Mark Steyn's Blog, page 57
June 14, 2011
Is Every Lesbian Blogger a Middle-Aged Man?
We're one lesbian away from a bona fide Fleet Street "trend". Further to yesterday's post, a lesbian blogger who helped unmask the Syrian lesbian blogger as a middle-aged American male has herself been revealed to be a middle-aged American male:
In an apology to its readers, one of the other owners, Linda Carbonell, wrote: "The past three days have been devastating for all of us on LezGetReal. 'Paula Brooks' has been a part of our lives for three years now."
Mr Graber told the Associated Press news agency he set up LezGetReal to advance the gay and lesbian cause. He said he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Miss Brooks, the founder of LezGetReal, turns out to be Bill Graber, a 58-year old construction worker from Ohio. Mr Graber feels that he should at least receive credit for unmasking yesterday's faux-lesbian blogger, 40-year old college student Tom McMaster:
Mr Graber defended his actions, saying he had helped unmask Mr MacMaster by tracking his posts to computer servers in Edinburgh.
"He would have got away with it if I hadn't been such a stand-up guy," Mr Graber told AP.
The trouble is finding a lesbian blogger who isn't a stand-up guy.
Just for the record, Jonah Goldberg, Mark Krikorian, John Derbyshire and I are all 23-year old lesbians. We started this site as a joke when we were drunk one night and had no idea so many gullible people would fall for such an obvious hoax. For public appearances, we hire 57-year old male 12th-year Social Construct Studies students who've been short of cash since the sperm donor clinic closed down.
[UPDATE: I like the way The Hyacinth Girl puts it:
Are there any lesbian bloggers out there that are actually female? Or are they a bunch of muffin-topped 40 year old college students with serious moobage?
Wasn't Serious Moobage a conspiracy thriller a few years back? Something about Halliburton putting something in the water supply? Ralph Fiennes with prosthetics?]
June 13, 2011
Re: This or That
The trouble is it's all "This or That". As Newt pointed out, most of the questions posit ridiculous choices: Are you in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants or are you in favor of deporting 20 million people? Are you in favor of seizing private property in New Hampshire for a Hydro Québec power line or are you in favor of continued oil dependency on psychotic dictators? The remainder fall into cutesie-pie stuff that John King lacks the personality to pull off, and the last embodied in its perfect post-modern stupidity the awfulness of these "debates": "What have you learned during the past two hours?"
Hmm. What I learned is that John King makes Tim Pawlenty look like Lady Gaga. Other than that, I also got the distimct impression that this season's debates seem unlikely to be effective forums even for acknowledging the profound and existential crises facing the nation, never mind addressing them.
But I agree with Rich that Michele Bachmann was very strong. (Here's my favorite picture of her - I hope it doesn't ruin her campaign.) I also agree that the answers on Afghanistan about deferring to the commanders in the field were pathetic - for a couple of reasons:
First, as I said in NR a couple of issues back, you can't win a war unless you have war aims - and war aims are determined by a nation's civilian leadership. So, if Romney & Co mean what they say, it helps explain why America has nothing to show either for a decade in the Hindu Kush or for three months over Tripoli.
Alternatively, if they don't mean it, then they're just pandering in a bumper-stickerish "I So Totally Support Our Troops I'll Take My Orders From Them" kind of way. And this political season ought to be one not for panderers but for tellers of hard truths.
Gay Girl in Damascus Meets Middle-Aged Man in T-shirt
The Internet is atwitter with the news that the blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus", whose author had supposedly been arrested by Boy Assad's goons, is neither lesbian, female, nor a resident of Syria. Instead, like those fake memoirs to which dear old Oprah was so partial, "she" is merely the latest leftie hoax.
If you find the notion of a Syrian lesbian blogger a bit of a stretch, the real author is a far more plausible construct: a 40-year old American male college student in a Che Guevara T-shirt. No imaginative powers required to create that identity, no sir.
As someone who's been advocating the overthrow of Assad for a decade, I doubt whether sending a squad of Baath Party heavies to crack down on lesbianism is a priority for him right now. However, keeping male "activists" in college and adolescent T-shirts until middle-age is evidently a priority of the western world. Tom MacMaster thinks his fictional creation (ie, the projection of his highly parochial obsessions on to distant lands) was an "important voice" for bringing the issues into focus. The dreary predictability of his actual persona is far more telling. Also: "The other deeply disturbing aspect of this story is that this 'man' found a woman to marry him."
June 11, 2011
NR Court Circular
The Duke of Edinburgh is Queen Elizabeth's consort. It's an ill-defined non-job full of potential frustrations: think First Lady or Vice President for life. A lot of consorts are unpopular (for example, Queen Rania, Jordan's current Hashemite hottie). Prince Philip has been doing it longer than anyone in the history of the Royal Family, since the day in 1952 when he and Princess Elizabeth were at Treetops in Kenya and received the news that George VI (the King's Speech guy) had died. Harry Truman was in the White House. That's a long time.
His Royal Highness turned 90 yesterday. He is worshiped as a god in outlying parts of Vanuatu, but, if memory serves, he's rather less popular at NR (Jay dislikes him, I seem to recall). Still, he's kept the show on the road in an age hostile to the monarchical principle. For a prince, he's prone to loose lips -- see The Herald Sun Down Under for a birthday countdown of his top ten alleged "gaffes" -- and he doesn't suffer fools gladly, which is a handicap in the Royal biz. I was invited to dinner at Buckingham Palace a few years back, and assumed upon acceptance that we guests were there as unpaid jesters to amuse the hosts. But, in fact, he was a quickwitted chap, and we were hard put to keep up with him.
One of my fellow guests, bemoaning the lack of agricultural workers in Britain, explained that his farm now brought in young Australians and South Africans, who were able to make £90-100 a day picking onions.
"Ah," said the Duke. "Crying all the way to the bank?"
I thought that was rather good. Happy birthday.
Default, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
...but in ourselves. Chancellor Williamson noted this one yesterday afternoon in the Exchequer. While Little Timmy Geithner has been running around bleating that failing to raise the debt ceiling would risk default, the Chinese have concluded that we're already defaulting:
A Chinese ratings house has accused the United States of defaulting on its massive debt, state media said Friday, a day after Beijing urged Washington to put its fiscal house in order.
“In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting,” Guan Jianzhong, president of Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. Ltd., the only Chinese agency that gives sovereign ratings, was quoted by the Global Times saying.
Washington had already defaulted on its loans by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies — eroding the wealth of creditors including China, Guan said.
Geithner and Bernanke can protest all they want that debauching the currency and the left hand buying the right hand's debt and quantitively easing yourself all day long like Congressman Weiner is so totally not like defaulting. But, if the dwindling ranks of buyers of Treasury debt around the world come to see it like that, that's what counts.
Imagine what a man who'd been cryogenically frozen circa 1963 would make of the above wire story. Communist China has a debt rating agency? And it's urging fiscal restraint on the U.S. government?
America has a looming rendezvous with destiny. You can't tax your way out of it, you can't inflate your way out of it, you can't quantitively ease your way out of it. The only door that leads anywhere is the one marked "Massive Government Cuts." There is not enough money on the planet for what the Permanent Governing Class is doing. If Americans decline to grasp that central truth, this country will die.
High Function Junction
Steven Hayward brought up Alec Baldwin's analysis of Anthony Weiner. As ridiculous as it is, it gets to the heart of what's wrong with our politics. That's to say:
He exists under a constant pressure cooker of self-analysis and public appraisal. Like other politicians, he needs something to take the edge off... For high functioning men like Weiner and other officials....
Whoa, wait a minute: What "constant pressure cooker"? He's got nothing to do but appear on MSNBC all day long. Everything else is done by one of his 19 staffers - for example, the official statement from his office on his relationship with this 17-year old girl in Delaware. Baldwin's got it backwards: Congressional life is very undemanding and certainly not performance related; on the other hand, I can see that juggling jailbait on your Twitter feed could get pretty stressful. Good thing he has an unimportant day job with 19 staffers to "take the edge off".
In what bizarro universe can even Alec Baldwin type the words "high functioning men like Weiner"? He's a minor elected official. Thinking of the governing class as "high functioning men" is a big part of what's got us into the mess we're in. During my troubles with the thought police up north, Stephen Harper gave an interview and said he had no plans to rein in Canada's "human rights" commission. One newspaper reported this as: "Principal Harper Ends The Free Speech Food Fight." I wrote:
Each to his own. I don't happen to think of the Queen's first minister as the "principal" with me and the rest of the citizenry as his charges. The head of government is no more or less than just that: He is not my "leader", and certainly not on inalienable rights.
I would have thought that such a notion would be even more repugnant to a republic. The governing class are not "high functioning men". Function-wise, they've been abysmal: Collectively, they've beggared the nation. While you low-functioning types were busy going off to work every day and providing for your family like a bunch of saps, lifetime politicians like Weiner - the Emirs of Incumbistan - comprehensively wrecked everything they touched, squandering this country's inheritance and lining it up for an imminent existential crisis those on the receiving end will have to figure some way out of. Ceasing to think of time-serving mediocrities and opportunist creeps like Weiner as some kind of "high-functioning" elite leadership class is a good place to start.
Bad Hair Day
Andrew Klavan wrote a very sweet piece in City Journal about my writing, then and now. The National Post of Canada chose to reprint it, and in the hard copy adorned the piece with an embarrassing before-and-after headshot of me, the pundit's equivalent of one those bad celebrity implants features that turn up everywhere. One of Canada's leading Jewish bloggettes reprinted the ancient picture and asserted that my hair was "", which I thought was rather flattering until she compared it to Anthony Weiner's. When your body parts start being compared to Congressman Tweeter, let's hope it doesn't all spiral out of control.
(For the record, I follow the old Fleet Street rule that any columnar byline photo should be at least 20 years out of date. The one that accompanies my NRO weekend column, for example, is of me in 1978.)
Obama's Road to Nowhere
‘There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery,’’ President Obama said at a Jeep plant in Toledo the other day. “We’re going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a tough time with.’’ His audience booed. They’re un-fire-able union members with lavish benefits, and even they weary of the glib lines from his twelve-year-old speechwriters.
We’re not on the road to recovery. You can’t get there from here, as they say. Obama was in Toledo to “celebrate” the sale of the government’s remaining stake in Chrysler to Fiat. That’s “Fiat” as in the Italian car manufacturer rather than “an authoritative or arbitrary decree (from the Latin ‘let it be done’),” which would be almost too perfect a name for an Obamafied automobile. The Treasury crowed that Fiat had agreed to pay a whopping $560 million for the government’s Chrysler shares.
#ad# Wow! 560 million smackeroos! If you laid them out end to end, they’re equivalent to what the federal government borrows every three hours. That’s some windfall! In the time it takes to fly Obama to Toledo to boast about it, he’d already blown through the Italians’ check. But who knows? If every business in the U.S. were to be nationalized and sold to foreigners to cover another three hours’ worth of debt, this summer’s “Recovery Summer” would be going even more gangbusters. I’d ask one of Obama’s egghead economists to explain it to you simpletons, but unfortunately they’ve all resigned and returned to cozy sinecures in academia. The latest is chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, the genius who in 2007, just before the subprime hit the fan, wrote in the New York Times that this exciting new form of home “ownership” was an “innovation” that had “opened doors to the excluded” and was part of an “incredible flowering of new types of home loans.”
Where have all the flowers gone? Not to worry. By now, some organization of which you’re a member has already booked Professor Goolsbee to give an after-dinner speech at your annual meeting where you’ll be privileged to get a glimpse of his boundless expertise for a mere six-figure speaking fee.
“I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it’s such a smart idea to let one’s breezy insouciance out of the bag when you’re giving a press conference. In May the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs. For the purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived in America.
So what kind of jobs were those 54,000? Economics professorships at the University of Berkeley? Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs? That sort of thing? No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new jobs created were at McDonald’s. That’s amazing. Not the Mickey D supersized hiring spree, but the fact that there’s fellows at Morgan Stanley making a bazillion dollars a year analyzing fluctuations in minimal-skill fast-food service-job hiring trends. What a great country! For as long as it lasts. Which is probably until some new regulatory agency starts enforcing Michelle Obama’s dietary admonitions.
Until then, relax. That bump in the road is just a quarter-pounder with cheese that fell off the counter on the drive-thru lane to recovery. Like every other blessing, we owe the Big MacConomy to the wisdom of Good King Barack. “This plant indirectly supports hundreds of other jobs right here in Toledo,” Obama told the workers at Chrysler. “After all, without you, who’d eat at Chet’s or Inky’s or Rudy’s? . . . Manufacturers from Michigan to Massachusetts are looking for new engineers to build advanced batteries for American-made electric cars. And obviously, Chet’s and Inky’s and Zinger’s, they’ll all have your business for some time to come.”
A couple of days later, Chet’s announced it was closing after nine decades. “It was the economy and the smoking ban that hurt us more than anything,” said the owner. But maybe he can retrain and re-open it as a community-organizer grantwriting-application center. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median period of unemployment is now nine months -- the longest it’s been since they’ve been tracking the numbers. Long-term unemployment is worse than in the Depression. Life goes slowly waiting for a fast-food job to open up.
This is Main Street, Obamaville: All bumps, no road. But shimmering on the distant horizon, beyond the shuttered diner and the foreclosed homes, is a state-of-the-art electric car, the new Fiat Mirage, that should be wheeling into town in a half-decade or so provided it can find somewhere to charge. “We will be able to look back and tell our children,” declared King Barack the Modest of his own candidacy in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.” Great news for the oceans! Meanwhile, back on dry land, a quarter of American mortgages are “underwater” -- that’s to say, the home “owners” owe more than the joint is worth. In Harry Reid’s Nevada, it’s 63 percent. Perhaps Obama’s Aquatic Bodies Water-Level Regulatory Authority, no doubt headed by Jamie Gorelick or Franklin Raines or some other Democrat worthy, could have its jurisdiction extended to the Nevada desert.
#page#
“Hope”? “Change”? These are the good times. What “change” are you “hoping” for in Obama’s second term? The loss of America’s triple-A credit-rating? The end of the dollar as global currency? Or just a slight upward tick in the same-old-same-old multi-trillion dollar binge-spending?
On what?
#ad# Random example from the headlines: The paramilitarization of the education bureaucracy. The federal Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher but it does have a SWAT team: They kicked down a front door in Stockton, Calif. last week and handcuffed Kenneth Wright (erroneously) in connection with a student-loan “investigation.” “We can confirm that we executed a search warrant,” said Department of Education spokesperson Gina Burress.
The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I’ll bet it’s got no plans to downsize.
Nor has the TSA. A 24-year-old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. “We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience,” said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!
The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.
The oceans will do just fine. It’s America that’s drowning.
--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.
June 8, 2011
Tweet of Clay
Ramesh, as an antidote to Maureen Dowd's take, here's Weiner's former girlfriend Kirsten Powers. When the Twit hit the fan, Kirsten received certain assurances from him about his innocence and, based on those, went out on Fox and elsewhere and defended him. Unlike too many my-Democrat-right-or-wrong types, she's done with him:
As I have recovered from the shock of seeing an old friend’s life unravel and have had time to get my mind around the extensive and sociopathic lying in which he engaged, there seems to be no other choice than for him to step aside and stop hurting his family, friends, and the Democratic Party... [I] was slack-jawed when I saw clips of him the next day sneering and pointing fingers at other people for what he knew he had done. I am of the general view that politicians are not the most honest group of people, but, even using that very low standard, what I saw in those interviews was deeply disturbing. There is no way anyone can ever believe anything Weiner says again after that.
Which is more or less what I said yesterday. But I never dated the guy. Apropos her appearance on "Hannity," she says:
My friends were furious when the real information came out and they realized he had allowed me to become involved in his sordid controversy.
In effect, he conscripted her into his lies. Now, in demanding he be allowed to "go back to work for the American people," he's forcing the entire country to collude in them. Kirsten also makes the point that his press conference was merely the sociopath's latest lie:
What has emerged is a picture of a predator trolling the Internet for women—some half his age—with which to engage in cybersex. We know only about the women who were responsive to his overtures. The odds are very high that he struck out with many, and other women were victim to his unsolicited sex talk. Women should be able to “friend” a married—or unmarried—congressman on Facebook or follow him on Twitter without fear of being the recipient of lewd talk or behavior. Just because a woman “likes” your video on Facebook doesn’t mean you can send her a picture of your penis.
That a feminist Democrat should even have to explain that to her fellow liberals is a fine example of how the Weinerization of the culture leads to a moral compass as flaccid as . . . oh, never mind. In that ABC interview, Weiner persisted in blurring the distinction between those who "follow" him" and those whom he "follows." His latest weaselly obfuscation is to focus on those women who responded to his unsolicited penis as opposed to those who didn't. It would seem to be statistically improbable that his Weiner and the accompanying fantasies (see Miss Powers' selected excerpts) did not end up in the inbox of various 16 and 17-year-olds who never asked for it.
Like Kirsten Powers, I have minimal expectations of this country's depraved political class. But if you can't draw the line at being ruled by creeps with a spambot penis, you can't draw it anywhere. Anthony Weiner tweets his crotch to young women on the grounds that, even if only one in twenty responds, that's still a helluva strike rate: Shame on him. If his electors and the broader political culture acquiesces in that, shame on us.
May 1, 1980
What We Should Know About China
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