Mark Steyn's Blog, page 42

Re: Tony Blankley RIP

As Mona says, Tony's death is a particular shock to those of us who enjoyed his company on the NR cruise just a few weeks ago. He was his usual convivial self, and fully engaged in the 2012 campaign season.

Back in 2005, Tony wrote a book called The West's Last Chance. It opens with a sharply prescient prologue set in the London of the near future in which a Finsbury Park imam launches a protest against "sacriligious" art and sets off a chain of events leading to a brutal attack on a Tate Modern curator, the firebombing of the "Little David" in Florence, attacks on art galleries in Spain and France, etc. A few months after publication, the Danish cartoons crisis erupted and, in its combination of Islamic intimidation and western capitulation, followed pretty much the trajectory foreseen by Tony - as has happened at other cultural pressure points in the years since. Tony anticipated all this, and wrote it up brilliantly. It would have made a marvelous movie.

To turn from the profound to the superficial, I always admired the way Tony was just about the only pundit who could eschew the dark-suit-for-TV rule. Instead, he was invariably the most colorfully accoutred guy on the set. A couple of Christmases back, I was guest-hosting "Hannity" on Fox and Tony turned up in a green check suit with red shirt and accessories. If memory serves, I introduced him as the poinsettia of pundits. Yet he looked splendid in a way that, say, Dick Morris or I wouldn't. On the NR cruise, he sauntered the decks in a terrific pair of orange pants, which isn't something most chaps can get away with. I vaguely assumed his confidence in this area was something to do with his days as a child actor on "Lassie" and whatnot.

To second Mona, he was delightful company, but he was also an incisive thinker with a great command of the long view, and he will be missed.

Debate Night in the Titanic Ballroom

With respect to Hugh and Marc, after almost every one of these debates we at NR and elsewhere say "ABC lost. Big time." and "Big loser: ABC News" - or CNN or MSNBC or whoever it is. And then ten days later (or, in this case, the following morning) there they all are again acquiescing in some condescending media bigfoot's wish to spend 20 minutes discussing whether the Supreme Court has a right to ban diaphragms for transgendered adoptees or whatever hallucinogenic George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer were chugging down in the green room last night.

This country is broke, and the unprecedented scale of its brokeness is an existential threat. Yet, with the exception of Newt's occasional flashes of contempt for the questioners, everyone else plays along with this absurd game. It's not merely that the GOP is letting the left frame the contest but that a party willing to dignify this pitiful charade is sending a broader message about the likelihood of its mustering the determination to stand up to a Democrat-media establishment once in office and effect meaningful course correction.

I see Terence Jeffrey and Andy McCarthy are having a disagreement about the correct response to a question on gay adoption. The correct response is to take an unconstitutional federally-funded supersized condom, roll it over George Stephanopoulos' head, and say, "That's odd. I can no longer hear a word you're saying. So let me throw in my two bits on impending multi-trillion-dollar ruin..."

An Arm and a Leg

Katrina, I hope Newt brings up that Massachusetts gun tax business tonight, because I would be interested to hear Mitt's response. A $100 registration fee per gun would be a pretty significant chunk of change for many of my better-armed neighbors in New Hampshire. Relative to the cost of the item, it seems to me it also strikes at the very concept of property "ownership". One consequence is a lower rate of gun ownership in Massachusetts - which makes it part of a bigger problem with Romney's record: for the most part, his governorship left no trace; where it did, it made Massachusetts even more of a liberal outlier.

The Left's So-Called Empathy

Lest you doubt that we’re headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within ten minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the “crazy things” he’s said and done.

Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America’s political class, but the “crazy thing” Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum’s “taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home,” whereupon he “played with it.” My National Review colleague Rich Lowry rightly slapped down Alan on air, and Colmes subsequently apologized, though not before Mrs. Santorum had been reduced to tears by his remarks. Undeterred, Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist, doubled down on stupid and insisted that Deadbabygate demonstrated how Santorum is “not a little weird, he’s really weird.”

#ad#The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

Not many of us will ever know what it’s like to have a child who lives only a few hours. That alone should occasion a certain modesty about presuming to know what are “weird” and unweird reactions to such an event.

In 1996, the Santorums were told during the pregnancy that their baby had a fatal birth defect and would not survive more than a few hours outside the womb. So Gabriel was born, his parents bundled him, and held him, and baptized him. And two hours later he died. They decided to take his body back to the home he would never know. Weirdly enough, this crazy weird behavior is in line with the advice of the American Pregnancy Association, which says that “it is important for your family members to spend time with the baby” and “help them come to terms with their loss.”

Would I do it? Dunno. Hope I never have to find out. Many years ago, a friend of mine discovered in the final hours of labor that her child was dead but that she would still have to deliver him. I went round to visit her shortly after, not relishing the prospect but feeling that it was one of those things one was bound to do. I ditched the baby gift I’d bought a few days earlier but kept the flowers and chocolate. My friend had photographs of the dead newborn. What do you say? Oh, he’s got your face?

I was a callow pup in my early twenties, with no paternal instincts and no great empathetic capacity. But I understood that I was in the presence of someone who had undergone a profound and harrowing experience, one which it would be insanely arrogant for those of us not so ill-starred to judge.

There but for the grace of God go I, as we used to say.

There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart -- the empathy -- to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

#page#Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers -- Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death -- or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

The Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum’s conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it’s that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues from spending to homosexuality. But you could have said the same thing four years ago about Sarah Palin -- and instead the Left, especially the so-called feminist Left, found it easier to mock her gleefully for the soi-disant retard kid and her fecundity in general. The usual rap against the Right is that they’re hypocrites -- they vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, and next thing you know they’re playing footsie across the stall divider with an undercover cop at the airport men’s room. But Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

#ad#Never mind the dead kid, he has six living kids. How crazy freaky weird is that?

This crazy freaky weird: All those self-evidently ludicrous risible surplus members of the Santorum litter are going to be paying the Social Security and Medicare of all you normal well-adjusted Boomer yuppies who had one designer kid at 39. So, if it helps make it easier to “empathize,” look on them as sacrificial virgins to hurl into the bottomless pit of Big Government debt.

Two weeks ago I wrote in this space: “A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future.” Whatever my disagreements with Santorum on his “compassionate conservatism,” he gets that. He understands that our fiscal bankruptcy is a symptom rather than the cause.

The real wickedness of Big Government is that it debauches not merely a nation’s finances but ultimately its human capital -- or, as he puts it, you cannot have a strong economy without strong families.

Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

Albeit less dramatically than “Doctor” Gosnell, much of the developed world has ruptured the compact between past, present, and future. A spendthrift life of self-gratification is one thing. A spendthrift life paid for by burdening insufficient numbers of children and grandchildren with crippling debt they can never pay off is utterly contemptible. And to too many of America’s politico-media establishment it’s not in the least bit “weird.”

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

Michele, Ma Belle, Tolls for Thee...

Rich, since you mention it, I mourn the collapse of Mrs. Bachmann's campaign. I know the insiders' rap on her -- she's had 47 foster children but 53 chiefs of staff, etc -- but I thought in the debates she punched above her weight, and she got the urgency. She understands that this November is the last chance for serious course correction. I'm not sure how many others do. I'm grateful for the times she cited my book, while obviously regretting that the frequency of citations proved to be inversely proportional to her poll numbers. Funny how that works. Also, I find her rather hot, which is more than I can say about Ron Paul or Newt, or even Jon Huntsman when he does that open-necked shirt thing.

But, as Jonah says, we're all settling this season. Rick Santorum is a wee bit too far down the compassionate-conservative end for my tastes, but he gave (as Newt would say) an extraordinarily remarkably profoundly good speech last night. Maggie got the right adjective: "grounded" -- very real, very secure, very grown-up. Mitt did himself no favors by dashing on immediately afterwards and burbling cheesy stump-speech boilerplate. As readers will know, I broadly agree with Santorum that, ultimately, culture trumps economics -- or, as he puts it, you can't have limited government and a strong economy without strong families. But no doubt by the time the media are through with him that will be assumed to mean he has a secret plan to lock up the sodomites.

Rick-wise, I'm glad the guy who pledges to make Washington as irrelevant to our lives as possible is staying in, and even more pleased to find that he's been rehearsing the title song from Mel Brooks' Men In Tights. Just what he needs at this stage.

But, as things stand, it looks like just another November in which the GOP have to figure out a way to drag their guy across the finish line. Plus ça change . . .

Ignorance is Bliss

Like many chaps round these parts, my general line on Ron Paul was that, as much as I think he's out of his gourd on Iran et al, he performs a useful role in the GOP line-up talking up the virtues of constitutional conservatism. But this Weekly Standard piece by John McCormack suggests Paul is a humbug even on his core domestic turf: The entitlement state is the single biggest deformation to the Founders' republic, and it downgrades not only America's finances but its citizenry. Yet Paul has no serious proposal for dealing with it, and indeed promises voters that we won't have to as long as we cut "overseas spending".

This is hooey. As I point out in my book, well before the end of this decade interest payments on the debt will consume more of the federal budget than military spending. So you could abolish the Pentagon, sell off the fleet to Beijing and the nukes to Tehran and Khartoum and anybody else who wants 'em, and we'd still be heading off the cliff. If a candidate isn't talking about entitlement transformation, he's unserious.

And, before the Ronulans start jeering "Neocon!", I part company with many friends on the right who argue that defense spending can't be cut. I wrote a cover story for NR a couple of months back arguing that the military's bloated size (and budget) is increasingly an impediment to its effectiveness: When you're responsible for 43 per cent of global military expenditure, it's hardly surprising that you start acting like the world's most lavishly funded transnational-outreach non-profit rather than the sharp end of America's national interest. In Afghanistan, the problem is not that we haven't spent enough money but that so much of it has been utterly wasted - and mostly in predictable ways. I am in favor of a leaner, meaner military, with the emphasis on both adjectives.

But Ron Paul, with his breezy indifference to the entitlement question, is peddling the same illusion Obama sold a gullible electorate in 2008 - that, if only America retreats from "Bush's wars", life can go on, and we'll be fat and happy with literally not a care in the world. Big Government parochialism is an appealing fantasy because it suggests America's fortunes can be restored without pain. But they can't - and when Ron Paul tells you otherwise he's talking hogwash.

PS I'd be interested in hearing what Derb (Dr Paul's biggest booster round here) thinks of his entitlement insouciance.

Re: Swift-Boat Vet Slams Gingrich

Newt's complaint about being "Romneyboated" is revealing in the same sense that his bizarre equivalence between his retainer from Freddie Mac and Mitt's failures at Bain Capital is revealing. He's using "swiftboated" as Kerry and the Democrats would - to mean a complacent insider undergoing a lethally effective attack that a fully paid-up member of the club shouldn't have to be subjected to. That's not just a glimpse of how Newt sees himself but also, given that Obama would do far worse things to him in the general, an insight into how disconnected from reality he is.

(And no, for the umpteenth time, I'm not a Mitt man. See here: "Go, Michele!")

Weathervane Pol

On climate change, Newt blows hot and cold.

Arab Spring to American Autumn

I was idly considering compiling a big ol' year-end round-up of my take on 2011, but the Pundette has put together such a grand anthology of Steyn bits from the last 12 months I don't think I can improve on it. Some of it I'd clean forgotten I'd written.

The Obama stuff's in there and the spending, and the Weiners and Sanduskys, but I like the way the selection focuses on the broader themes underlying the freaky news items. As I always say, in the end culture trumps economics. The real problem in Greece isn't the Greek finances so much as the Greek people. That's a good general rule.

So Happy New Year - and let's get real in 2012.

Happy New Year?

Ring out the new, ring in the old.

No, hang on, that should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Not as far as 2011 was concerned. The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion -- a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months’ time.

At the end of 2011, America, like much of the rest of the Western world, has dug deeper into a cocoon of denial. Tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke -- broker than any nation has ever been. A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur -- and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s. That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.

#ad#Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the last three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough: Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion, and eventually 173 dollars and 48 cents. At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done.

Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers. The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s prime minister has already pointed out that they’ll sell it to the Chinese, whose Politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism, and indeed seems increasingly amused by it. Pace the ecopalyptics, the planet will be just fine: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or state, or municipality?

Last January, the BBC’s Brian Milligan inaugurated the new year by driving an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh taking advantage of the many government-subsidized charge posts en route. It took him four days, which works out to an average speed of six miles per hour -- or longer than it would have taken on a stagecoach in the mid–19th century. This was hailed as a great triumph by the environmentalists. I mean, c’mon, what’s the hurry?

What indeed? In September, the tenth anniversary of a murderous strike at the heart of America’s most glittering city was commemorated at a building site: The Empire State Building was finished in 18 months during a depression, but in the 21st century the global superpower cannot put up two replacement skyscrapers within a decade. The 9/11 memorial museum was supposed to open on the eleventh anniversary, this coming September. On Thursday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that there is “no chance of it being open on time.” No big deal. What’s one more endlessly delayed, inefficient, over-bureaucratized construction project in a sclerotic republic?

Barely had the 9/11 observances ended than America’s gilded if somewhat long-in-the-tooth youth took to the streets of Lower Manhattan to launch “Occupy Wall Street.” The young certainly should be mad about something: After all, it’s their future that got looted to bribe the present. As things stand, they’ll end their days in an impoverished, violent, disease-ridden swamp of dysfunction that would be all but unrecognizable to Americans of the mid–20th century -- and, if that’s not reason to take to the streets, what is? Alas, our somnolent youth are also laboring under the misapprehension that advanced Western societies still have somebody to stick it to. The total combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans is $1.5 trillion. So, if you confiscated the lot, it would barely cover one Obama debt-ceiling increase. Nevertheless, America’s student princes’ main demand was that someone else should pick up the six-figure tab for their leisurely half-decade varsity of Social Justice studies. Lest sticking it to the Man by demanding the Man write them a large check sound insufficiently idealistic, they also wanted a trillion dollars for “ecological restoration.” Hey, why not? What difference is another lousy trill gonna make?

#page#Underneath the patchouli and pneumatic drumming, the starry-eyed young share the same cobwebbed parochial assumptions of permanence as their grandparents: We’re gayer, greener, and groovier, but other than that it’s still 1950 and we’ve got more money than anybody else on the planet, so why get hung up about a few trillion here and a few trillion there? In a mere half century, the richest nation on earth became the brokest nation in history, but the attitudes and assumptions of half the population and 90 percent of the ruling class remain unchanged.

Auld acquaintance can be forgot, for a while. But eventually even the most complacent and myopic societies get reacquainted with reality. For anyone who cares about the future of America and the broader West, the most important task in 2012 is to puncture the cocoon of denial. Instead, the governing class obsesses on trivia: just to pluck at random from recent Californian legislative proposals, a ban on non-fitted sheets in motels, mandatory gay history for first graders, car seats for children up to the age of eight. Why not up to the age of 38? Just to be on the safe side. And all this in an ever more insolvent jurisdiction that every year drives ever more of its productive class to flee its borders.

#ad#Tens of millions of Americans have yet to understand that the can can no longer be kicked down the road, because we’re all out of road. The pavement ends, and there’s just a long drop into the abyss. And, even in a state-compliant car seat, you’ll land with a bump. At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.

The sooner we recognize the 20th-century entitlement state is over, the sooner we can ring in something new. The longer we delay ringing out the old, the worse it will be. Happy New Year?

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. ©2011 Mark Steyn