Mark Steyn's Blog, page 35

Ivan the Re-Revoked

John Demjanjuk died a few days ago, 91 years old and still protesting his innocence. The Israeli Supreme Court declined to accept that he was Ivan the Terrible, the butcher of Treblinka. A German court decided that he was a lowly prison guard at an entirely different camp, Sobibor. I suppose one day it will be possible to say for certain who this man was and where he passed the years of the Second World War. In the meantime, I'm struck by the behavior of US officials. George Jonas, in a sharp commentary on the Demjanjuk case, writes:

In the same year, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, essentially, that the Soviets were not alone in sitting on exculpatory evidence. By failing to disclose evidence that would have indicated that their trophy fish (Demjanjuk) wasn't Moby Dick but a minnow, the intrepid Nazi hunters of the Office of Special investigations along with U.S. federal prosecutors committed fraud on the court.

That's correct. US officials suppressed evidence from various Treblinka guards identifying someone else as Ivan the Terrible. So, having had his US citizenship revoked, Demjanjuk had it restored by a US court in 1998. As is their wont, the feds took another whack:

In 1999, the U.S. Justice Department filed a new complaint against him, this time for having been, not Ivan the Terrible, as they had urged for the previous 20 years, but plain John Demjanjuk, a guard at the infamous death camps of Sobibor and Majdanek in German-occupied Poland.

So in 2004 Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship a second time, and eventually wound up being tried in Germany. As Jonas puts it:

It offered to prosecute people whose country it invaded in 1941 for accepting Germany's offer they couldn't refuse. And so it happened that in 2009, Demjanjuk, 88, stripped of his American citizenship again, was extradited to Germany, to be tried and eventually convicted of not saying no to Germany, which now appears to be a crime in that country.

Last year, on the eve of his German conviction, the AP discovered that the US Justice Department's fallback theory - not Moby Dick, but a minnow - rested in large part on a Nazi ID card their own chaps regarded as a Soviet forgery:

Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.

That's what the FBI said in 1985, but it stayed classified until 2009 - by which time Demjanjuk had been restored to US citizenship, re-stripped, denied various appeals, and shipped to Germany for his trial, in large part because of that ID card. Convicted under a novel legal theory as an accessory to mass murder, he was, in effect, let off by the judge with time served in order to commence, from his German old folks' home, his latest appeal. Death has brought that to an end, so we'll never get to see, another decade or so down the road, a US court ponder whether he was stiffed by the Justice Department yet again and if his US citizenship should be de-re-revoked.

Whatever the truth of Demjanjuk's past, there's a faintly disreputable whiff of double jeopardy about the American end of this case. I'd be interested to know from Andy McCarthy or any of our other legal wallahs whether anybody else has ever been stripped of his US citizenship twice. Is that a record? Or is there someone out there who was de-Americanized thrice?

The Sun Also Sets

I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. “I don’t feel America is quite a First World country anymore,” a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.

Well, what does some rinky-dink ’roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the last decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later.

#ad#I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still -- from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen and a half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the treasury secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

Nor do some of Ryan’s fellow conservatives. Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, for whom I have a high regard, was among those representatives who appeared at the Heritage Foundation to express misgivings regarding the Ryan plan’s timidity. They’re not wrong on that: The alleged terrorizer of widows and orphans does not propose to balance the budget of the government of the United States until the year 2040. That would be 27 years after Congressman Ryan’s current term of office expires. Who knows what could throw a wrench in those numbers? Suppose Beijing decides to seize Taiwan. The U.S. is obligated to defend it militarily. But U.S. taxpayers would be funding both sides of the war -- the home team, via the Pentagon budget, and the Chinese military, through the interest payments on the debt. (We’ll be bankrolling the entire People’s Liberation Army by some point this decade.) A Beijing–Taipei conflict would be, in budget terms, a U.S. civil war relocated to the Straits of Taiwan. Which is why plans for mid-century are of limited value. When the most notorious extreme callous budget-slasher of the age cannot foresee the government living within its means within the next three decades, you begin to appreciate why foreign observers doubt whether there’ll be a 2040, not for anything recognizable as “the United States.”

Yet it’s widely agreed that Ryan’s plan is about as far as you can push it while retaining minimal political viability. A second-term Obama would roar full throttle to the cliff edge, while a President Romney would be unlikely to do much more than ease off to third gear. At this point, it’s traditional for pundits to warn that if we don’t change course we’re going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although it’s worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland, and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America’s current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece’s, although it’s worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.

But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent -- or getting on for twice as much as the second-most-insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.

#page#And if you’re thinking, Wow, all these percentages are making my head hurt, forget ’em: When you’re spending on the scale Washington does, what matters is the hard dollar numbers. Greece’s total debt is a few rinky-dink billions, a rounding error in the average Obama budget. Only America is spending trillions. The 2011 budget deficit, for example, is about the size of the entire Russian economy. By 2010, the Obama administration was issuing about a hundred billion dollars of treasury bonds every month -- or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase of U.S. debt equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India -- every year. And those numbers don’t take into account the huge levels of personal debt run up by Americans. College-debt alone is over a trillion dollars, or the equivalent of the entire South Korean economy -- tied up just in one small boutique niche market of debt which barely exists in most other developed nations.

#ad#“We are headed for the most predictable economic crisis in history,” says Paul Ryan. And he’s right. But precisely because it’s so predictable the political class has already discounted it. Which is why a plan for pie now and spinach later, maybe even two decades later, is the only real menu on the table. There’s a famous exchange in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Someone asks Mike Campbell, “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” We’ve been going through the gradual phase so long, we’re kinda used to it. But it’s coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second way: sudden, and very bad.

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, stopping the spendaholism, closing federal agencies, privatizing departments, block-granting to the states -- not in 2040, but now. “Suddenly” is about to show up.

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

Missing Cathy

I wouldn't want to let midnight chime without noting that, hard as it is to believe, today marks the fifth anniversary of our pal Cathy Siepp's death. She was NRO's Left Coast correspondent and much else. I was tootling around in rural Quebec the other day when a line of hers popped unbidden into my head and I laughed out loud and went off the road.

Amy Alkon shares some memories of Cathy here. I said my bit in an NRO symposium which you can find here. Among the others paying tribute to her back then was Andrew Breitbart, now reunited (one hopes) with his old friend. As I said five years ago:

Great writing is all about rhythm, and Cathy’s was beautiful. I shall miss her enormously.

I do.

Lather, Rinse, and Repeat

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a "right wing conservative extremist," in the words of NRO commenter ExpatAsia, echoed by Chrisman and Galt's Bain. Up north, this view was shared by Canada's most prominent establishment Jew and the Liberal Party attack poodle Warren Kinsella (whom NR readers may recall from my free-speech cover story, which mentioned the groveling apology he was forced to make to “the Chinese community” after an unfortunately sinophobic cat joke). The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn't representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam. I’m sad to see the usually perceptive Ed West of the London Telegraph planting his flag on this wobbling blancmange.

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: "French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting." Likewise, after Major Hasan's mountain of dead infidels, "Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army." Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, "British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow's Train Bombing." Oh, no, wait, that's a parody, though it's hard to tell.

Look, pace Ed West, isn't it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it’s not a competition. Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed -- for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What's left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.     

Moral Equivalence Watch

On Monday morning, a gunman opened fire in Toulouse as children were arriving at a Jewish school for the start of classes. Two boys and a girl (all under eight) and a teacher died. Baroness Ashton, the Browno-Blairite hack who serves as "Europe"'s "High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy," was sympathetic but decided to place the event within the broader picture:

At an event in Brussels on Monday organized for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, Ms. Ashton paid tribute to children around the world, including the fatal coach crash in Switzerland which killed more than 20 Belgian children, the Syrian conflict, the Toulouse shooting and "what's happened in Gaza."

Lady Ashton now says her remarks were "taken out of context." The context that matters is that Jewish life in Europe now takes place only behind increasingly heavy security -- at synagogues, at schools, at community centers. That leaves the journeys in between, which many Jews now make without identifying marks of their faith: in the streets, for example, the son of Amsterdam's chief rabbi wears his yarmulke under a baseball cap. As I wrote here three years ago:

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews;” in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, the congregation at a Swedish synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in; in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store; in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a Belgian synagogue; in Antwerp, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

This roll call and much else in the years since ought to be a source of shame, even to a posturing buffoon like Catherine Ashton. Before moving on to heal the Middle East, maybe she and her fellow Eurocrats could try applying their magic touch to the jurisdiction for which they're actually responsible.

Re Jimmy Carter of Mars

...or whatever it's called: Michael's right. It is kind of amazing that a Saturday-morning serial can lose a fifth of a billion dollars. Yes, yes, I know that's what the diseased government of the United States borrows every hour of every day, but, for anyone not in "public service," it's still a helluva sum.

But I disagree somewhat with Michael here:

Who would ever green-light such an absurd amount of money for a project whose original fans were driving Model T’s and listening to the organ while watching the latest moving picture from the Lumiere brothers?

Yeah, but what else you got? Sherlock Holmes? Narnia? Middle Earth? Hollywood's business model is to take a story that cost two shillings and thruppence-ha'penny and spend a fifth of a billion making it lousier. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't, but either way the industry's living off Model T fumes. Hollywood could use its own Edgar Rice Burroughs, but instead it's a business full of guys who can't even adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs for less than 300 mil -- and then blow it. (Broadway has the same problem, but with a couple of zeroes lopped off the bottom line.)

Oh, and note the relatively positive nature of John Carter's reviews: People who spend their working week immersed in Hollywood's present sensibility couldn't see there was no there there. This critic gets close to it:

Just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere.

And he means it as a compliment: Why, here's a film like all the other films! What's not to like? He's got a point: These days, whatever the source material, movies are mostly about other movies. And not even old movies, like Spielberg when he did the Indiana Jones stuff, but movies that you saw last week. You'd almost get the impression that that's all these fellows know. So all you see is the formula, which the critics dignify as allusion and hommage rather than a shrinking myopia as constricting as the most convention-bound kabuki.

By the way, is John Podhoretz right -- they're remaking the 2002 Spider-Man?

Staying Focused

On St. Patrick's Day, Joe Biden was awash in booze. Whoops, that should be boos. But WPXI's Brandon Hudson does his best not to let it derail his hard-hitting reporting. As does the anchor back at the studio (stay tuned to the very end of the clip for a Great Moment in Court Eunuchry).

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain quotes from the exciting news coverage of Camelot's local paper:

On Monday, the King rode in the park.

  "   Tuesday,       "       "            "

  "   Wednesday, "       "            "

  "   Thursday,      "       "            "

  "   Friday,            "       "            "

  "   Saturday,       "       "            "

  "   Sunday,         "        "            "

Thus, WPXI: On St. Patrick's Day, the king's most wise and beneficent Lord High Chancellor rode in the park.

Comic Strib

Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune comics page spiked a handful of Doonesbury strips last week. For readers under 60, Doonesbury is a charming period piece about an average suburban guy who puts on a bow tie to go to work every morning but still finds himself running late for the streetcar and is happily married to his lovely wife Blondie . . . oh, no, wait, that's something else. Anyway, in a fast-moving world, Doonesbury remains reassuringly immune to change and innovation. Last week's strips concerned Texas abortion laws. Demonstrating the lightness of touch for which he's renowned, Garry Trudeau shows a Lone Star doc picking up his "10-inch shaming wand" to perform a sonogram and declaring: "By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape."

Hard to believe America's dying monodailies don't recognize Mr. Trudeau as the path back to solvency, but there it is. Explaining her decision not to run the strip, the Star Tribune's editor Nancy Barnes made the following comparison:

A few years ago, we had a similar controversy over a decision not to publish some highly controversial cartoons circulated in a Danish newspaper that caricatured the prophet Mohammed... We chose not to run them in the Star Tribune because they would have been inflammatory and offensive to many readers.

As John Hinderaker points out, the two cases are not in the least bit similar: one's a comic strip you run every day; one's a news story about mass murder by frenzied mobs. You're not being asked to carry a comic strip in which, say, Beetle Bailey accidentally burns a Koran; you're simply being called upon to cover a news story in an honest fashion that provides readers with the basic information. If a newspaper can't do that, who needs it?

Meanwhile, Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist with whom I had the honor to share a platform in Copenhagen a year or so back, lives under constant threat of murder but refuses to go into hiding. He has had his home firebombed by some strikingly inept fatwa-enforcers who managed to set their pants alight and were forced to flee trouserless through the snowy wastes. Artists congratulate themselves incessantly on their "courage," far more than soldiers or firemen do. But Mr Vilks is actually having to live up to it. I would be more hopeful about the future of the west if the ranks of "bold" "transgressive" artists numbered more Lars Vilkses and fewer Garry Trudeaus. (Plug alert: I'll be speaking on this and related topics in Toronto next month. So far, compared to Lars' pantsless incendiaries, the death threats are rather dull.)

Obama's History Lesson

Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus

When he said the world was round

They all laughed when Edison recorded sound

They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother

When they said that man could fly

They told Marconi wireless was a phony#...# 

#ad#Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film Shall We Dance? (1937). Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George’s Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter:

Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail -- [Laughter] -- they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society. [Laughter.] They would not have believed that the world was round. [Applause.] We’ve heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” [Laughter.] One of Henry Ford’s advisers was quoted as saying, “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad.” [Laughter.]

The crowd loved it. But President Algy Solyndra wasn’t done:

There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?” [Laughter.] That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore -- [laughter and applause] -- because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. [Applause.] He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something. 

It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.

But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st-century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health-care reforms, 1930s New Deal--sized entitlements premised on mid-20th-century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the Weimar Republic. If that’s not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don’t know what is.

I was interested in the rest of Obama’s yukfest of history’s biggest idiots. Considering that he is (in the words of historian Michael Beschloss) “the smartest guy ever to become president,” the entire passage sounded as if it was plucked straight from one of those “Top Twenty Useful Quotes for Forward-Looking Inspirational Speakers” websites. And whaddayaknow? Rutherford B. Hayes, the TV flash in the pan, the horse is here to stay -- they’re all at the Wikiquote page on “Incorrect Predictions.” Fancy that! You can also find his selected examples at the web page “Some Really Really Bad Predictions About the Future” and a bazillion others.

Given that the ol’ Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I wondered about the others. The line about television being a “flash in the pan” is generally attributed to “Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.” She was a New Zealand--born lass who while at Oxford wrote to the newly founded BBC with some ideas on using radio in schools. By the Seventies, the educational programming she had invented and developed was used in 90 percent of U.K. schools, and across the British Commonwealth from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific. She apparently used the flash-in-the-pan line in a private conversation recounted some years after her death by her fellow BBC executive, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a lady I knew very slightly. It was in the context of why she was pessimistic about early attempts at educational television. Mary Somerville would not have been surprised by American Idol or Desperate Housewives, but she thought TV’s possibilities for scholarly study were limited. If you remember Leonard Bernstein giving live illustrated music lectures on Beethoven on CBS in the Fifties, and you’ve lived long enough to see “quality public television” on PBS dwindle down to dreary boomer nostalgia, lousy Brit sitcoms, Laurence Welk reruns, and therapeutic infomercials, you might be inclined to agree that as an educational tool TV certainly proved “a flash in the pan.” And that’s before your grandkid gets home from school and complains he’s had to sit through Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth again.

#page#What was Obama’s other thigh slapper? Oh, yes. “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad.” The line is generally attributed to “the president of the Michigan Savings Bank” in 1903. That would be George Peck, born in 1834 on a hardscrabble farm in Connecticut. Due to a boyhood accident, he was unable to use one arm and so was no good for agricultural labor. So at the age of 16 he started as the lowest paid clerk in a Utica dry-goods store. From this unpromising start, Peck built one of the largest dry-goods businesses in Michigan. Was he, as the president said, one of those men “who don’t believe in the future”? Not at all. He was president of the Edison Illuminating Company, named for the guy who invented that light bulb the United States government has banned. Henry Ford was Peck’s chief engineer. Peck set his son and Ford up in a shop on Park Place in Detroit to work on their prototype horseless carriages. After Ford departed, the first porcelain spark plug was baked in Peck’s shop.

Christopher Columbus? Once upon a time, your average well-informed high-schooler, never mind the smartest president in history, understood that Columbus was laughed at not because everyone believed the world was round: Educated Europeans of his day accepted that the earth was spherical and had done since Aristotle’s time. They laughed because they thought he was taking the long way round to the East Indies. Which he was.

#ad#So let’s see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th-century Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste. Marie. A man who sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers.” A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.”

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It’s not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle Crowd-Pleasing for Dummies as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison#...# How does that song continue? “They laughed at me#...#”

At Prince George’s Community College they didn’t. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

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

HHS Mandate, Phase Two?

Once these Catholic institutions get with the beat on contraceptives, what next? From Sudbury, Ontario:

Family members are shocked after Grade 7 Catholic school students received oral sex pamphlets meant for 18 year olds.

“My granddaughter is totally not into sex or anything like that. She could not believe that she was handed this in school. And when I saw it — I’m 62 years old — I was upset,” said Carmen James-Poulin, the grandmother of a student at Marymount Academy in Sudbury, Ont.

The explicit flyers were distributed Thursday during an open house at the all-girls Catholic school for students in Grades 7 to 12.

The pamphlet includes a guide on how to perform oral sex on men and women, as well as pros and cons to giving or receiving the act.

You can see the explicit pamphlet here, written in the usual desperate-to-be-cool yet grimly mechanical mélange characteristic of the genre. This is a new record for its distribution: Two years ago, it was discovered a Montreal school had handed it out to Eighth Graders. Now it's Sudbury Seventh Graders. I'm confident in a year or two some lucky Manitoban Fifth Graders or Nova Scotian Second Graders will be enjoying the benefits of its wisdom.

As Brian Lilley comments, the school's excuse is as weird as its original "error": Oh, don't worry, the how-to-improve-your-cunnilingus-skills leaflet we accidentally handed out to middle-schoolers was really meant for the Grade 12 girls. What sort of "Catholic" school hands out tips on oral sex to any grade?

Oh, well: Sex Ed über alles. In my day (as we oldsters say), whatever one's tastes in this area, most interested parties managed to pick up the gist of it out of hours. You'd be amazed how much curriculum time that frees up for math, history, Latin and whatnot.