Mark Steyn's Blog, page 7

Doctor in the House

Jonah, I'm with you on "Dr Jill Biden", which is part of the absurd over-credentialization of modern life.

When everyone's running around with titles, what's the coolest title of all? I rather like the custom in British Commonwealth countries whereby surgeons are addressed as "Mister" (or "Miss", "Mrs", and no doubt "Ms") not "Doctor". See, to pluck at random, this Melbourne spine surgeon, a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He does what most of us would think of as doctor-type stuff: He puts on scrubs, opens you up, and fixes what's wrong in there. And yet, unlike Dr Jill Biden, he's content to be a mere "Mister".

This particular tradition provided one of the rare moments when Conan Doyle let someone get the better of Sherlock Holmes. From The Hound Of The Baskervilles:

"Come, come, we are not so far wrong after all," said Holmes. "And now, Dr James Mortimer--"

"Dr" Mortimer replies:

"Mister, sir, Mister--a humble MRCS."

That's Member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

As for "Dr Shannen Coffin", he's currently representing NR in our legal battle against Nobel Laureate Michael Mann. How the hell did we wind up hiring an ambulance-chaser who moonlights as a sawbones?

A Second Cheer for Glenn Greenwald

Jonah writes:

Lord knows that I have deep disagreements with Glenn Greenwald (not least on his extremely low opinion of me), but in fairness you’ve got to credit him with consistency.

I'll second that. Lord knows that I have deep disagreements with Glenn Greenwald (not least on his extremely low opinion of me), but consistent he certainly is. When I ran into my difficulties with the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, Mr Greenwald, while finding me "pernicious" and "odious", was nevertheless a principled defender of free speech - one of all too few from the allegedly "liberal" commentariat. (And, if I recall correctly, he took the trouble to contact my office and nail down the facts of the case.)

His consistency on drones - regardless of whether Bush or Obama is pulling the trigger - doesn't surprise me. He is a principled man of the left, and that's sufficiently rare to be worthy of note. 

The Paramilitarization of the Department of Paperwork

Deroy's excellent column on American government's "gun culture" is well worth your time, and not just for the mountain of corpses of non-threatening domestic dogs:

A U.S. Department of Education SWAT force burst into Kenneth Wright’s Stockton, Calif., home in June 2011. “I look out of my window, and I see 15 police officers,” Wright told KXTV. Wright said one officer forced him by the neck onto the front lawn. “He had his knee on my back, and I had no idea why they were there.” While officers searched his house, Wright said, “They put me in handcuffs in a hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” then ages 3, 7, and 11.

The feds sought Wright’s estranged wife, apparently for suspected financial-aid fraud. However, she had moved away a year earlier.

I wrote about the unfortunate Mr. Wright at the time, observing that "the federal Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher but it does have a SWAT team":

“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.

Why should the education secretary have his own private police force? Ah, well, these days what self-respecting American bureaucrat doesn't? You're not a serious time-serving pen-pusher unless you can dispatch a bunch of guys in the full Robocop to take on groups known for their notorious penchant for violence, like, er, Gibson guitar makers.

Meanwhile, when it comes to actual police-type policing, we're getting worse. The odds are that, by the time the blundering flatfeet of the LAPD catch up with their ex-employee and Piers Morgan fan Christopher Dorner, they'll have matched his body count. They've already seriously wounded a 71-year-old innocent woman, shot her daughter, and turned a third bystander's car into Swiss cheese. Good thing it's not a major crime like unpasteurized dairying.

When the Assassin Calls . . .

Further to yesterday's post, Bruce Bawer has a very good report on the attempted assassination of my friend Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen:

Hedegaard opened the door and was handed a package by the guy, who then drew a pistol and shot at him. Miraculously, the gunman missed – just barely. While he fumbled with his weapon, trying to get off another shot, Lars acted fast, striking his assailant, who dropped the gun. Lars tried to shut the door, but the perpetrator stuck his foot in and managed to push it open again and to pick up his pistol. The two men struggled, and the goon finally took it on the lam.

He was last seen at the Copenhagen Zoo, which seems appropriate. We laugh at the ineptitude of these bozo jihadists, but, as the IRA taunted Mrs. Thatcher after the Brighton bombing, they only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky every time. This time Lars was lucky. That first shot whistled past his ear -- and then a spry septuagenarian clobbered "a man around 25 with a foreign background" with the phony package he'd been handed, and tenaciously fought back.

Last summer, over in Europe, I had the privilege of presenting Lars with a Defender of Freedom Award for his brave words. Yesterday morning, he was called on to defend freedom more directly. Had he died, it would have been a grievous loss. Even so, because of the folly and delusion of the European establishment, it was a close call -- and not the last. 

Lars Man Standing, Just

I've written previously about my friend Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, in a series of posts about his outrageous show trial headed "Lars Man Standing". I meant the term metaphorically. Today, it got a little more literal. This morning, Lars survived an assassination attempt in Copenhagen.

Incidentally, the slapdash hack at the Associated Press can't even get the basic facts right, reporting that Lars was "fined 5,000 kroner ($1,000) in 2011 for making a series of insulting and degrading statements about Muslims," but apparently unaware that last year the Danish Supreme Court struck down his conviction 7--0.

In that previous post on Lars, apropos our free speech battles, I quoted a prominent Toronto talk-show host:

Can we get over the idea that it's "dangerous" to be Mark Steyn. It's actually rather benign and highly profitable.

And I responded:

Well, it’s dangerous to be Lars Hedegaard, or Lars Vilks, or Geert Wilders or Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- while there’s surely nothing safer than peddling “dangerous” “edgy” cobwebbed multiculti pieties and knowing that, whatever words you utter, there will never come a day when you’ll be called on to bet your house and your savings and perhaps your life on them.

That's what Lars did this morning, in one of the oldest free societies on earth. On the Continent, for the few who talk about Islam and Europe life is not "benign and highly profitable" but comes at a very steep price.

UPDATE: From the BBC:

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt condemned the attack, saying: "It is even worse if the attack is rooted in an attempt to prevent Lars Hedegaard using his freedom of expression."

That statement would be more persuasive had not the Danish state (as noted above) spent the last three years in multiple attempts to "prevent Lars Hedegaard using his freedom of expression".

A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

What happens when American college students take their "academic studies" seriously? Meet "anthropology major" Nkosi Thandiwe, who shot three white women in midtown Atlanta:

During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University of West Georgia.

“I was trying to prove a point that Europeans had colonized the world, and as a result of that, we see a lot of evil today,” he said. “In terms of slavery, it was something that needed to be answered for. I was trying to spread the message of making white people mend.”

By shooting them. Maybe we need college control. What's sauce for the NRA is sauce for the NEA.

Incidentally, note how far down the story the Atlanta Journal-Constitution buries the usually key question of motive.

When the Skeet Hits the Fan...

The plot thickens:

Why is Obama shooting skeet with a rifle, why an ‘assault’ model, and why is he aiming so low (while wearing mom jeans)?

Sheikhen Baby Syndrome

More genius jurisprudence from the Sharia set:

“Burkas for babies”: Saudi cleric’s new fatwa causes controversy

To protect baby girls from being sexually exploited, the Saudi cleric, Sheikh Abdullah Daoud, has called parents to make their female children wear the Islamic headscarf...

The Sheikh tried to back his assertion with claims of sexual molestation against babies in the kingdom, quoting unnamed medical and security sources.

When it comes to the sexual allure of the pre-kindergarten set, Saudi clerics are nothing if not vigilant:

Online activists in Saudi Arabia are calling for harsher punishments for child abuse after reports that a prominent cleric received only a light sentence after confessing to the beating death of his 5-year-old daughter...

Saudi media reports say Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a frequent guest on Islamic TV programs, was arrested in November on charges of killing the girl. The reports said he questioned the child's virginity.

Saudi media say he was freed last week after serving a short prison term and agreeing to pay $50,000 in "blood money" to avoid a possible death sentence.

If only Sheikh al-Ghamdi had followed Sheikh Daoud's advice and kept his daughter in a black body bag all her life, the poor chap wouldn't have had to beat her to death.

UPDATE: More on what al-Ghamdi did to his daughter from Agence France-Presse. Not for the squeamish. Aside from the burns, broken ribs and crushed skull:

Randa al-Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl’s back was broken and that she had been raped “everywhere”, according to the group.

But that's unlikely to prove an obstacle to al-Ghamdi resuming his media-imam gig.

The Republic of Paperwork

You'll recall George McGovern's post-politics career as a Connecticut innkeeper. Over at Slate, Matthew Yglesias is undergoing his own McGovern moment:

Starting a Business Is a Huge Pain

I’ve been to three offices, filed five forms, spent $200, lost a day of work—and I’m not even close to getting the simple license I need.

In an ever more sclerotic America, government at every level throws too many obstacles in the path of its citizens for the economy to return to anything approaching meaningful growth.

And all poor old Yglesias wants to do is rent out his condo.

Containing Hagel

You don’t have to be that good to fend off a committee of showboating senatorial blowhards. Hillary Clinton demonstrated that a week or so back when she unleashed what’s apparently the last word in withering putdowns: What difference does it make?

Quite a bit of difference it seems. This week, an over-sedated Elmer Fudd showed up at the Senate claiming to be the president’s nominee for secretary of defense, and even the kindliest interrogators on the committee couldn’t prevent the poor chap shooting himself in the foot.

Twenty minutes in, Chuck Hagel was all out of appendages.#ad#

He warmed up with a little light “misspeaking” on Iran. “I support the president’s strong position on containment,” he declared. Breaking news!

Obama comes clean on Iran! According to Hagel, the administration favors “containment.” I could barely “contain” my excitement! Despite official denials, many of us had long suspected that, lacking any stomach for preventing a nuclear Tehran, Washington would settle for “containing” them. Hagel has been a containment man for years: It worked with the Soviets, so why not with apocalyptic ayatollahs? As he said in a 2007 speech, “The core tenets of George Kennan’s ‘The Long Telegram’ and the strategy of containment remain relevant today.” Recent history of pre-nuclear Iran -- authorizing successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, bombing Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, seeding client regimes in Lebanon and Gaza -- suggests that these are fellows disinclined to be “contained” even at the best of times. But, even if Iran can be “contained” from nuking Tel Aviv, how do you “contain” Iran’s exercise of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, or “contain” the mullahs’ generosity to states and non-state actors less squeamish about using the technology? How do you “contain” a nuclear Iran from de facto control of Gulf oil, including setting the price and determining the customers?

All fascinating questions, and now that Hagel has announced “containment” as the official administration position, we can all discuss them.

Unfortunately, as Hillary said the other day, “our policy is prevention, not containment.” So five minutes later the handlers discreetly swung into action to “contain” Hagel. “I was just handed a note that I misspoke,” he announced, “that I said I supported the president’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say that we don’t have a position on containment.” Hagel’s revised position is that there is no position on containment for him to have a position on.

Carl Levin, the Democrat chair, stepped in to contain further damage. “We do have a position on containment, and that is we do not favor containment,” he clarified. “I just wanted to clarify the clarify.”

Containment? Prevention? What difference does it make? Could happen to anyone. I well remember when Neville Chamberlain landed at Heston Aerodrome in 1938 and announced the latest breakthrough in appeasement: “I have here a piece of paper from Herr Hitler.” Two minutes later, he announced, “I have here a second piece of paper from my staffer saying that I misspoke.” Who can forget Churchill’s stirring words in the House of Commons? “If, indeed, it is the case that I said, ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender!’ then I misspoke. I meant to say that we’re keeping the situation under review and remain committed to exploring all options.”

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re as expert in all the nuances of Iranian affairs as Chuck Hagel. After he’d hailed Iran’s “elected, legitimate government,” it fell to another Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, to prompt Hagel to walk it back. Okay, delete “elected” and “legitimate”:

“What I meant to say, should have said, is that it’s recognizable.”

“Recognizable”? In the sense that, if you wake up one morning to a big mushroom cloud on the horizon, you’d recognize it as the work of the Iranian government? No, by “recognizable,” he meant that the Iranian government is “recognized” as the government of Iran.

“I don’t understand Iranian politics,” he announced in perhaps his least misspoken statement of the day. But the Iranians understand ours, which is why, in an amusing touch, the foreign ministry in Tehran has enthusiastically endorsed Hagel.

Fortunately, Iran is entirely peripheral to global affairs -- it’s not like Chad or the Solomon Islands or the other burning questions the great powers are currently wrestling with -- so it would be entirely unreasonable to expect Hagel to understand anything much about what’s going on over there. So what of his other, non-Iranian interests?

“There are a lot of things I don’t know about,” said Hagel. “If confirmed, I intend to know a lot more than I do.”

He then denied that “I will be running anything.” Don’t let the fact that the secretary of defense presides over 40 percent of the entire planet’s military spending confuse you. He’s not really “running” a thing -- or, as he was anxious to assure us, “I won’t be in a policy-making position.”

Really? So what’s the job for then? Just showing up at the office and the occasional black-tie NATO banquet? Most misspeakers loose off one round and then have to reload, but Chuck Hagel is a big scary “military-style assault weapon” of a misspeaker, effortlessly peppering the Senate wainscoting for hours on end. Late in the day, after five o’clock, he pronounced definitively: “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“It does matter what you think,” insisted New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte.

With respect to my own senator, I think it matters that he seems incapable of thinking -- or at least of thinking through his own Great Thoughts.#page#

There are over 300 million Americans, and another 20 million more Undocumented-Americans about to be fast-tracked down the soi-disant “path to citizenship.” Surely, from this vast talent pool, it should be possible to find someone who’s sufficiently interested in running the planet’s biggest military not to present himself on the world stage as a woozy, unfocused stumblebum. In an exquisite touch, responding to reports that Hagel was “ill-prepared,” someone in the White House leaked that he had been thoroughly “coached.” In other words, don’t blame us: We put him through the federally mandated Confirmation Hearing for Dummies course. He doesn’t have to be a competent defense secretary; he just has to play one on TV for a couple of hours. But even that’s too much to ask of an increasingly dysfunctional political system: The Senate disdains to pass a budget, 70 percent of U.S .Treasury debt is bought by the Federal Reserve, month-long negotiations to cut spending turn out in the final deal to increase spending#...#and the president’s choice of defense secretary tells the world he has no idea what our policy on Iran is.#ad#

Hagel may know nothing about Iran, but he’s an incisive expert on America.

During an appearance on Al Jazeera in 2009, a caller asked him about “the perception and the reality” that America is “the world’s bully” -- and Hagel told viewers that he agreed. Confronted with this exchange by Senator Ted Cruz, Hagel floundered. There was no aide to slip him a note explaining that the incoming SecDef takes no formal position on whether or not his own nation is “the world’s bully.”

Ah, if only. In the chancelleries of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Cairo, Pyongyang, the world’s bullied are laughing their heads off.

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