Mark Steyn's Blog, page 32

Re: What's Bill Clinton Doing?

Jonah, aside from the unseemliness of a former president voicing that ad insinuating Romney wouldn't have killed Osama bin Laden, what about the ridiculousness of getting this particular former president to do it? Throughout the Nineties, bin Laden attacked US targets - military housing, ships, embassies - and Bill Clinton refused to respond. In 2000, after 17 sailors were killed on the USS Cole, Clinton's Defense Secretary Bill Cohen said the attack "was not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response.

You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did.

And now Clinton asks us to take his word on the awesome lonely burden of being "the decider"...

In Arab Spring, a Young Man's Fancy Turns to...

...necrophilia?

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives - for up to six hours after their death.

The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.

Gotta hand it to the Muslim Brotherhood. Hard to come up with a more apt image of the Arab Spring than an aroused Islamist rogering a corpse.

More here.

Lars Man Standing, Final Score

I've written previously about Lars Hedegaard of the Danish Free Press Society, my host in Copenhagen in 2010. Lars was charged, acquitted, re-charged, convicted and fined 5,000 kroner for remarks about Islam made during a conversation in his own home. He appealed to the Danish Supreme Court, and late on Friday they struck down his conviction 7--0.

But the relevant provision of Danish law remains in place, and Lars can never get back the years of his time that this disgusting prosecution consumed. Restraints on free speech and individual liberty in the name of identity-group rights are now routine in much of the Western world. If it weren't for the First Amendment, the American Left would do as the Euroleft does on freedom of expression. At America's wretchedly conformist college campuses they already do.

And for every Lars Hedegaard willing to push things all the way to the Supreme Court, the broader lesson of his "victory" is that the average Dane understands the price of raising certain subjects is too high. As I put it in my rollicking foreword to Geert Wilders' lively new book, for every contrarian spirit such as Lars, "there are a thousand other public figures who get the message" -- best just to steer clear, keep your head down.

Sharing the stage with Lars and me in Copenhagen was a Dutch cartoonist called Nekschot. In 2008, he was arrested, tossed in jail for 30 hours, and had his computers confiscated -- all because of a complaint by a Dutch imam who publicly celebrated the murder of Theo van Gogh and demanded the same fate for Geert Wilders. The Dutch state doesn't mind imams inciting the murder of individual citizens, but it tied Nekschot up in court for two years. Last Christmas, he decided he'd had enough. 

I talked about free-speech issues in an interview with Canada's National Post this weekend, just ahead of my Tuesday night appearance in Toronto. In response, an allegedly major talk-radio guy in the city sneered, "Can we get over the idea that it's dangerous to be Mark Steyn."

Well, it's dangerous to be Lars Hedegaard, or Lars Vilks, or Geert Wilders or Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- while there's surely nothing safer than peddling "dangerous" "edgy" cobwebbed multiculti pieties and knowing that, whatever words you utter, there will never come a day when you'll be called on to bet your house and your savings and perhaps your life on them. In some of the oldest free societies on the planet, a few guys like Lars Hedegaard are doing the heavy lifting for all of us, and paying a very high price.

The Pley Boy Lifestyle

My weekend column muses on David Chaney, Greg Stokes, and the 19 other members of the president's "security" detail who enjoyed the services of the "escorts" at the PleyClub. Notwithstanding Messrs Chaney and Stokes' abrupt departure from the Secret Service, taxpayers will be paying them a pension of up to $61,000 a year.

Britain's Daily Mail, demonstrating a greater interest in the story than the court eunuchs of the Obamamedia, provides some pictures of the hotel accommodations these guys were enjoying while they "scouted security for the President's visit."

We have a dependency culture from top to toe. Forty-five million Americans are on food stamps. The "public servants" manning the government that hands out the food stamps are themselves on Vegas hot-tub stamps, beach-resort stamps, Colombian hooker stamps, third-of-a-century retirement stamps . . .

A few more years of this, and it won't be necessary to go to Cartagena: It'll be Latin America at home, too.

Grope and Change

Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope#...#and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

#ad#Alas, young Miss Suarez, just 24 and with a nine-year-old son and a ravenous pimp to feed, didn’t care for the cut of her Secret Service man’s jib. He made the fairly basic mistake -- for an expensively trained government operative -- of attempting to pay a prostitute in the hotel corridor, and Dania caused an altercation whose fallout has brought the Secret Service to its knees. Which isn’t how these encounters usually go.

What we know so far is this: All eleven Secret Service men and all ten U.S. military personnel staying at the Hotel Caribe are alleged to have had “escorts” in their rooms that night. All of them. The entire team.

Twenty-one U.S. public servants. Twenty-one Colombian whores. Unless a couple of the senior guys splashed out for the two-girl special. “Some of them were saying they didn’t know they were prostitutes,” explained Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“Some are saying they were women at the bar.”

Amazing to hear government agents channeling Dudley Moore in Arthur: “You’re a hooker? I thought I was doing so well.” It turns out U.S. Secret Service agents are the only men who can walk into a Colombian nightclub and not spot the professionals. Are they really the guys you want protecting the president?

Congress is not happy about this. “It was totally wrong to take a foreign national back to a hotel when the president is about to arrive,” said Representative King.

It’s wrong to take a “foreign national” up to the room, but it would have been okay if she’d been from Des Moines? We’re all in favor of outsourcing, but in compliance with Section 27(e)viii of the PATRIOT Act this is the one job Americans will do?

With respect to the congressman, sometimes it helps to step back and consider the bigger picture. Why were 21 officials of the United States government able to enjoy a night of pleasure with 21 prostitutes, whether “foreign nationals” or all-American? The answer isn’t difficult. Indeed, one retired agent spelled it out: “They just didn’t have anything to do.”

So they did Dania Suarez and her friends instead.

The 21 dedicated public servants jetted in on the so-called car-planes, the big transports flying in the tinted-windowed black Suburbans for the presidential motorcade. The “car-plane” guys show up a few days in advance, but usually two weeks or so after the really advanced advance team has hit the ground. And there was nothing for them to do. There is no reason for them to be there.

So instead they went to the Pleyclub.

As I understand it, the 21 public servants did not technically bill U.S. taxpayers for their “escorts.” But you suckers paid for them to fly to Cartagena, and they were enjoying those women on your time. On foreign trips, aside from the 40 or so armored limousines, there are usually 200 Secret Service agents plus a couple of dozen sniffer dogs. Did the latter take any Colombian bitches back to their kennels? Or are they just the entrée for Obama’s embassy banquet?

#page#I’ve written before about the U.S. government’s motorcade culture. Just last month, it cost U.S. taxpayers half a million bucks to fly Obama and David Cameron to Dayton, Ohio, to pretend to enjoy a basketball game. I’ve attended previous “Summits of the Americas” and G7 meetings and other international confabs, and always heard the same story wearily retailed by representatives of the host nation -- that the money-no-object Yanks are flying in a bigger and more disruptive presidential entourage than everybody else put together. At this point, the local official usually rolls his eyes, and mostly, but not always, leaves the thought unspoken:

“Americans! What do you expect?” The Queen routinely turns down requests from visiting U.S. presidents to reinforce the garden walls and replace the windows of Buckingham Palace -- for an overnight stay. When the U.S. was the richest country on earth, the mad excess used to impress in a crude kind of way: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Now it’s the Brokest Nation in History: America hasn’t got it, but still flaunts it. Which is kind of pathetic.

#ad#Does more equal better? No. All eleven Secret Service johns had their “security clearances” canceled. That still leaves over 4 million Americans (or about 2 percent of the adult population) with “security clearances,” and, according to the director of national intelligence last October, just under 1.5 million federal employees with “top secret”clearances. Which helps explain why one army private was able singlehandedly to download bazillions of (admittedly mostly worthless) “secrets” for WikiLeaks. Imagine the entire population of New Zealand with security clearances, and the entire population of Philadelphia or Phoenix with “top secret” clearances.

And yet the more guys on the payroll, the less anyone does. For all the hooker-cavorting among a bored entourage with time on its hands, there was no one to proofread President Obama’s speech. So he stood up in public and attempted to pander to the Latins by referring to the sovereign British territory of the Falkland Islands by the designation of its temporary Argentine usurpers 30 years ago: “Las Malvinas.” Except that his writers got it wrong. So the president of the United States called it “the Maldives,” an entirely different bit of British Commonwealth real estate half a world away in the Indian Ocean. Were the speechwriting staff also face down in the hooker bar? “Jush a minute, baby. Hic. The preshhhiduh wansh a couple rewrites. ‘I call on London to return British Columbia to Colombia.’ Thash should do it. Lesh go back to my room and I’ll show you my prompter.”

It’s not just the entitlements. Everywhere you look in the bloated federal Leviathan, all is waste, all is excess. But the absurd imperial presidency is a good place to start. The next citizen-executive of this republic would be sending a right message were he to halve the motorcade, halve the security detail, halve the hookers.

Otherwise, America’s foreign creditors will start to figure out that another half decade of U.S. spendaholism and they’re likely to wind up like Dania Suarez: You loan the U.S. government $800 billion, and come the due day the treasury secretary reaches in his pocket and says: “So how about we call it 28 bucks even?”

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

It Takes Two to Tango

Charles, re the European Union rechristening World War Two as the "European Civil War", it's not just (as The Daily Mail's report notes) the geographical myopia but the fundamental dishonesty of the characterization: If this were truly a "European Civil War", it would have been over in nothing flat, because on the Continent of Europe every nation was either neutral, conquered, or on the wrong side. It's hard to have a civil war with only one team. The only thing that makes it a "European" civil war at all is that, after the fall of France, one small island way out on the periphery off the continental shelf and its non-European empire declined to submit, and were eventually joined by its transatlantic ally. It was, in a certain sense (and putting Russia and Japan to one side), a "western civil war" between the Anglophone democracies and Continental Fascists - but for some reason that's far less congenial an interpretation to EU myth-makers.

My mother's family chose to emigrate to Canada after the war because their Belgian town had been liberated by Canadian troops. It's a funny kind of "European civil war" that needs quite so many non-Europeans to do all the liberating.

Re: Bipartisan. Of course.

Andrew, re Congress giving the IRS power to confiscate your passport without a court order if you owe more than $50,000 in taxes, instead of the bill's blandly evasive present title (the "Moving Ahead for Progress" act), why don't we just call it the Buffett Rule?

Re: Really?

Jonah, a cartoon with a fire labeled "DEFICIT" and a fire truck labeled "SPENDING CUTS" and a fire hydrant labeled "TAXES" and an elephant labeled "TEA PARTY" really ought to win the Pulitzer Prize for writing.

PS I would have found the piercing wit a lot easier to understand if the fire hose had been labeled "STIMULUS" and the vast U.S. Treasury forecourt had been labeled "ECONOMIC WASTELAND" and the second fireman had been labeled "JOE BIDEN OR POSSIBLY TIMOTHY GEITHNER." Also, if a man in a top hat and monocle labeled "THE ONE PER CENT" had sauntered by with a urine sample labeled "BUFFETT RULE REVENUE."

PPS Oh, and there should be a big hole in the ground marked "INNOVATIVE SOLYNDRA-LIKE INVESTMENT IN THE FUTURE FOR NEW FEDERAL REGULATORY AGENCY FOR PULITZER-WINNING POLITICAL CARTOONISTS INCAPABLE OF VISUALIZING WORN-OUT CLICHES WITHOUT LABELING EVERY STICK OF FURNITURE IN SIGHT".

Pay No Attention to that House of Lords Hitman

Andy, while you're neurotically hysterical enough to get worked up over the fact that the Labour Party's nice Lord Ahmed has put a bounty on Obama's head, a new British organization called Hope Not Hate has identified the real problem: you and me and a bunch of other right-wing Islamophobic "counter-jihadists," whom they list here so that Britons can be alert to our hatey hateyness. Hope Not Hate is dedicated to "celebrating Britain's diversity."

In other news:

48% Of Brits Want To Get Out Of The UK

Re: In the Year 2525...

Fred, I had clean forgotten Zager & Evans' far-sighted pop hit, but I'm all in favor of making it this year's Obama campaign theme:

In the year 2525

If man is still alive

If woman should survive

They'll only be twelve months away from paying off Obama's 2011 budget deficit...

Presumably, the attraction of the Buffett Rule for Mr Buffett lui-mème is that, if it catches on, the IRS may offer him the same generous 514 year schedule for paying off what he owes.