Mark Steyn's Blog, page 26

Direct Messages Are for Western Union

If anybody can help, perhaps by hooking up the fax machine to the Domino's delivery bike, Lanny Davis is trying to DM Morgan Fairchild on Twitter.

American Twilight

This weekend, I am thousands of miles from home in a remote and isolated part of the world with erratic communications and lack of basic services. No, not Washington, D.C. Things aren’t that primitive, thank God. I’m in a rude Highland croft way up a far Scottish brae, enjoying the simple life by choice, rather than because the capital region of the global superpower is incapable of turning the lights back on within a week.

Which is by way of saying that news from the imperial metropolis has reached me in fits and starts. The other morning it was the intriguing tidbit that Chief Justice John Roberts had written both the majority opinion in the Obamacare decision and the dissent. He is literally his own worst enemy. He’s apparently the Mike Myers of the Supreme Court, able to play both Austin Powers and Dr. Evil, although it has to be said that he seems rather more at home as the bumbling swinger. If I understand correctly, the chief justice wrote the dissent back when it was the 5–4 majority opinion, and then, after switching sides, wrote the new majority opinion, and the four guys left holding the old majority opinion decided to leave it as is, presumably as a way of not so subtly underlining their total contempt for their squishy chief. Fascinating stuff, I’m sure. An enterprising legal scholar should pitch it to Paramount as a high-school musical or a particularly dysfunctional reality show.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, East Coast municipalities were canceling Fourth of July celebrations because of lack of electricity. In a novel, this would be rather too obviously symbolic of the hyperpower at twilight, but truth is crasser than art. So we had the spectacle of Martin O’Malley, governor of Maryland, turning up on CBS’s Face the Nation last Sunday as part of his not-so-subtle campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Across Montgomery County, his delirious constituents would have cheered, “President O’Malley? There’s the answer to our nation’s woes!” -- except that their TVs weren’t working, so they never saw him. Unless they jumped in their Chevy Volts and drove to#...#oh, no, wait.

#ad#I live in the North Country, so in a light breeze our power goes out. As I tell bewildered foreign visitors, “Think of rural New Hampshire as Baghdad outside the Green Zone.” But suburban Maryland is inside the Green Zone, and still the power goes out. America’s dysfunctional utility companies have a zillion explanations for this, but years ago I rode through the outskirts of D.C. with a Dutch tourist who marveled at the men digging up the sidewalk in densely populated neighborhoods to bury the new cable-TV wires while the sagging electric lines overhead continued to string their way from pole to pole dodging tree branches across town. It’s a very American sight: “Telegraph cables sing down the highway, and travel each bend in the road#...#” (“Moonlight in Vermont”). “I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine#...#” (“Wichita Lineman”). In the rural hinterlands, power lines are a sign of civilization. A stone’s throw from the imperial metropolis, they’re an emblem of civilizational decay.

In recent years, speaking to audiences hither and yon, I’m wont to say something on the lines of “The lamps are going out on liberty all over the world.” It’s my update on a famous observation by Edward Grey, British foreign secretary on the eve of the Great War. In August 1914, Sir Edward stood at his window in the summer dusk, and said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe.” He was speaking metaphorically. After all, his remark was prompted by the sight of London’s lamplighters going about their evening routine lighting the lamps in Whitehall. Metaphorically speaking, the lights of liberty were certainly dimmed by Roberts’s hideously convoluted Supreme Court decision: I don’t see why I should be fined $695 for declining to participate in an overpriced and dysfunctional “insurance” “market.”

But that’s a philosophical argument, and most folks just want to get on with their lives. And in that sense last week’s power outages are more relevant to where the U.S. is headed than what passes for John Roberts’s thinking in his Obamacare opinion. It was a reminder, as if you needed one, that in the American twilight the lights will be going out literally. Last week, as the East Coast was fading to black, the West Coast was sinking deeper into the red: Stockton, Calif., became the largest U.S. city to date to file for bankruptcy. America is seizing up before our eyes, and the action necessary to reverse the sclerosis is stymied at every turn by rapacious unions, government micro-regulators, dependency-spreading social engineers, and crony capitalists who know how to weave their way through the bureaucracy.

#page#Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small, highly developed, northern Continental nation-states with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have sufficiently common interests. You can get by with it for a while in Mediterranean Europe, mainly because of a somewhat desultory attitude to the rule of law: In Italy and Greece, there are prohibitions against everything, but nobody obeys them and so, after a fashion, life goes on. Anglophone nations are generally disposed to abide by the law, and so, if there are a bazillion regulations, the average citizen will make a sincere effort to comply. But if you’re, say, Australia and you’re attempting to design a health-care system for 20 million people across an entire continent, it’s just about doable.

But no advanced society has ever attempted Big Government for a third of a billion people -- for the simple reason that it cannot be done without creating a nation with the black-hole finances of Stockton, Calif., and the Black-Hole-of-Calcutta fetid, airless, sweatbox utility services of Rockville, Md. Thanks to Obamacare, in matters of health provision, whether you’re in favor of socialized medicine or truly private health care, Swedes and Italians are now freer than Americans: They have a state system and a private system, and both are relatively simple. What’s simple in micro-regulated America? In health care, we now have what’s nominally a private system encrusted with so many statist barnacles that it no longer functions as either a private or a state system. Thus, Obamacare embodies the strange no-man’s-land of statism American-style: The U.S. is no longer a land of republican virtue and self-reliant citizens but it’s not headed for the sunlit uplands of Scandinavia, either.

#ad#In their book The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore argue that, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would have broken up long ago. But hey, that’s no reason not to try it! In a land where everything else is supersized, why not government? Obituaries for the late Andy Griffith generally glossed over his career finale as a pitchman for Obamacare. But he was a canny choice to sell the unsellable, for is not “health” “care” “reform” the communitarian virtues of beloved small-town Mayberry writ large? The problem is you can’t write Mayberry large. And, if you attempt it, it leads not to Mayberry but to Stockton, Calif., and to a corrupt, dysfunctional swamp. A large Sweden is a contradiction in terms. It cannot be done, and the more determinedly you try to do it, the more you will preside over a ruined wasteland. The road to hell isn’t paved at all, and the street lamps went out long ago.

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

It's a Barnum & Bailey World . . .

George Leef over at NRO's Phi Beta Cons had a teasing link to this exciting news earlier today:

Harvard has appointed Vanidy “Van” Bailey as the College’s first permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. Bailey, the assistant director for education at the University of California, San Diego, will assume the new position on July 16.

Alas, this long overdue shattering of the BGLTQ ceiling was marred by the Harvard Crimson's grossly insensitive coverage:

An earlier version of this article used the pronoun "she" to refer to Vanidy "Van" Bailey, the newly appointed director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. In fact, Bailey prefers not to be referred to by any gendered pronoun.

I'll bet Elizabeth Warren is kicking herself for not thinking of that one.

So America is now the first nation in history in which people take on six figures of debt for the privilege of entrusting their education to persons with no pronouns. That seems likely to work.

Oh, Well. Back to Hayek and Pat Boone...

Jonathan Krohn, the Nick Jonas of the CPAC set, is no longer a conservative.

Not a Bug But a Feature

A headline for our times from Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast:

Egypt Policy Shows How Well Obama Has Managed America’s Decline

Coming soon:

Record Debt Shows How Well Obama Has Managed America's Brokeness

We're Here, We're Queer, We're Taking Names

I wrote recently about a small victory for freedom of speech in Canada, but, as always, it's two steps forward, one step back. Here's the backward one: Gai Écoute in Québec has announced the launch of the world's first "register of homophobic acts."

I don't mind gay groups keeping a vast database of anonymously-reported homophobic thought-crimes if they feel that's a productive use of their time. But it is preposterous that this sprawling directory of  cobwebbed flamer cracks and swishy-gait titters will be publicly funded by taxpayers under the Québec Government's "action plan for the fight against homophobia," which apparently also includes redesignating Jean-Marc Fournier, the minister of justice and attorney general, as "Minister of Justice, Attorney General, and Minister for the Fight Against Homophobia."

As usual with these censorious types, "act" is defined with the broadest of brushes to include "moquerie blessante" (offensive mockery) and "couverture médiatique inappropriée" (inappropriate media coverage). The right to mock and be "inappropriate" are about as basic to a free society as any, so nuts to that.

To announce the launch of their secret files of inappropriate mockers, the leaders of Gai Écoute were flanked by Montréal Police Chief Inspector Johanne Paquin and Commander Alain Gagnon. In a sane world, no self-respecting gay would attend such an event. The fact that this sight -- policemen publicly announcing a dossier of dissident citizens suspected of thought crimes to the approval of supposedly "liberal" "progressive" groups -- is now entirely normal in Western societies is far more disturbing than any problem they purport to be addressing. To modify an ancient joke, how do you make a fruit cordial? Evidently, it's a lot harder than it used to be. You can have that one for free, lads -- just in case things are a bit quiet on the homophobia-epidemic front.

PS I'll be interested to see how much room the database has for persons of a, ahem, certain background who say things like "all male homosexuals should be killed for their deviant behavior."

Moderation in Everything

On this Dominion Day, The Calgary Herald's Licia Corbella spends some quality time with her fellow Canadians:

I had been invited to attend the event by both Bilal Philips himself, who sent me two complimentary tickets to the conference called: Power of Unity - Islam in a Multicultural Canada, taking place this entire weekend, as well as by Abraham Ayache, chairman of the Muslim Council of Calgary, who was putting on the event... Philips, a Saudi-educated cleric, was born in Jamaica and raised in Ontario, where he converted to Islam. He is considered controversial because he is on the record saying that all male homosexuals should be killed for their deviant behaviour...

Shortly after his sermon about the importance of gratitude, Philips clarified his views on homosexuality in a one-on-one interview.

In short, he only thinks homosexuals should be executed in Muslim countries and only after four people have witnessed the homosexual act.

"The media tends to take my words out of context," Philips said.

In my recent foreword to Geert Wilders' fine book, I remarked on the extraordinary efforts in Britain, Australia and elsewhere to expel from polite society anyone who merely associates with Wilders and other targets of Islamic intimidation. Best to do as the head of the Calgary Police "diversity unit" and various representatives of Canadian officialdom are doing this weekend, and stick to hanging out with less controversial figures like Imam Philips.

Aside from "moderate" Canadians, there were also some "moderate" Americans in attendance:

Shaykh Hatem Alhaj lost his job recently at the Mayo Clinic because he wrote papers in support of female genital circumcision, which is illegal in North America. He later clarified his position by saying he only supports nicking the clitoris, not cutting it right off.

Indeed. If that doesn't fall under the US Government's taxing authority, I don't know what does.

Constitutional Contortions

Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada’s ghastly “Charter of Rights and Freedoms”: “There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself,” wrote Jonas. “It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them.”

For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule -- until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism rendered U.S. constitutionalism increasingly absurd. As I also wrote three months ago (yes, yes, don’t worry, there’s a couple of sentences of new material in amongst all the I-told-you-so stuff), “The United States is the only Western nation in which our rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it -- or, at any rate, torturing its language beyond repair.”

Thus, the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision. No one could seriously argue that the Framers’ vision of the Constitution intended to provide philosophical license for a national government (“federal” hardly seems le mot juste) whose treasury could fine you for declining to make provision for a chest infection that meets the approval of the Commissar of Ailments. Yet on Thursday Chief Justice Roberts did just that. And conservatives are supposed to be encouraged that he did so by appeal to the Constitution’s taxing authority rather than by a massive expansion of the Commerce Clause. Indeed, several respected commentators portrayed the Chief Justice’s majority vote as a finely calibrated act of constitutional seemliness.

#ad#Great. That and $4.95 will get you a decaf macchiato in the Supreme Court snack bar. There’s nothing constitutionally seemly about a Court decision that says this law is only legal because the people’s representatives flat-out lied to the people when they passed it. Throughout the Obamacare debates, Democrats explicitly denied it was a massive tax hike: “You reject that it’s a tax increase?” George Stephanopoulos demanded to know on ABC. “I absolutely reject that notion,” replied the president. Yet “that notion” is the only one that would fly at the Supreme Court. The jurists found the individual mandate constitutional by declining to recognize it as a mandate at all. For Roberts’ defenders on the right, this is apparently a daring rout of Big Government: Like Nelson contemplating the Danish fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen, the chief justice held the telescope to his blind eye and declared, “I see no ships.”

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but a handful of judges rule that it’s a rare breed of elk, then all’s well. The chief justice, on the other hand, looks, quacks, and walks like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.” The Obama administration sentences you to a $695 fine, and a couple of years later the queens of the Supreme Court explain what it is you’re guilty of. A. V. Dicey’s famous antipathy to written constitutions and preference for what he called (in a then largely unfamiliar coinage) the “rule of law” has never looked better.

Instead, constitutionalists argue that Chief Roberts has won a Nelson-like victory over the ever-expanding Commerce Clause. Big deal -- for is his new, approved, enhanced taxing power not equally expandable? And, in attempting to pass off a confiscatory penalty as a legitimate tax, Roberts inflicts damage on the most basic legal principles.

#page#Still, quibbling over whose pretzel argument is more ingeniously twisted -- the government’s or the Court’s -- is to debate, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the precedence between a louse and a flea. I have great respect for George Will, but his assertion that the Supreme Court decision is a “huge victory” that will “help revive a venerable tradition” of “viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint” and lead to a “sharpening” of “many Americans’ constitutional consciousness” is sufficiently delusional that one trusts mental health is not grounds for priority check-in at the death panel. Back in the real world, it is a melancholy fact that tens of millions of Americans are far more European in their view of government than the nation’s self-mythologizing would suggest. Indeed, citizens of many Continental countries now have more -- what’s the word? -- liberty in matters of health care than Americans. That’s to say, they have genuinely universal government systems alongside genuinely private-system alternatives. Only in America does “health” “care” “reform” begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine. It is the perverse genius of Obamacare that it will kill off what’s left of a truly private health sector without leading to a truly universal system. However, it will be catastrophically unaffordable, hideously bureaucratic, and ever more coercive. So what’s not to like?

To give Chief Justice Roberts’ argument more credit than it deserves, governments use taxes as a form of incentive. There is mortgage tax relief because the state feels home ownership is generally a good thing. Conversely, not buying health insurance is a bad thing, so such anti-social behavior should be liable to a kind of anti-social tax. But, as presently constituted, the Supreme Court’s new “tax” is a steal -- $695 is cheaper than most annual health-insurance policies. Especially when, under Obamacare, you’re allowed to wait till you get ill to take out health insurance, and you can’t be turned down. Which is why the cost of insurance is already rising, and will rise higher still down the road. Which means that in a few years’ time paying the penalty will look even more of a bargain, at least until you fall off the roof or acquire an uncooperative polyp. Right now, many Americans are, by any rational measure, over-insured. That will be far less affordable in the future. Some are already downgrading to less lavish policies. Those with barebones policies might likewise find it makes more sense to downgrade to the $695 penalty. What Chief Justice Roberts sees as the Alternative Mandate Tax, millions of Americans will see as a de facto Alternative Minimum Health Plan.

#ad#Who knows? Chances are I’m wrong, and the justices are wrong, and the government’s wrong, and the consequences of Obamacare will be of a nature none of us has foreseen. But we already know Obama’s been wrong about pretty much everything -- you can keep your own doc, your premiums won’t go up, it’s not a tax, etc. -- and in the Republic of Paperwork multi-trillion-dollar cost overruns and ever greater bureaucratic sclerosis seem the very least you can bet on. It should also be a given that this decision is a forlorn marker on a great nation’s descent into steep decline and decay. Granted the dysfunctionalism of Canadian health care, there’s at least the consolation of an equality of crappiness for all except cabinet ministers and NHL players. Here, it’s 2,800 unread pages of opt-outs, favors, cronyism, and a $695 fine for those guilty of no crime except wanting to live their lives without putting their bladder under the jurisdiction of Commissar Sebelius.

And the Constitution is apparently cool with all that.

So be it. It’s down to the people now -- as it should be. But, meanwhile, a little less deference to judges wouldn’t go amiss. The U.S. Supreme Court is starting to look like Britain’s National Health Service -- you wait two years to get in, and then they tell you there’s nothing wrong. And you can’t get a second opinion.

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

Don't Stick a Fork in Him, He's Not Done (Talking)

I'm overseas at the moment, so I apologize if it's only distance that makes the rituals of the imperial motorcade seem utterly preposterous:

Guests heard an unusual announcement that they needed to hand over their silverware for security reasons.

“It’s very important that you use your utensils as soon as possible,” National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials board member Raquel Regalado told about 1000 delegates at the group’s annual conference.

Regalado hurried the diners to finish up their salads and pre-cut chicken breasts, saying that the Secret Service required that there be no knives at the tables and that the forks be rounded up before Obama entered the room...

“The Secret Service coordinates this process with staff and host committee to ensure tables are cleared of material that may be deemed hazardous prior to the arrival of the president,” Special Agent Max Milien told POLITICO. “Any implication that this was unique for this event is completely inaccurate.”

As their Colombian hookers say, is that a full set of silverware in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

On a related matter noted by Jim Geraghty, I'd like to see more of this:

Today President Obama holds a campaign event in Durham, New Hampshire. The cost to the town in police and fire overtime expenses are estimated to be $20,000 to $30,000. There are 10,345 residents in Durham, according to the last census, meaning the cost for this one event would be roughly $2-$3 per person.

Durham lawmakers, including town-council chairman Jay Gooze (a Democrat), asked the Obama campaign to cover some of those costs; the campaign declined, contending that as a private organization they do not participate in security or traffic-control planning. They referred the inquiry to the Secret Service.

But they were too busy confiscating spoons.

Blood Money

This account of a traffic fatality in South Carolina is perplexing in many ways. For example, is it customary for the deceased to be charged with having his own blood washed off the asphalt?

"I had to pay to have the vehicle towed," she said. "I had to pay for the vehicle removed and to clean up the street from Justin's blood on the ground."

Robinson [the victim's mother] said that was the bill that stung the most – paying $50 to have the street cleaned.

"First of all, having to open the mail and look at the charge to the deceased, Justin Darryl Walker -- the deceased! It's just a hard thing to deal with in the context of your child," she said.

The headline chooses its words carefully:

After Drunken Driver Kills Son, Mother Billed For Cleanup

"Drunken driver"? The perp, Anna Gonzalez, is an illegal immigrant who has been driving in the United States without a license for 12 years. Does WYFF Channel 4 share Ms. Gonzalez's blithe disdain for the tedious business of acquiring a valid driver's license? Judging from the way the key facts about Ms. Gonzalez are withheld until the antepenultimate paragraph, one would almost get the impression WYFF is cool with illegal immigrants driving illegally as long as they make sure they're sober when they run over the natives.

As with the Tahrir Square coverage noted below, there are moments when American journalism might just as well declare itself an organized conspiracy against the public.