un-Chicagoan Activities” and call those of us who are suspect to appear before it? I would have argued a few days ago that I believe such a move is, if I can borrow a phrase, “un-Chicagoan.”

Re those "Chicago values": I mentioned in my column the inconsistency of birdbrain Boston Mayor Menino's hostility to Chick-fil-A and his enthusiasm for institutionally "homophobic" Islam, but that goes for Rahm Emanuel, too. Has he dined yet at the reopened restaurant of Minister Farrakhan?

If you're gay and you think opportunist thugs like Menino and Emanuel are really there for you, you're a sap.

Taking the Jew Out of Judo

On the one hand, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Football Federation, says we shouldn't have a moment of silence for the 40th anniversary of the murder of Israeli Olympians because:

Sports is a bridge for love, connection and relaying peace between peoples. It should not be a factor for separation and spreading racism between peoples.

On the other hand, there are times when you could use "a factor for separation" - like when you walk into a room and it's full of Jews:

The Lebanon judo team has refused to train alongside the Israeli team, demanding that a curtain screen be erected so that the athletes would not have to see each other.

The latest political row on the eve of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games prompted anger from an Israeli official who said ”what? they can’t see us, but they will smell us.”

London 2012 organising committee officials erected a makeshift curtain to split the two halves of a training gym at the ExCeL centre on Friday afternoon to placate the Lebanese team, which was refusing to train at the same time as the Israelis.

With equally exquisite sensitivity, the American media appear to have drawn their own "makeshift curtain" around the whole event. But it's a useful reminder that the Olympian "bridge for love and connection" operates to the same principles as the old gag:

One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”

“Israel, of course.”

Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?

I've written previously here and there (warning: includes bad language from "jokes", and extensive excerpts from the Court's ruling on lesbian necking) about Guy Earle, a stand-up comic convicted by the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal for the hitherto unknown crime of putting down a lesbian heckler homophobically. He had no money to fly in for his trial, so they convicted him in absentia and fined him 15 grand. Half a decade after his lesbophobic putdown, his case is wending its way to the B.C. Supreme Court. Kevin Dale McKeown of Canada's Numero Uno gay publication writes of the Tribunal's original embarrassing judgment:

As Ezra Levant commented on the case, “Does Commissar Geiger-Adams, the chief kangaroo, have some special, official sense of humour? So if he laughs, it’s legal, but if he doesn’t, it’s not?”

Yes, rightwing windbag Ezra. In standing with others who value freedom of expression above all else, one finds oneself in some pretty dubious company. But that’s the whole point of freedom of expression.

Just so. If you're only in favor of freedom of expression for people you agree with, you're not doing it right.

Unfortunately, in a world where "group rights are 'the key Nanny State concept'," fewer and fewer people seem to grasp that basic point. So, up north, "edgy" "transgressive" comedians abandon Guy Earle and accept the principle that the state has a right to regulate their comedy routines. And, down south, corrupt mayors brag about using the business-licensing process to punish their enemies, and for the most part their citizens shrug.

It's bad enough that in a supposedly free society you can't sell a chicken sandwich to your fellow citizen without buying a bazillion permits from the state. If they can prevent you from selling a chicken sandwich because they don't like your opinions, then what can't they do to you? When Canada decriminalized homosexuality, Pierre Trudeau declared that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. But the state has a place in the stand-up comedy routines of the nation, and the homophobic waffle fries of the nation?

Rush puts it well:

I'm reading intellectual treatises on, "Well, you know, they have the right to say these things, and the solution here is let Chick-Fil-A open a store in Chicago and let's see if the people will visit it." That's not the reaction to have! The reaction to have is, "Who the hell do you think you are, Rahm Emanuel? Who the hell do you think you are? What country do you think you're in?"

Who the hell is Tom Menino to say you can't sell chicken in Boston unless you agree with him? Who the hell is Murray Geiger-Adams to say you can't tell a joke in Vancouver unless he approves it? Until more citizens of free nations are willing to say to statist hacks "Who the hell do you think you are?,"liberty will continue to bleed.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Gays? (contd.)

My weekend column muses on the use of state power to punish dissent from party orthodoxy -- i.e., Boston and Chicago Democrats promising their base a Chick-fil-A executive in every pot. Shortly after I filed the column came this news:

We are saddened to report the news to you that our dear friend Don Perry, vice president of public relations, passed away suddenly this morning.

Don was a member of our Chick-fil-A family for nearly 29 years.  For many of you in the media, he was the spokesperson for Chick-fil-A.  He was a well-respected and well-liked media executive in the Atlanta and University of Georgia communities, and we will all miss him.

Mr. Perry apparently had a heart attack. The forces of tolerance respond accordingly.

The Tolerance Enforcers

To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but aldermanic power corrupts all der more manically. Proco “Joe” Moreno is alderman of the First Ward of Chicago, and last week, in a city with an Aurora-sized body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants. “Because of this man’s ignorance,” said Alderman Moreno, “I will now be denying Chick-fil-A’s permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward.”

“This man’s ignorance”? You mean, of the City of Chicago permit process? Zoning regulations? Health and safety ordinances? No, Alderman Moreno means “this man’s ignorance” of the approved position on same-sex marriage. “This man” is Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, and a few days earlier he had remarked that “we are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives” -- which last part suggests he is as antipathetic to no-fault divorce and other heterosexual assaults on matrimony as he is to more recent novelties such as gay marriage. But no matter. Alderman Moreno does not allege that Chick-fil-A discriminates in its hiring practices or in its customer service. Nor does he argue that business owners should not be entitled to hold opinions: The Muppets, for example, have reacted to Mr. Cathy’s observations by announcing that they’re severing all ties with Chick-fil-A. Did you know that the Muppet Corporation has a position on gay marriage? Well, they do. But Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef would be permitted to open a business in the First Ward of Chicago because their opinion on gay marriage happens to coincide with Alderman Moreno’s. It’s his ward, you just live in it. When it comes to lunch options, he’s the chicken supremo and don’t you forget it.

#ad#The city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, agrees with the alderman: Chick-fil-A does not represent “Chicago values” -- which is true if by “Chicago values” you mean machine politics, AIDS-conspiracy-peddling pastors, and industrial-scale black youth homicide rates. But, before he was mayor, Rahm Emanuel was President Obama’s chief of staff. Until the president’s recent “evolution,” the Obama administration held the same position on gay marriage as Chick-fil-A. Would Alderman Moreno have denied Barack Obama the right to open a chicken restaurant in the First Ward? Did Rahm Emanuel quit the Obama administration on principle? Don’t be ridiculous. Mayor Emanuel is a former ballet dancer, and when it’s politically necessary he can twirl on a dime.

Meanwhile, fellow mayor Tom Menino announced that Chick-fil-A would not be opening in his burg anytime soon. “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult,” said His Honor. If you’ve just wandered in in the middle of the column, this guy Menino isn’t the mayor of Soviet Novosibirsk or Kampong Cham under the Khmer Rouge, but of Boston, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he shares the commissars’ view that in order to operate even a modest and politically inconsequential business it is necessary to demonstrate that one is in full ideological compliance with party orthodoxy. “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail,” Mayor Menino thundered in his letter to Mr. Cathy, “and no place for your company alongside it.” No, sir. On Boston’s Freedom Trail, you’re free to march in ideological lockstep with the city authorities -- or else. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Massachusetts was a beacon of liberty: the shot heard round the world, and all that. Now it fires Bureau of Compliance permit-rejection letters round the world.

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster’s head left in Mr. Cathy’s bed was all just a misunderstanding. Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston’s Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective. As the Boston Herald’s Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death. The mayor couldn’t have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi’s position on gays is in a state of “evolution”: He can’t decide whether to burn them or toss ’em off a cliff. “Some say we should throw them from a high place,” he told Al Jazeera. “Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement.#...#The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.” Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded: There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one? In Mayor Menino’s Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he’ll run your homophobic ass out of town. But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he’ll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony.

#page#This inconsistency is very telling. The forces of “tolerance” and “diversity” are ever more intolerant of anything less than total ideological homogeneity. Earlier this year, the Susan G. Komen Foundation -- the group that gave us those pink “awareness raising” ribbons for breast cancer -- decided to end its funding of Planned Parenthood on the grounds that, whatever its other charms, Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with curing breast cancer. Within hours, the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker had been jumped by her fellow liberals, and was strapped to a chair under a light bulb in the basement with her head clamped between two mammogram plates until she recanted. A few weeks back, Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor who “says he’s never voted for a Republican presidential candidate,” published a paper in the journal Social Science Research whose findings, alas, did not conform to the party line on gay parenting. Immediately, the party of science set about ending his career, demanding that he be investigated for “scientific misconduct” and calling on mainstream TV and radio networks to ban him from their airwaves.

#ad#As an exercise in sheer political muscle, it’s impressive. But, if you’re a feminist or a gay or any of the other house pets in the Democrat menagerie, you might want to look at Rahm Emanuel’s pirouette, and Menino’s coziness with Islamic homophobia. These guys are about power, and right now your cause happens to coincide with their political advantage. But political winds shift. Once upon a time, Massachusetts burned witches. Now it grills chicken-sandwich homophobes. One day it’ll be something else. Already in Europe, in previously gay-friendly cities like Amsterdam, demographically surging Muslim populations have muted leftie politicians’ commitment to gay rights, feminism, and much else. It’s easy to cheer on the thugs when they’re thuggish in your name. What happens when Emanuel’s political needs change?

Americans talk more about liberty than citizens of other Western nations, but, underneath the rhetorical swagger, liberty bleeds. When Mayor Menino and Alderman Moreno openly threaten to deny business licenses because of ideological apostasy, they’re declaring their unfitness for public office. It’s not about marriage, it’s not about gays, it’s about a basic understanding that a free society requires a decent respect for a wide range of opinion without penalty by the state. In Menino’s Boston, the Freedom Trail is heavy on the Trail, way too light on the Freedom.

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

Shouting 'Fire!' at the Policemen's Ball

In Britain, if a member of the public essays a mild jest about bombs or terrorism to the authorities, he faces seven years in jail. But, if a Muslim police officer does it in Dorset, where Olympic events are being held and where the constabulary is stretched to the limit by the biggest security operation in years, it just shows what a great sense of humor the guy has:

A police officer caused a major terrorism alert after ringing a busy port with a hoax bomb threat.

PC Hatef Nezami, 48, rang colleagues at the police Special Branch office with a coded message that a device was placed in a busy port.

Specialist terrorism staff were so concerned by the call's authentic nature that they started preparing for a full terrorist attack.

But don't worry. Falsely reporting that a bomb is on a ferry in the harbor at Poole doesn't seem to harm your career prospects in the Dorset police:

The Daily Mail understands that Mr Nezami, who has worked as a detective, has not faced criminal or disciplinary proceedings.

During my free-speech battles in Canada and elsewhere, I was routinely lectured by huffily indignant plonkers whose research began and ended with Bartlett's For Dummies that "there is no right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre." But Constable Nezami has just turned a lazy metaphor into reality, and none of the indignant huffers seems to mind.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Gays?

Top story of the day:

Muppets Break Ties With Chick-Fil-A Over Gay Marriage

Close second:

America's crackerjack media track down World's Youngest Homophobe!

(But is he on Romney Veep list?)

Bird of Pay

The bald eagle is an emblem of the United States - in more ways than one:

Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero. But the IRS takes a different view. It has appraised “Canyon” at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes.

Plus penalties of $11.7 million. Government makes it impossible for you to sell your assets, but taxes you on their "fair" market value anyway. With that kind of brilliant and inspired thinking, the deficit will go away in nothing flat.

(via Allahpundit)

Going Dutch

My weekend column discusses Obama's Bartlett's-worthy instant classic, "You didn't build that!" Everyone else has had his two bits, of course, but I was struck by Charles Murray's contribution:

There’s a standard way for Americans to celebrate accomplishment. First, we call an individual onto the stage and say what great things that person has done. Then that person gives a thank-you speech that begins “I couldn’t have done this without…” and a list of people who helped along the way. That’s the way we’ve always done it. Everyone knows we all get help in life (and sometimes just get lucky). But we have always started with the individual and then worked out. It is not part of the American mindset to begin with the collective and admonish individuals for thinking too highly of their contribution.

That brings me back to the creepiness of it all. It is as if a Dutch politician—an intelligent, well-meaning Dutch politician—were somehow running for the American presidency, but bringing with him the Rawlsian, social-democratic ethos that, in the Netherlands, is the natural way to talk about a properly run society. We would listen to him and say to ourselves, “He doesn’t get this country.” That’s the thing about Obama. Time and again, he does things and says things that are un-American. Not evil. Not anti-American. Just un-American.

I know what Charles means about the Dutch bloke, but let's not forget that the Dutch were the first truly capitalist society on earth, the Dutch East India Company was the first real multinational corporation, the Amsterdam exchange was the first modern stock market, etc. In other words, if a 21st-century Dutch social democrat was running for office in the heyday of the Netherlands, the Dutch would think, "He doesn't get this country." That's a point I've tried to make over and over these last four years: Big Government can transform a people. It's done so in Britain, Europe and most of the rest of the developed world.

Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones and the rest of the gang have made a bet they can pull off the same trick here. In his Roanoke speech, listen to the audience cheer his disdain for individual effort. Consider the mainstream media's mystification that anyone would find these words controversial. Look at the statistics: In the last three years, 2.6 million Americans have signed on with new employers, but 3.1 million have signed on for disability checks.

Charles is right: Obama's remarks would have rung exceedingly foreign for most of America's history. Whether they'll sound quite so alien in America's future is the central question of this election. 

Golden Gateway to Dependency

On the evidence of last week’s Republican campaign events, President Obama’s instant classic -- “You didn’t build that” -- is to Mitt Romney what that radioactive arachnid is to Spider-Man: It got under his skin, and, in an instant, the geeky stiff was transformed into a muscular Captain Capitalism swinging through the streets and deftly squirting his webbing all over Community-Organizerman. Rattled by the reborn Romney, the Obama campaign launched an attack on Romney’s attack on Obama’s attack on American business. First they showed Romney quoting Obama: “He said, ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’” And then the Obama team moved in for the kill: “The only problem? That’s not what he said.”

Indeed. What Obama actually said was:

“If you’ve got a business, you, you didn’t build that. [Interjection by fawning supporters: “Yeeaaaaah!”] “Somebody else made that happen.”

Since the president is widely agreed to be “the smartest guy ever to become president” (Michael Beschloss, presidential historian), the problem can’t be “what he said” but that you dummies aren’t smart enough to get the point he was trying to make. According to Slate’s David Weigel, the “you didn’t build that” bit referred back to something he’d said earlier in the speech -- “somebody invested in roads and bridges.” You didn’t build those, did you? Or maybe he was referring back to “this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.” You didn’t build the system, did you? Or maybe he was referring to the teleprompter. You didn’t build that, did you? Well, unless you’re Rajiv or Suresh from the teleprompter factory in Bangalore, you didn’t. Maybe he was referring back to something he said in a totally different speech -- the Berlin Wall one, perhaps. You didn’t build that, did you? Who are we to say which of these highly nuanced interpretations of the presidential text is correct?

#ad#If this is the best all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can do to put Humpty Dumpty’s silver-tongued oratory together again, they might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting President Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it fits with the reality of the last three and a half years -- that America’s chief executive is a man entirely ignorant of business who presides over an administration profoundly hostile to it.

But, just for the record, I did “invest in roads and bridges,” and so did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes from taxpayers, because government doesn’t have any money except for what it takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you pay for those roads and bridges.

So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium b.c., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court over 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G-7 today.

In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “you didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon -- all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”

He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his deputy assistant secretary of the Interior, in a speech to Democrat environmentalists in Nevada:

“You will never see another federal dam.” 

Ever. So the president can carry forward his “vision,” but it apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he enjoyed as a member of his high-school “choom gang” back in Hawaii. Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss’s enlightening new biography that, during car-chooming sessions, young Barry insisted all the windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously envision President Obama opening a 21st-century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy Volt.

The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million -- or about $530 million today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.

#page#A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one.

Because that’s not what Big Government does: Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate bridge, and tossed it into the Pacific.

#ad#Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not “disabled” as that term is generally understood. Rather, it’s the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. What Big Government is doing to those 85,000 “disabled” is profoundly wicked. Let me quote a guy called Mark Steyn, from his last book:

The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as “disabled”. A fit, able-bodied 40-year old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie.

Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and figured it goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. As the president would say, you didn’t build the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built it, and, because they built it, you came. In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and bridges. In reality, the president of Dependistan has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.

That he can build. That’s all he can build.

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