Mark Steyn's Blog, page 34

Holier Than Thou

Melanie Phillips on an election in Yorkshire for the House of Commons in the Mother of Parliaments in the early 21st century:

'All praise to Allah!’ he [George Galloway] saluted his victory through a loud-hailer — having previously told a public meeting that if people didn’t vote for him, Allah would want to know why.

Indeed, declaring in one address that ‘God knows who is a Muslim’, he implied that he was even more of a true adherent of that faith than Labour’s Muslim candidate who, he suggested without a shred of evidence, drank alcohol whereas he himself had never touched the stuff.

It worked. The Muslim candidate was defeated by the Even More Muslim candidate - the Arab Spring, Yorkshire version.

I was on a TV show a gazillion years ago when "Gorgeous George" was certainly creepily opportunist but still had the air of a conventionally oleaginous lounge lizard. Today, he's a prototype for a political genus that will become all too familiar in the years ahead. Melanie on London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone:

In a speech last month at the radical Finsbury Park mosque in London, Livingstone more than amply confirmed such fears. For he pledged to ‘educate the mass of Londoners’ in Islam, saying this would help to cement London as a ’beacon’ for the faith.

Since when was making London a  ‘beacon’ for a foreign religion a legitimate goal for any British politician, let alone a priority for a British city mayor?

Well, since London became a city where 64.7 percent of births are to couples where at least one parent was born outside the United Kingdom and where 55 percent of all Inner London primary school pupils do not speak English as a first language. When he first appeared on the scene a generation back, Red Ken was hot for gay liberation and women's rights. Now he has other priorities:

This week Ken Livingstone was accused by Jewish Labour supporters of telling them at a private meeting that since Jews tended to be rich he wasn’t expecting them to vote for him. In a letter published in the Jewish Chronicle, they also accused Livingstone of using the word “Jewish” in a pejorative manner. And this just weeks after he described the Tories as “riddled with homosexuality”.

The Ken of the 1980s was painful to listen to, but I don’t remember him dog-whistling like that. In those days he was an ultra-liberal politician, the whining incarnation of rainbow ideology. What has happened?

Call me a cynic, but one possible explanation is that, 30 years ago, Livingstone wasn’t chasing a Muslim bloc vote influenced by raging anti-Zionists and homophobes.

As a certain notorious Islamophobe has been saying for years, the future belongs to those who show up for it. Livingstone and Galloway have got that message. Many others will follow.

Swingin' Kennedy

Since the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Swingin’ Anthony Kennedy has been the swingingest swinger on the Supreme Court, the big Numero Cinco on all those 5--4 white-knuckle nail-biting final scores. So naturally Court observers have been paying close attention to his interventions in the Obamacare oral arguments. So far he doesn’t sound terribly persuaded by the administration’s line:

“The government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases, and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.” As John Hinderaker wrote at the Powerline blog, “In that last observation, Kennedy seems to be channeling Mark Steyn.” Which is true. As I wrote in National Review only two or three issues back, “I’ve argued for years in these pages that governmentalized health care fundamentally transforms the relationship between citizen and state in ways that” -- and here’s the bit Justice Kennedy isn’t quite on board with yet -- “make it all but impossible to have genuinely conservative government ever again.” So I’m naturally heartened to hear him meeting me halfway. This was one of the highlights of a week that a shell-shocked Jeffrey Toobin, crawling out from under the rubble of the solicitor general’s presentation, told CNN viewers was “a train wreck” for the government’s case.

#ad#And yet, and yet#...# If you incline to the view that Obamacare is a transformative act, isn’t there something slightly pitiful about the fact that the liberties of over 300 million people hinge on the somewhat whimsical leanings of just one man? I mean, Kennedy seems a cheery enough cove, but who died and made him the all-powerful Sultan of Swing? “It is a decision of the Supreme Court,” explained Nancy Pelosi a few years back in more congenial times for the Democrats. “So this is almost as if God has spoken.”

That’s not how earlier Americans saw it: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” wrote Abraham Lincoln, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Which they have. Or it would not have come to this.

In February, George Jonas wrote up north that Canadians enjoyed more rights and freedoms in the days before all their rights and freedoms got written down in a big ol’ “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (1982). At this point, many readers will object that the constitutional documents of some effete pansy ninny monarchy like Canada are entirely irrelevant to a strapping butch manly self-reliant republic like America. Three words: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Finding herself with a bit of time on her hands, Justice Ginsburg swung by Cairo last month to help out the lads from the Muslim Brotherhood building the new Egypt: “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she advised them. Instead, she recommended the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the European Convention on Human Rights. That’s why the fate of the republic will come down to a 5--4 vote. Because four-ninths of the constitutional court think the American constitutional order is as déclassé as a 2006 BlackBerry.

“There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself,” mused George 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.” That was generally the view of the Britannic part of the English-speaking world until the late 20th century: What’s unwritten is as important as, if not more so than, what is. The constitution of Australia, for example, makes no mention of the office of prime minister. The job exists only through custom and convention understood from the United Kingdom, where likewise it existed only through custom and convention: “statutory recognition” in London didn’t come till 1937 -- or over two centuries after dozens of blokes had been doing the job.

By contrast, on the Continent, where many constitutions date all the way back to the disco era (Greece, 1975; Portugal, 1976; Spain, 1978), if the establishment wants to invent a new “right” -- i.e., yet another intrusion by government -- it goes ahead and does so. If it happens to conflict with this year’s constitution, they rewrite it. 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, in this week’s debate on whether Obamacare is merely the latest harmless evolution of the interstate-commerce clause, the most learned and highly remunerated jurists in the land chewed over the matter of whether a person, simply by virtue of being born, was participating in a “market.” Had George III shown up at the Constitutional Convention to advance that argument with a straight face, the framers would have tossed aside the quill feathers and reached for their muskets.

#page#A land of laws decays almost imperceptibly into a land of legalisms, which is why America has 50 percent of the world’s lawyers. Like most of his colleagues, lifetime legislator John Conyers (a congressman for 47 years) didn’t bother reading the 2,700-page health-care bill he voted for. As he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did: “They get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Representative Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit. So let’s take him at his word that it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. Who does read the thing? “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” sighed Justice Scalia the other day. That’s the bit about cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages#...#? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”

#ad#He was making a narrow argument about “severability” -- about whether the Court could junk the “individual mandate” but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

If the Supreme Court really wished to perform a service, it would declare that henceforth no law can be longer than, say, 27 pages -- or, at any rate, no longer than the copy of Playboy Congressman Conyers was reading on that commuter flight.

C’mon, Justice Kennedy. Obamacare v. Playboy: It would be a decision for the ages -- and an act of bracing constitutional hygiene.

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

Don't Die for Me, Argentina

I see Argentina has just banned my book, and everybody else's:

The Argentine government has severely restricted the importation of books due to “human health concerns” [in Spanish]. That’s right. According to the government, it can be dangerous to “page through” a book that has high lead quantities in its ink. “If you put you finger in your mouth after paging through a book, that can be dangerous,” said Juan Carlos Sacco, the vice-president of an industrialist organization that supports the measure.

The government claims that this is not a ban. However, since each buyer has to demonstrate at the airport’s customs office that the ink in the purchased book has lead quantities no higher than 0.006% in its chemical composition, the result is that all book imports into the country are stalled.

Boy, I'll bet at their Monday night poker game in Hell, Hitler and Stalin are kicking themselves for not thinking of that one: "That schmuck Goebbels, burning books for 'decadence'. Why didn't we just burn them on Health & Safety grounds?" "Exactly, comrade. And next time we'll jam the western radio broadcasts because they increase your risk of cancer. It's for the children."

This is not unrelated to the present ObamaCare debate. If the government regulates your health care arrangements on the grounds of controlling costs, it can surely regulate dangerous activities you undertake that could potentially increase those costs - like reading an imported book opposed to government health care.

Injustice Department

Daniel, re that seditious conspiracy that wasn't, I chanced to dine tonight with a fellow whose hairdresser is pals with the head Hutaree militia guy, so I feel him I'm on the inside track with this stuff. And her line, like everyone else's in this corner of Michigan, is "Aw, he says a lot of stuff, but he's not gonna do anything." Unfortunately, my dining companion's hairdresser isn't US Attorney-General, and Eric Holder is, and he declared the Hutaree a "dangerous organization" and his money-no-object prosecutors went to town.

It's easy to laugh at this crowd, although it's an open question who's nuttier: the organization that thinks Javier Solana is the anti-Christ, or the organization that expends millions of taxpayer dollars and FBI manpower (including agents undercover for months on end) investigating them. But the fact remains: These men languished in jail without bail for two years - for a big phony nothing of a case the judge threw out. Because, unlike my friend's hairdresser, the US Justice Department has no sense of proportion.

Conrad Black, another chap on the receiving end of federal zealots, writes at NRO today about the corruption of American justice by its grotesque reliance on plea bargains - whose negotiations, as Justice Kennedy noted, are now "the critical point" for any defendant. You have to be either crazy (like a bunch of militia loons) or extremely dogged (like Conrad) to fend off the enormous pressure to forgo your right to a fair trial. A "sane" person would have copped a plea with Holder's heavies for misdemeanor sedition or whatever.

When I attended Conrad's own trial in Chicago, the first thing that struck me about the federal building was that there was nothing going on in any other courtroom: I'd duck into them to eat my sandwich at lunchtime, or to make a quiet phone call. As he points out, 94 per cent of state convictions and 97 per cent at the federal level come from plea bargains. In rural upstate New York recently, a town attorney tried to get me to attend a "pre-trial hearing" and discuss a plea - for traffic court. I wanted a swift trial; he wanted to drag it out for months on end, and get me to settle for being kinda-sorta semi-guilty of something or other, because that's the way the system "works". (I won, by the way.)

From Conrad getting the "honest services" law reined in at the Supreme Court to the Hutaree sedition charges getting dismissed, determined defendants can still occasionally win against federal prosecutors, but in reality they always lose: the process is the punishment. The jury tossed out the feds' case against a New Hampshire neighbor of mine in nothing flat, but by that time he'd lost his savings and his marriage and attempted suicide. Any fair-minded observer of US justice would conclude its excesses have thrown off the balance between defendant, prosecutor and judge.

Incidentally, I see the original Time story on the Hutaree militia is headlined "". But they weren't paranoid, were they? They were convinced that one day the black helicopters would be hovering overhead. And one day they were. Or, actually, one night - in the wee small hours, descending from the skies with searchlights circling. Oh, and Humvees - just like in Waziristan. So Eric Holder proved their point. In Lenawee and Hillsdale counties, they still talk about it - and the general consensus is the pseudo-commandos of the federal constabulary looked way more ridiculous than the survivalist kooks.

(PS I'll be speaking at Hillsdale on Tuesday. If any Hutaree members care to swing by, I promise to do some Javier Solana gags.)

When it's Springtime in the Lower Peninsula...

...my thoughts to Hillsdale ever stray. If you're weary of a world in which government has its fingers in everything, including your intestines, there's always Hillsdale College, a school that disdains any federal or state funding. It's home to The Corner's John J Miller, and to some hot young talent that'll be joining NR this summer and giving us squaresville deadbeats a run for our money.

I'll be speaking at Hillsdale in the sports arena next Tuesday evening, April 3rd. Admission is free. Full details here. Usual apocalyptic doom-mongering, but punctuated midway by my new knife-throwing act (John J has kindly volunteered). It's a convenient 14-hour drive from the Upper Peninsula, and rather nearer to Indiana, Ohio, and southern Ontario.

Rave On for Trayvon

Victor wrote yesterday that the Trayvon Martin case exemplified "how absolutely insane America has become". If you're having difficulty keeping up with the insanity, the Pundette has a useful round-up:

In a touching tribute to the slain Florida teen, Miami high schoolers looted their local Walgreens, because nothing says "rest in peace" or "you will be missed" like a swiped bag of chips...

In another moving memorial, Fr. Michael Pfleger used the young man's death as fuel for his decades-long ego trip at the expense of the Catholic Church and his own parishioners. The Daily Caller has the disturbing video, complete with a hooded dummy of Trayvon set up near the altar.

Spike Lee showed his respects with an ineffectual attempt to incite harassment, or worse, of George Zimmerman. He tweeted what he thought was Zimmerman's address. Turns out it wasn't Zimmerman's house at all, but rather the home of an elderly couple entirely unrelated to the "white hispanic." Oh well -- it's the thought that counts!

And don't forget the "wide open" night of justice for Trayvon at Bentley's Lingerie Lounge.

C'mon, Reverend Sharpton, Reverend Jackson: Are you gonna let your good selves be so effortlessly upstaged by some Hollywood has-been, a North Carolina strip joint, and even some pasty honky Catholic?

Hilton and Lana

I owe Hilton Kramer my American career, such as it is. He was a guest on a BBC show I hosted, along with Graydon Carter. Largely unfamiliar with New York magazines, I was barely aware which was which: Hilton Carter, Graydon Kramer; one edited Vanity Fair, one The New Criterion. One of the magazines was heavily perfumed, in the way that folks selling houses douse the joint in Glade to hide something unpleasant in the basement. I knew one of the editors received a generous wardrobe allowance from Condé Nast in order to project the image of a debonair man about town. I assumed it was Hilton.

Shortly after his appearance on the show, I was asked to write a book review for The New Criterion, and then to become its drama critic - and from there everything followed, including NR. I enjoyed his company enormously. The magazine he founded has lasted twice as long as the original for which it was named, and I'm honored to have been associated with it.

As Jay says, Hilton was a great raconteur. Years ago, when he was still the distinguished art critic of The New York Times, he turned up in Liz Smith's gossip column, which is quite an accomplishment. Better yet, he turned up in an item about Lana Turner:

Oh, Lana! Lana Turner, who believes you can't be too rich or too thin, has signed up to do an episode for Jane Wyman's new TV series Falcon Crest. If things work out well, Lana could become a regular. She hasn't really been seen on the tube since the disastrous Survivors flop. Meanwhile, Lana sold her home in LA and has bought herself a place in Honolulu. She intends to spend more time in Hawaii with her daughter, Cheryl Crane, who is a tall, beautiful blonde and a local real estate entrepreneur. Incidentally, Hilton Kramer's biography of Lana is giving its publisher rewrite headaches.

I don't doubt it. Hilton wouldn't seem the most obvious biographer for the legendary besweatered sexpot. But, when you drop as many names as Liz Smith, it can't be easy dropping them all in the right place. Hilton had no plans to write a bio of Lana, although the following day he arrived at the Times to find some words of encouragement scrawled in lipstick on the glass of his office door, apparently from Miss Turner herself. One measure of how times and the Times have changed post-Hilton is that today it would be entirely unexceptional for an eminent NYT cultural critic to write a bio of even the most ridiculous celeb (see Margo Jefferson's scholarly monograph On Michael Jackson, which isn't half as much fun as Hilton's on Lana would have been).

I used to enjoy hearing him tell the story, in part because it sounded funnier in his languid New England vowels (in the same way I enjoyed hearing Bill Buckley at the NR 50th anniversary gala read the first paragraph of my "Happy Warrior" column and say the word "Barcalounger"). I feared it might be apocryphal, but in fact the Internet has preserved it here.

Rick is right that Hilton was no troglodyte. But I remember him telling me back in the Nineties about a Saturday night out at a critically acclaimed art-house movie. As they were leaving the theater, his wife sighed, "Darling, from now on, let's not see any films we haven't already seen."

Target-Rich Environment

Andy McCarthy's weekend column is a terrific response to the Senatorial stay-the-coursers on Afghanistan:

Senators McCain, Lieberman, and Graham worry, for good reason, that American tolerance for that state of affairs has been exhausted by a series of atrocities that demonstrates Afghan contempt for the West. The senators gingerly describe these incidents as “examples of the few Afghan soldiers who despicably turned their weapons on Americans.”

Sorry, gentlemen: Quite apart from the murderous riots over accidental Koran burnings, American and coalition forces are the targets of an unrelenting assassination campaign by Afghan security forces. Michael Yon puts the number at 200 coalition members killed in nearly 50 documented incidents.

On Sunday that number increased by three. An American was killed by an Afghan policeman, and two Britons by an Afghan soldier:

As the Royal Military Police began investigating yesterday’s tragedy, it emerged that the gunman went berserk after a row broke out at the entrance to the British military compound in Lashkar Gah, Helmand.

Lieutenant Gul Nazir is said to have arrived in an army vehicle with several men pretending to be assigned to guard a delegation of VIPs visiting the base.

But when he was challenged by guards and told to wait outside, he opened fire with an M16 semi-automatic rifle, killing the two men and wounding a third...

British forces shot him dead after he killed a Royal Marine and a soldier from the staff and personnel support department of the Adjutant General’s Corps...

The joint British-Afghan investigation announced yesterday will try to discover whether Nazir was working for the Taliban.

What difference does that make? The Taliban hate western forces, and so do thousands of serving Afghan soldiers and police. The only difference is that the former hate us on their own dime, while the latter hate the hand that feeds them. As I wrote earlier this month:

In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by Westerners, and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest opportunity to kill them.

To stay the course, you have to have a course to stay. And Senator McCain & Co cannot articulate one beyond the "progress that we have personally witnessed over repeated visits". An Aussie politician on a similar visit to his own troops told me the question he asked when invited to admire that "progress": "If things are going so well, why can't I leave the base? Why, in fact, are there places on the base it's not safe for me to go?" (The parts to which the likes of Lieut Nazir have access.)

That's a better question than McCain, Lieberman and Graham seem to have asked. The lack of strategic purpose in Afghanistan ought to be a national disgrace.

A Gated Community in Mogadishu?

Michael, as it happens, I touched tangentially on this subject in my weekend column. After pointing out that the US dollar is worth half of what it was Down Under a decade ago, I continued:

By the way, that decline in the U.S./Australian exchange isn’t the only one. Ten years ago the U.S. dollar was worth 1.6 Canadian; now it’s at par. A decade ago, the dollar was worth over ten Swedish Kroner, now 6.7; 1.8 Singapore dollars, now 1.2. I get asked with distressing frequency by Americans where I would recommend fleeing to. The reality is, given the dollar’s decline over the last decade, that most Americans can no longer afford to flee to any place worth fleeing to. What’s left is the non-flee option: taking a stand here...

Etc. But maybe I'm thinking too narrowly. I bought a timeshare in Ougadougou 15 years ago, and it's increased in value by $27.86, so who knows?

In his novel about America in the year 2030, Albert Brooks (no right-winger) posits a land riven by inter-generational conflict where seniors are preyed on by young 'uns resentful at having been born too late for the American Dream. In Brooks' scenario, the escape route for codgers is an unending cruise: cash in your assets and live on a floating palace - life as an eternal NR cruise but without having to get up early for Steyn and McCarthy's panel discussion on the Iranian nuclear program.

I thought this was just a dystopian fancy of the author's, but it's already here. While down in Australia, I was invited to a party on The World, which had berthed in Sydney for a few days. It's life beyond the gated community: The floated community.

Look for more of this in the years ahead. And presumably, if you spend most of your year in international waters, there are potential tax advantages - as long as you can stay one step ahead of the Somali pirates.

Spirits of the Age

Random sampling of global headlines:

Yorkshire: "Woman Died After Muslim Nurse Refused To Help As He Was Praying"

An 87-year old Alzheimer's patient dies untended because Abdul Bhutto was finishing up his prayers: That's almost too poignant a distillation of Britain's demographic transformation.

Vancouver: "Transgender Beauty Queen Kicked Out Of Miss Universe"

She's hotter than most of the other gals, but that's almost too literal an illustration of John O'Sullivan's theory that the entire post-war history of Canada can be summed up by Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song".

Sacramento: "California Marijuana Workers Ready To Unionize"

The grass is always greener on the other coast. The Golden State at twilight: half-stoner, half-teamster. Okay, that's enough: As Ed Driscoll notes, satirists should be unionizing before the massive redundancies.