Mark Steyn's Blog, page 36

Let's Have Burkina Faso Run U.S. Elections

The NAACP have asked the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva to investigate U.S. voter ID laws.

The U.N. Human Rights Council includes such paragons of human rights -- and free elections -- as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Libya (elected to the council under its late dictator-for-life) and Burkina Faso, whose citizens are required to carry government photo ID at all times, or risk highly mercurial spot fines. Oh, and let's not forget Djibouti, whose current president, the nephew of the previous president, won an impressive 100 percent of the vote in his 2005 reelection campaign.

By the way, if, after they've finished testifying on America's institutional racism, the NAACP are minded to accept any dinner invitations from the council members, I'd be wary of the chaps from Mauritania, a country where blacks are still kept as slaves.

Let's Have Burkina Faso Run US Elections

The NAACP have asked the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to investigate US voter ID laws.

The UN Human Rights Council includes such paragons of human rights - and free elections - as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Libya (elected to the council under its late dictator-for-life) and Burkina Faso, whose citizens are required to carry government photo ID at all times, or risk highly mercurial spot fines. Oh, and let's not forget Djibouti, whose current president, the nephew of the previous president, won an impressive 100 per cent of the vote in his 2005 re-election campaign.

By the way, if, after they've finished testifying on America's institutional racism, the NAACP are minded to accept any dinner invitations from the council members, I'd be wary of the chaps from Mauritania, a country where blacks are still kept as slaves.

Speaking of Free Speech...

John O'Sullivan's post on the sad state of free speech in Britain reminds me that the current issue of The Spectator Down Under has a cover story on me and my free speech tour in Australia, which wrapped up a week ago. The opening sentence alone is worth a click.

If you like John's line that the British police are now the paramilitary wing of The Guardian, you'll enjoy the tale of the gay outreach officer who arrested a practicing Christian for causing emotional distress to the gay outreach officer.

This is the first time I've been on the Speccie's front page in half a decade, and I enjoyed the cover illustration so much (there is a, er, arresting policeman in it) we're using it to promote my big free speech extravaganza in Toronto next month.

The stories that John and Rowan Dean quote are not small things. One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of "conventional wisdom" on everything from unsustainable welfare programs to climate change to Islam. Yet, at precisely the moment when we need to be broadening the bounds of public discourse, in Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere the same ideologically insecure political class that got us into this mess is growing ever more comfortable in regulating what the citizenry is allowed to say, read, listen to - and, indeed, think. I say nuts to that.

The Quit and the Dead

Pamela Geller was struck by that ad The New York Times ran the other day, "It's Time To Quit The Catholic Church", an "open letter to 'liberal' and 'nominal' Catholics". So she sent in her own ad, "It's Time To Quit Islam", an "open letter to 'moderate' Muslims". Analogous artwork, same pitch, only difference being the intended target. The Times' Senior Vice-President for Corporate Hogwash called to tell Miss Geller that - surprise! surprise! - they were way less eager to rush this one into print:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in "a few months." 

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Thus the courage of the secular left: If you're going to be "provocative", it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked. Pamela is right. If you want to be treated with respect by The New York Times and the rest of the multiculti establishment, make it clear you're willing to kill them. That's an interesting message to send.

Beyond the Green Zone

I see I’m part of a news story north of the border this morning. As the CBC reports:

Dick Cheney Cancels Upcoming Toronto Visit

Or as The National Post puts it rather more larkily:

Dick Cheney Cancels Toronto Trip, Says Canada Is Too Dangerous

The Toronto Star wonders:

Has Dick Cheney been reading about how all the mean “pinkos” up in Toronto treat their right-wing politicians? Or is he just scared of Canadians in general?

David Frum is skeptical, but even the Yankee papers have picked it up. (Convergence alert: "Bush Ex-Officials Avoid Birth Control And Canada.")

Anyway, the Steyn connection is this - I’m now pinch-hitting for Cheney:

Conservative author and pundit Mark Steyn will now be speaking along with Michael Coren. The night has been named "Steynamite." We kid you not.

Unlike the former vice-president, I have no fear of venturing into the heart of Canadian darkness. I always use the same three trusty native bearers. They’d take a bullet for me, or at least a maple crème donut.

Meanwhile, respected Canadian journalists are already muttering that the canceled-speech business is a crock. (We're running out of names for conspiracy theorists, but I like this one: "Speechers.") The Calgary Sun’s Stephen Lautens confidently declares that the whole Cheney-scared-of-Canada thing is a hoax. There never was a Cheney gig, and it was all ginned up to promote my lame-o appearance. The Globe & Mail's Adam Radwanski challenges anyone to produce a valid Cheney-in-Toronto ticket. So Quebec monarchist Dr Roy promptly does so ten minutes later.

An old colleague of mine from Maclean’s cruelly suggests I won’t draw “the same quantity of mob”. On the other hand, unlike me, Dick Cheney does not sing “Kung Fu Fighting”. The mob may be smaller, but more enraged.

If you're in Buffalo and surrounding areas, the big show is merely a scenic 90-minute zip up the Queen Elizabeth Way. Even with herds of zombie moose ridden by feral Gordon Lightfoot fans rampaging across the dystopian wastelands, it’s reasonably safe, as long as you keep your car doors locked and avoid eye contact with the locals. And, if you book now, you can get your tickets at special early bird prices. As this excited Twitterer says, it's two a**holes, one low price.

Cry Me a Specter

Remember Senator Arlen Specter, the long-time Republican and somewhat shorter-time Democrat? He has a new book out complaining that, after he stiffed his Republican colleagues, his new Democrat colleagues stiffed him:

Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform.

Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican...

Specter writes that Obama turned down a request to campaign with him in the final days of the primary, because the president’s advisers feared he would look weak if he intervened and Specter lost...

Specter was also disappointed that Biden, who was only a few blocks away at Penn University, did not attend a pre-primary day rally at the Phillies’s Citizens Bank Park — a missed opportunity Specter attributes to a failed staff-to-staff request.

"A failed staff-to-staff request"? Specter could have called Biden directly on a non-staff-to-non-staff telephone, but that would have been totally improper considering Specter's former seniority to Biden on the powerful senate Telephone, Telegram and Facsimile Machine Inter-Senatorial Communications Etiquette Committee. It gets worse:

Specter believes Reid acted with “duplicity” while managing the party switch. Specter said Reid promised him that he would be recognized on the seniority list as a Democrat elected in 1980, but failed to deliver on it...  

Instead, Reid stripped Specter of all his seniority by passing a short resolution by unanimous consent in a nearly-empty chamber, burying him at the bottom of the Democrats’ seniority list.

Specter found out about it after his press secretary emailed him a press account of the switch. Specter was floored that Reid had “violated a fundamental Senate practice to give personal notice to a senator directly affected by the substance of a unanimous consent agreement.”

Outrageous! Specter had his press secretary take it up with the powerful senate subcommittee on subcommittees chaired by Harry Reid's press secretary's communications advisor's media strategist's marketing consultant's publicity relations director's intern. But the humiliations continued:

He says Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), now the chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee, declined a request to let Specter take over as chairman at least until the election.

Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) refused to let him move past them in seniority on the Judiciary Committee.

Reid also reneged on a commitment to re-name the influential Energy, Education, Indian Casino Gambling and Northern Mariana Islands Committee the His Excellency Senator Arlen Z. Specter Energy, Education, Indian Casino Gambling and Northern Mariana Islands Committee.

If you buy only one book this year about a man passed over for the chairmanship of the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee, make it this one. Unless Tom Harkin has one in the works.

There Ain't No 'Busses Runnin' From the Bank to Mandalay

Over the weekend, America's secretary of state spoke in New York at the Women in the World summit:

Clinton specifically mentioned Georgetown contraception activist Sandra Fluke while praising women "who are assuming the risks that come with sticking your neck out, whether you are a democracy activist in Burma or a Georgetown law student in the United States."

I wonder if Mrs. Clinton gave a moment's thought to how revoltingly insulting that comparison is to "democracy activists in Burma." On the one hand, Zin Mar Aung, who spent eleven years in jail for writing a letter. On the other, one of the eternal children of American entitlement, attending an elite law school whose graduates proceed smoothly to jobs with a starting salary of $160,000 yet demanding the government pick up the tab for her birth control -- which, even if one accepts her absurd figure of $3,000, amounts to less than the first week's salary of that first job.

John J. Miller below quotes Steven Landsburg saying Miss Fluke's position "deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered." We should save some of that ridicule, mockery, and jeering for the hideous parochial decadence of Mrs. Clinton's ludicrous equation -- and the audience that applauded it.

U.S. Soldier Goes on Civilian Rampage

NATO's sorry war in Afghanistan appears to have taken another wretched turn. From the Washington Post:

KABUL — A U.S. soldier was taken into custody in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, a few hours after he opened fire on Afghan civilians, killing 15, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

The shooting took place at approximately 3 a.m. as a lone soldier left a checkpoint in Kandahar province’s Panjwai district and opened fire on civilians in two villages, said Javed Faisal, the director of the provincial government’s media center.

Fun with Democ**ts

My weekend column is on the various ructions surrounding middle-aged co-ed Sandra Fluke, as seen from my distant vantage in Oz. Not for the first time, the Democrats may have overreached in their Miss Manners routine. The President made a great show of telephoning poor Sandra, as the father of young girls himself (technically, Sasha and Malia are young enough to be Miss Fluke's daughters, but, given her lethargic progress through the education system, it's not inconceivable they could end up sitting alongside her in class in a few years). Now it turns out that not only is Bill ("Sarah Palin is a c***") Maher headlining a Dem fundraiser but that President Civility himself was due to attend the Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner and enjoy the late-night comedy stylings of  Louis C.K. Says RTCA chair and CNN honcho Jay McMichael of Mr C.K.:

It gives the dinner a bit of an edge, shakes it up a little, which is what we wanted to do. One of our goals was to make it not so stuffy an evening, as opposed to the more traditional, D.C. black-tie events.

How's about this surefire thigh slapper?

Louis C.K. says of Palin: “her f*** retard making c***” and “the baby that just came out of her f**** disgusting c***.”

That's some edge. If you think it's even edgier without the asterisks, you can see his raw Tweets here.

Louis C.K. has now been mysteriously disinvited from the dinner. Those who live by the asterisk die by the asterisk.

(PS A decade ago in Britain, after a week of asterisk-studded outbursts from Russell Crowe, Mike Tyson and others, I invented the Riskies, an awards gala for the most asterisked soundbites of the year. It may be time to revive it for the Democrats' loose-lipped civility cops.)

The Fluke Charade

I’m writing this from Australia, so, if I’m not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me -- the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law, and recently testified before Congress.

Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn’t a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn, and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of Miss Fluke Goes to Washington, with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, “Anyone for bull****?”

Oh, and the “young coed” turns out to be 30, which is what less evolved cultures refer to as early middle age. She’s a couple of years younger than Mozart was at the time he croaked, but, if the Dems are to be believed, the plucky little Grade 24 schoolgirl has already made an even greater contribution to humanity. She’s had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else (and this is where one is obliged to tiptoe cautiously, lest offense is given to gallant defenders of the good name of American maidenhood such as the many prestigious soon-to-be-former sponsors of this column who’ve booked Bill Maher for their corporate retreat with his amusing “Sarah Palin is a c***” routine#...#)

#ad#Where was I? Oh, yes. The brave middle-aged schoolgirl had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex life.

Well, as noted above, she’s attending Georgetown, a nominally Catholic seat of learning, so how expensive can that be? Alas, Georgetown is so nominally Catholic that the cost of her sex life runs to three grand -- and, according to the star witness, 40 percent of female students “struggle financially” because of the heavy burden of maintaining a respectable level of premarital sex at a Jesuit institution.

As I said, I’m on the other side of the planet, so maybe I’m not getting this. But I’d say the core issue here is not religious liberty -- which in these Godless times the careless swing voter now understands as a code phrase meaning that uptight Republicans who can’t get any action want to stop you getting any, too.

Nor is the core issue liberty in its more basic sense -- although it would certainly surprise America’s founders that their republic of limited government is now the first nation in the developed world to compel private employers to fully fund the sex lives of their employees.

Nor is it even the distinctively American wrinkle the Republic of Paperwork has given to governmentalized health care, under which the “right to privacy” the Supreme Court claimed to have discovered in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade will now lead to thousands and thousands of self-insuring employers keeping computer records of the morning-after pills and herpes medication racked up by Miss Jones on reception.

Nor is the issue that America has 30-year-old schoolkids -- or even 30-year-old schoolkids who expect someone else to pick up the tab for their extracurricular activities, rather than doing a paper route and a bit of yard work to save up for their first IUD, as we did back in my day. After all, the human right to government-mandated free contraception is as American as apple pie and far healthier for you. In my most recent book, I quote one of Sandra Fluke’s fellow geriatrics gamboling in the groves of academe and complaining to the Washington Post about the quality of free condoms therein:

“If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to trash them,” said T Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia. “So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people want?” 

All of us are born with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and a lifetime supply of premium ribbed silky-smooth ultrasensitive spermicidal lubricant condoms. No taxation without rubberization, as the Minutemen said. The shot heard round the world, and all that.

#page#Nor is the core issue that, whatever the merits of government contraception, America is the Brokest Nation in History -- although the Fluke story is a useful reminder that the distinction between fiscal and social conservatism is generally false. As almost all those fashionable split-the-difference fiscally conservative/socially liberal governors from George Pataki to California’s pathetically terminated Terminator eventually discover, their social liberalism comes with a hell of a price tag. Ask the Greeks how easy it is for insolvent nations to wean the populace off unaffordable nanny-state lollipops: When even casual sex requires a state welfare program, you’re pretty much done for.

No, the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts. As stark staring nuts as the court of Ranavalona, the deranged nymphomaniac queen of Madagascar at whose funeral the powder keg literally went up, killing dozens and burning down three royal palaces. Indeed, one is tempted to arrange an introduction between “T Squalls, 30,” now 32 going on 33, and Sandra Fluke, 30 going on 31, like a skillfully negotiated betrothal between two royal houses in medieval Europe. The student prince would bring to the marriage his impressive fortune of a decade’s worth of Trojan Magnums, while the Princess Leia would have a dowry of index-linked RU 486s settled upon her by HHS the Margravine of Sebelius. They would not be required to produce an heir.

#ad#Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar-lottery winner, still receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness. Yet the same people are determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.

Sorry, I pass. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1784. In the absence of religious virtue, sexual virtue, and fiscal virtue, one might trust to the people’s sense of sheer preposterousness to reject the official narrative of the Fluke charade. Yet even that is not to be permitted. Full disclosure: I will be guest-hosting for Rush Limbaugh this Monday, so it would not be appropriate for me to comment here on Rush’s intervention. But let me say this. Almost every matter of the moment boils down to the same story: The Left’s urge to narrow the bounds of public discourse and insist that “conventional wisdom” unknown to the world the day before yesterday is now as unquestionable as the laws of physics. Nothing that Rush said is as weird or as degrading as what Sandra Fluke and the Obama administration are demanding. And any freeborn citizen should reserve the right to point that out as loudly and as often as possible.

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