Mark Steyn's Blog, page 4

SNAP, Crackle, and Bust

From Eli Saslow in the Washington Post, a portrait of America as Dependistan:

He wiped the front counter and smoothed the edges of a sign posted near his register. “Yes! We take Food Stamps, SNAP, EBT!”

“Today, we fill the store up with everything,” he said. “Tomorrow, we sell it all.”

At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks, beginning the monthly cycle that has helped Woonsocket survive.

The "economy" (unemployment, shuttered factories, debt) is permanent, but the economic cycle is monthly, thanks to "Uncle Sam Day":

The 1st is always circled on the office calendar at International Meat Market, where customers refer to the day in the familiar slang of a holiday. It is Check Day. Milk Day. Pay Day. Mother’s Day.

“Uncle Sam Day,” Pichardo said now, late on Feb. 28, as he watched new merchandise roll off the trucks. Out came 40 cases of Ramen Noodles. Out came 230 pounds of ground beef and 180 gallons of orange juice.

SNAP enrollment in Rhode Island had been rising for six years, up from 73,000 people to nearly 180,000, and now three-quarters of purchases at International Meat Market are paid for with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Government money had in effect funded the truckloads of food at Pichardo’s dock . . . and the three part-time employees he had hired to unload it . . . and the walk-in freezer he had installed to store surplus product . . . and the electric bills he paid to run that freezer, at nearly $2,000 each month.

Pichardo’s profits from SNAP had also helped pay for International Meat Market itself, a 10-aisle store in a yellow building that he had bought and refurbished in 2010, when the rise in government spending persuaded him to expand out of a smaller market down the block.

That old Democratic Depression anthem is too idealistic for such a world. But, for the new normal, "Snappy Days Are Here Again":

Grocery store chains had started discount spinoffs. Farmers markets had incentivized SNAP shopping by rewarding customers with $2 extra for every $5 of government money spent. Restaurants, long forbidden from accepting SNAP, had begun a major lobbying campaign in Washington, and now a handful of Subways in Rhode Island were accepting the benefit as part of a pilot program.

And then what? Where does this story end? What happens to change the trajectory of these lives?

Two Thumbs Down

Say what you like about Iran's state-controlled Press TV, but they know how to write a headline:

Ben Affleck Could Be Hanged For War Crimes

And they mean it. The Iranians have taken Argo's publicity slogan at face value - "The movie was fake. The mission was real." - and applied it to Ben's entire oeuvre:

Honegger stated that filmmaker Ben Affleck might one day be hanged for war crimes and treason - not only for Argo, which she said is designed to pave the road to war on Iran, but also for his role in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, an earlier intelligence operation designed to pave the road to the 9/11 “New Pearl Harbor.” According to Honegger, Affleck - like his character in Argo - appears to be a covert operator posing as a filmmaker.

And let's not forget Daredevil (2003) in which Agent Affleck played a blind man with superpowers, and which opened only a month before the Great Satan, a superpower, stumbled blindly into Iraq. Coincidence?

Likewise, Affleck's 2009 romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You opened shortly before Obama gave Gordon Brown a lousy box set of discount movies that don't work on a British DVD player. Hmm.

The Axis of Torpor

I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming Finding Nemo 2 Marlin and Dory’s marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he’s not Dick Cheney.

#ad#Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster -- questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America -- broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town -- and those are just our “allies.” With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

And, to be fair, even Dick Cheney isn’t Dick Cheney, at least in the sense that Dick Cheney isn’t Darth Vader. After a decade of inconclusive war, Americans are understandably receptive to the notion that it’s time to “come home.” Thus, newly appointed defense secretary Chuck Hagel faces, in the words of the Associated Press, “the jarring difficulties of shutting down a war in a country still racked by violence.” “Shutting down”? Yes, the defense secretary is now doing to the Afghan War what Romney’s Bain Capital did to midwestern factories. Its business model no longer makes sense. Some personnel can be reassigned, but thousands of EU nation-building consultants, cousins of Hamid Karzai, and tribal pederasts enjoying free Viagra from Washington (seriously) may have to be laid off.

“Shutting down” Afghan wars can be a tricky business, as the British discovered during their 1842 retreat from Kabul, when the locals offered them “safe passage” and then proceeded to massacre all 4,500 troops plus 12,000 wives, children, and attendant locals, leaving only Dr. William Brydon and his horse to make it through to Jalalabad. His mount died upon arrival; Dr. Brydon lived to tell the tale, albeit missing part of his skull, sheared off by a Pashtun tribesman.

#page#

No doubt things will go better this time. Two more Americans died this week at the hands of one of their Afghan “allies,” a man trained, paid, and armed by the United States. If you slaughter thousands, you can still just about get our attention, as Mullah Omar discovered after 9/11. But the slow bleeding of two deaths here, three deaths there, week after week after week takes a psychological toll, rotting out purpose and strategy. So in Washington this will be a war we “shut down”; in Kandahar and beyond, it will be a war we lost.

As one war “shuts down,” are any others likely to open up? This week Obama told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that “we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” So Tehran, fresh from playing the bad guys in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning blockbuster, is going nuclear? Hey, relax, says the president: “I continue to keep all options on the table.” And, every time he says that, you get the vague feeling he continues to keep the table somewhere in the basement. The best option would be if the Israelis just got on with it, absolving everyone else from a tough decision and simultaneously affording them the deliciously irresistible frisson of denouncing the Zionists for their grossly disproportionate response.

More likely, Iran will be permitted to go nuclear -- followed shortly thereafter by Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and anyone else who dislikes being conscripted under the Shia Persian nuclear umbrella. North Korea and Pakistan both anticipate a lively export market.

Pakistan has a nominal per capita GDP of about $1,200, with North Korea’s barely detectable. By comparison Sweden’s is about $58,000 and the Netherlands’ about $50,000. But North Korea is a nuclear power and the Netherlands isn’t, and has no plans to become one, and any party so minded to propose otherwise would soon find itself out of power. The assumption that developed nations will get richer under Washington’s defense welfare has been the central tenet of the American era. So now the wealthiest countries in history cannot defend their own borders, while economic basket cases of one degree of derangement or another are nuclear powers.

Perhaps this improbable division will hold. Perhaps the Axis of Crazy will be content just to jostle among itself leaving the Axis of Torpor to fret about lowering the retirement age to 48 and mandatory transgendered bathrooms and other pressing public-policy priorities. But, even under such an inherently unstable truce, the American position and the wider global economy would deteriorate.

As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds. A broker America needs to learn to do more with less, and to rediscover the cold calculation of national interest rather than waging war as the world’s largest NGO. In dismissing Paul as a “wacko bird,” John McCain and Lindsey Graham assume that the too-big-to-fail status quo is forever. It’s not; it’s already over.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Nobody Expects the Toronto District School Board Inquisition . . .

Last weekend I wrote about the paramilitarization of the bureaucracy:

Two years ago in this space, I noted that the U.S. secretary of education, who doesn’t employ a single teacher, is the only education minister in the developed world with his own SWAT team: He used it to send 15 officers to kick down a door in Stockton, Calif., drag Kenneth Wright out onto the front lawn, and put him in handcuffs for six hours. Erroneously, as it turned out. But it was in connection with his estranged wife’s suspected fraudulent student-loan application, so you can’t be too careful. That the education bureaucracy of the Brokest Nation in History has its own Seal Team Six is ridiculous and offensive. Yet the citizenry don’t find it so: They accept it.

I'm embarrassed to say that the town of my birth has just staged a low-budget Canadian remake, and on an even more disreputable pretext. The Toronto blogger Blazing Cat Fur has been a tireless critic of the confused social engineers at the Toronto District School Board, who simultaneously promote both vegetable sex and Muslim sex-segregated prayer sessions at which menstruating girls have to sit at the back. Many of his exposés have been picked up by local TV, radio and newspapers. Yesterday, the School Board decided they'd had enough of being publicly embarrassed. As the Toronto Sun puts it:

TDSB Sics Police On Sarcastic Blogger

It seems a wee bit over-sensitive for a school board that promotes murderous goons like Che Guevara and cop-killers like the Black Panthers as role models to its young charges to get its knickers in a twist over a blog post. But, of course, for leftie social engineers, the glamor of the revolutionary aesthetic is mostly a useful cover for inculcating a bovine, unquestioning statist compliance from which no deviation is permitted. There was barely any pretense by the cops that there was a legal justification for what happened yesterday; it was just a friendly warning: "Nice blog ya got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it."

One of the most disquieting trends in Western Europe is the state's increasingly open intimidation of those who dissent from the official ideology. Sad to see it on this side of the Atlantic.

The Loneliness of the Links

Nathaniel writes below:

White House press secretary Jay Carney earlier today refused to disclose the cost to the American taxpayers of the president’s golf outings. The question, from ABC’s Jonathan Karl, came on the heels of Carney’s claim that White House tours had been canceled as a result of the sequester because they are “labor intensive.”

But taking a helicopter, a wide-body jet and a 40-car motorcade to play golf with Tiger Woods isn't?

These guys aren't even trying anymore.

Don't Try for Me, Argentina

In yesterday's referendum, 99.8 per cent of Falkland Islanders voted to remain under British sovereignty.

Their democratic wishes are unlikely to cut much ice with the Obama administration. It's not like they voted for the Muslim Brotherhood or anything hopeful and inspiring like that . . .

Get With the Beat

I wrote below about Saturday night's debate at University College, London, at which the audience was segregated by sex. What happens, though, if the chicks get a little uppity at being forced to sit at the back of the room? In the latest edition of his book Islam: Balancing Life And Beyond, Suhail Kapoor provides some useful advice:

In a chapter, entitled "Does Islam Allow Wife Beating?" Kapoor outlines the circumstances under which it is appropriate for a man to punish his wife using "light" slaps on the wrist with a small wooden stick.

The book appears with a congratulatory blurb from the Ontario Minister of Labour (and President of the Ontario Liberal Party) hailing Mr Kapoor for promoting "tolerance, understanding and respect".

The minister is now pleading ignorance.

Like any relationship, the ever closer Islamo-leftist alliance has its ups and downs. But nothing a few "light slaps" with the wooden stick can't cure.

Saturday Night Sharia

My weekend column mentioned en passant the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and indeed took its title from one of his inspirations. A proponent of the separation of church and state and a believer in equal rights for women, Bentham is regarded as the "spiritual founder" of University College, London, which among other Benthamite characteristics was the first such institution in England to admit men and women on equal terms.

That is, until Saturday night, when the college hosted a debate called "Islam And Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?", and the women were obliged to sit at the back:

When he got to the meeting he discovered that actually the seating in the auditorium was indeed segregated by sex. There was a men’s section, a women’s section, and a “couples” section. Did the “couples” have to produce a marriage certificate, one can’t help wondering? And, while wondering such things, what would have been the reaction of the audience if they had been segregated, as in apartheid South Africa, into a black section, a white section and a “coloureds” section?

When Lawrence realised that he had been duped, he immediately secured permission from the organizers to announce that – contrary to previous instructions – people could sit wherever they wanted. Three young men, described by Lawrence as nice gentle guys, then got up and moved to the women’s section in the back. “In the back”, by the way, may resonate with those who remember Rosa Parks in Alabama in 1955. Security guards then tried to eject the three young men. Lawrence went to find out why, and the guards told him the three were a “threat”.

At least they didn't divide the females into menstruating and non-menstruating, as the celebrated Toronto middle-school mosqueteria does.

This is Britain's future unless so-called liberals are willing to stand up for liberal values. In this case, they did, and they persisted, and University College appears to have been forced to take action. UCL can claim among its alumni the thwarted Pantybomber, who was president of the Islamic Society there. But the savvier Islamic supremacists have no desire to self-detonate over Detroit, not when so many in the West are eager to accept their central argument -- that Islamic law now applies to believer and infidel alike. Hence, sex-segregated public meetings in the heart of London in 2013.

Jeremy Bentham bequeathed his body to University College, intending for it to be displayed in a Chàvez-like manner. Unfortunately, Maori mummification techniques weren't quite up to snuff, so what survives is a skeleton padded with straw like the scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz with a wax head, on display in the South Cloisters (plus a real head, available for inspection upon request). A man of straw with a bland rictus grin: That seems kind of emblematic of the British establishment as it assures everyone there's nothing to see here.

Tax Dollars of Courage

Yesterday, I wrote about Samira Ibrahim, the Arab Springer scheduled to receive (today) a "Woman of Courage" award from the First Lady and the Secretary of State until Samuel Tadros at The Weekly Standard republished a few of her livelier Tweets. Miss Ibrahim initially responded that her Twitter feed had been hacked, but now appears to have abandoned that line:

I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America regarding my previous anti-Zionist statements under pressure from American government therefore they withdrew the award.

The Standard's Lee Smith adds:

Now all that’s left is for the State Department to demand that Ibrahim reimburse American taxpayers for her trip to the United States.

With respect, no. What's left is for American taxpayers to demand the State Department reimburse us for her trip to the United States by firing the boobs who okayed it.

Why is this fiasco Miss Ibrahim's fault? Why blame a Jew-loathing, Hitler-quoting, terrorist-supporting America-hater for being offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the Great Satan and saying, hey, why not? The screw-up here is entirely on the part of the world's most lavishly funded bureaucracy. How many layers of pen-pushers did Miss Ibrahim's honor waft up through from the US Embassy in Cairo to the State Department to the White House without anyone checking anything? Why couldn't the US Government find someone to do five minutes of Arabic Googling?

Yes, yes, I know. All together with the old State Department motto: What difference, at this point, does it make? But, at a time when the President is ostentatiously canceling public tours of the White House to save $18,000 a week, the Samira Ibrahim story is a small reminder that Big Government is invariably stupid government.

The Panopticon State

I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

#ad#I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration -- no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news -- the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.

And in a certain sense they’re right: Afghanistan is winding down, at best, to join the long list of America’s unwon wars, in which, 48 hours after departure, there will be no trace that we were ever there. The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer -- because they mean it, and we don’t. The drone thus has come to symbolize the central defect of America’s “war on terror,” which is that it’s all means and no end: We’re fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.

For a war without strategic purpose, a drone’ll do. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen born in New Mexico, was whacked by a Predator not on a battlefield but after an apparently convivial lunch at a favorite Yemeni restaurant. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman was dining on the terrace of another local eatery when the CIA served him the old Hellfire Special and he wound up splattered all over the patio. Abdulrahman was 16, and born in Denver. As I understand it, the Supreme Court has ruled that American minors, convicted of the most heinous crimes, cannot be executed. But you can gaily atomize them halfway round the planet. My brief experience of Yemeni restaurants was not a happy one but, granted that, I couldn’t honestly say they met any recognized definition of a “battlefield.”

Al-Awlaki Junior seems to have been your average anti-American teen. Al-Awlaki Senior was an al-Qaeda ideologue, and a supposed “spiritual mentor” to everyone from the 9/11 murderers to the Fort Hood killer and the thwarted Pantybomber. On the other hand, after September 11, he was invited to lunch at the Pentagon, became the first imam to conduct a prayer service at the U.S. Congress, and was hailed by NPR as an exemplar of an American “Muslim leader who could help build bridges between Islam and the West.” The precise point at which he changed from American bridge-builder to Yemeni-restaurant take-out is hard to determine. His public utterances when he was being feted by the New York Times are far more benign than those of, say, Samira Ibrahim, who was scheduled to receive a “Woman of Courage” award from Michelle Obama and John Kerry on Friday until an unfortunate flap erupted over some ill-phrased Tweets from the courageous lass rejoicing on the anniversary of 9/11 that she loved to see “America burning.” The same bureaucracy that booked Samira Ibrahim for an audience with the first lady and Anwar al-Awlaki to host prayers at the Capitol now assures you that it’s entirely capable of determining who needs to be zapped by a drone between the sea bass and the tiramisu at Ahmed’s Bar and Grill. But it’s precisely because the government is too craven to stray beyond technological warfare and take on its enemies ideologically that it winds up booking the first lady to hand out awards to a Jew-loathing, Hitler-quoting, terrorist-supporting America-hater.

#page#Insofar as it relieves Washington of the need to think strategically about the nature of the enemy, the drone is part of the problem. But its technology is too convenient a gift for government to forswear at home. America takes an ever more expansive view of police power, and, while the notion of unmanned drones patrolling the heartland may seem absurd, lots of things that seemed absurd a mere 15 years ago are now a routine feature of life. Not so long ago, it would have seemed not just absurd but repugnant and un-American to suggest that the state ought to have the power to fondle the crotch of a seven-year-old boy without probable cause before permitting him to board an airplane. Yet it happened, and became accepted, and is unlikely ever to be reversed.

#ad#Americans now accept the right of minor bureaucrats to collect all kinds of information for vast computerized federal databases, from answers on gun ownership for centralized “medical records” to answers on “dwelling arrangements” for nationalized “education records.” With paperwork comes regulation, and with regulation comes enforcement. We have advanced from the paramilitarization of the police to the paramilitarization of the Bureau of Form-Filling. Two years ago in this space, I noted that the U.S. secretary of education, who doesn’t employ a single teacher, is the only education minister in the developed world with his own SWAT team: He used it to send 15 officers to kick down a door in Stockton, Calif., drag Kenneth Wright out onto the front lawn, and put him in handcuffs for six hours. Erroneously, as it turned out. But it was in connection with his estranged wife’s suspected fraudulent student-loan application, so you can’t be too careful. That the education bureaucracy of the Brokest Nation in History has its own Seal Team Six is ridiculous and offensive. Yet the citizenry don’t find it so: They accept it.

The federal government operates a Railroad Retirement Board to administer benefits to elderly Pullman porters: For some reason, the RRB likewise has its own armed agents ready to rappel down the walls of the Sunset Caboose retirement home. I see my old friend David Frum thinks concerns over drones are “far-fetched.” If it’s not “far-fetched” for the education secretary to have his own SWAT team, why would it be “far-fetched” for the education secretary to have his own drone fleet?

Do you remember the way it was before the war on terror? Back in the Nineties, everyone was worried about militias and survivalists, who lived in what were invariably described as “compounds,” and not in the Kennedys-at-Hyannisport sense. And every so often one of these compound-dwellers would find himself besieged by a great tide of federal alphabet soup, agents from the DEA, ATF, FBI, and maybe even RRB. There was a guy called Randy Weaver who lost his wife, son, and dog to the guns of federal agents, was charged and acquitted in the murder of a deputy marshal, and wound up getting a multi-million-dollar settlement from the Department of Justice. Before he zipped his lips on grounds of self-incrimination, the man who wounded Weaver and killed his wife, an FBI agent called Lon Horiuchi, testified that he opened fire because he thought the Weavers were about to fire on a surveillance helicopter. When you consider the resources brought to bear against a nobody like Randy Weaver for no rational purpose, is it really so “far-fetched” to foresee the Department of Justice deploying drones to the Ruby Ridges and Wacos of the 2020s?

I mention in my book that government is increasingly comfortable with a view of society as a giant “Panopticon” -- the radial prison devised by Jeremy Bentham in 1785, in which the authorities can see everyone and everything. In the Droneworld we have built for the war on terror, we can’t see the forest because we’re busy tracking every spindly sapling. When the same philosophy is applied on the home front, it will not be pretty.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn