Mark Steyn's Blog, page 8

Poliostan

So a Jew, a homosexual, and an uncovered woman walk into a Waziristani bar, and the barman says, "Sorry, everyone's out killing polio workers":

ISLAMABAD, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- Two workers administering polio vaccinations in the northwestern tribal regions of Pakistan have been killed by a roadside bomb, officials say.

Some 19 polio vaccination workers have now died in attacks in Pakistan in the last two months, Geo TV reported Thursday...

No group claimed responsibility for the deaths, but the Taliban last year banned such vaccinations in Waziristan, terming the effort a cover for espionage.

Instead, they have a great imamunization program.

Plaid as Hell

John, thank you for your kind words about my Hillsdale appearance. Re the guy in the plaid shirt, just for the record, I didn't sign his book afterwards. Instead, per his request, I signed his shirt. Red-and-black plaid isn't ideally suited for the purpose, but fortunately he had a short name ("To John").

If memory serves, I used him for an impromptu riff about playing strip-plaid poker of a winter's night with Howard Dean. That's what comes of sniffing glue before the big speech.

With respect to John, I don't think his plaid is as stylish as mine.

Amputation Automation Nation

The Amalgamated Union of Amputators, Lashers, and Beheaders is not happy about this technological breakthrough:

Iranian Officials Purportedly Unveil Machine To Amputate Fingers Of Thieves

Compare and Contrast

From the Ottawa Citizen:

Canadian military special forces are in Mali protecting Canada’s embassy, Postmedia News has learned . . .

It is not known how many members of the special unit are in Mali, or how long they have been there. However, it is understood that with so much instability in the country,  Canada wants to ensure its diplomats are guarded.

By contrast, when US diplomats find themselves operating in an unstable corner of North Africa, their security is outsourced to a Welsh contractor, who hires minimum-wage, unarmed Libyans, plus a few lads from the local revolutionary militia.

Ah, well. As Hillary would say, what difference does it make?

Holocaust 'Remembrance'

Eliana, re Holocaust Remembrance Day in Europe, I'm old-fashioned enough not to think of Britain as "in" Europe, at least not in that sense, which is one reason historically it has a far less wretched record on Jew-hating than the continent.

So it pains me to see that Gerald Scarfe cartoon. I might also add it makes no sense. The casual observer would get the impression that that bloodthirsty bricklayer Netanyahu is building his wall to keep Palestinian Arabs from getting out -- rather than, as is the case, getting in and blowing people up. Indeed, even their fellow Arabs don't want Palestinians getting in to their country. As I wrote a decade ago, it's easier for a Palestinian to move to Toronto and become a subject of Queen Elizabeth than to move to Riyadh and become a subject of King Fahd (then -- King Abdullah now).

Caroline Glick has more on the contemporary British elite's peculiarly obsessive yet all but socially mandatory loathing of Israel, as does Melanie Phillips. In the Thirties, Jews were told by working-class Fascists in London, "Go back to Palestine!" Now they're told by the most respectable figures in the British establishment, get out of Palestine. Bloody Jews: They can never get it right, can they?

Court in the Act

The National Review Institute "whither conservatism?" summit has come to a close. Lots of buoyant optimism from Mia Love, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal et al., but on Saturday night Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long and yours truly -- the world's oldest boy band -- did our best to reduce the crowd to total despair.

While in town, I also made my debut appearance in D.C. Superior Court for the opening round of the 21st century's very own Scopes Monkey Trial -- because if you have to go to Washington you might as well combine a late-night cabaret gig with a court date. (In separate cases, Jonah pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity, and Rob got his restraining order renewed.) I see the plaintiff, self-proclaimed Nobel laureate Michael Mann, is claiming yet again that all his tormentors are secretly funded by the Koch brothers, but, if there are any Koch brothers, Koch sisters, Koch great-uncles and second cousins, etc., who haven't yet chipped in, our legal defense fund is still open, and all contributions are gratefully received.

If you missed me in Washington, here's your chance to miss me in Michigan. I'll be making my annual appearance at Hillsdale College this Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the sports arena. It's a mere stone's throw from Indiana, Ohio, the Upper Peninsula, and northern Ontario. No Rob and Jonah this time. So a third of the laughs, but three times as much apocalyptic doom.

The Obama Simulacrum

If I’m following this correctly, according to one spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band, at Monday’s inauguration Beyoncé lip-synced to the national anthem but the band accompanied her live. However, according to a second spokesperson, it was the band who were pretending to play to a pre-recorded tape while Beyoncé sang along live. So one or other of them were faking it. Or maybe both were. Or neither. I’d ask Chuck Schumer, the master of ceremonies, who was standing right behind her, but he spent the entire performance staring at her butt. If it was her butt, that is. It might just have been the bulge of the Radio Shack cassette player she was miming to. In an America with an ever more tenuous grip on reality, there’s so little to be sure of.

Whether Beyoncé was lip-syncing to the band or the band were lip-syncing to Beyoncé is like one of those red pill/ blue pill choices from The Matrix. Was President Obama lip-syncing to the Founders, rooting his inaugural address in the earliest expressions of American identity? (“The patriots of 1776#...#gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”) Or maybe the Founders were lip-syncing to him as he appropriated the vision of the first generation of Americans and yoked it (“preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”) to a statist pitch they would have found utterly repugnant.#ad#

The whole event had the air of a simulacrum: It looked like a presidential inauguration, but the sound was tinny and not quite in sync. Obama mouthed along to a canned vocal track: “We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.” That’s great! It’s always reassuring to know the head of state is going to take issue with all those people wedded to the “belief” that America needs either to shove every granny off the cliff or stake its newborns out on the tundra for the wolves to finish off. When it comes to facing the music, Obama is peerless at making a song and dance about tunes nobody’s whistling without ever once warbling the real big numbers (16 trillion). But, like Beyoncé, he’s totally cool and has a cute butt.

A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft soundbite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath:

“Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”

“Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Well, it’s the difference between cool and reality -- and, as Hillary’s confident reply appeared to suggest, and the delirious media reception of it confirmed, reality comes a poor second in the Obama era. The presumption of conservatives has always been that one day cold, dull reality would pierce the klieg-light sheen of Obama’s glamour. Indeed, that was the premise of Mitt Romney’s reductive presidential campaign. But, just as Beyoncé will always be way cooler than some no-name operatic soprano or a male voice choir, so Obama will always be cooler than a bunch of squaresville yawneroos boring on about jobs and debt and entitlement reform. Hillary’s cocksure sneer to Senator Johnson of Wisconsin made it explicit. At a basic level, the “difference” is the difference between truth and falsity, but the subtext took it a stage further: No matter what actually happened that night in Benghazi, you poor sad loser Republicans will never succeed in imposing that reality and its consequences on this administration.

And so a congressional hearing -- one of the famous “checks and balances” of the American system -- is reduced to just another piece of Beltway theater. “The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled,” as Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But he’s totally uncool, too. So Hillary lip-synced far more than Beyoncé, and was adored for it. “As I have said many times, I take responsibility,” she said. In Washington, the bold declarative oft-stated acceptance of responsibility is the classic substitute for responsibility: rhetorically “taking responsibility,” preferably “many times,” absolves one from the need to take actual responsibility even once.

In the very same self-serving testimony, the secretary of state denied that she’d ever seen the late Ambassador Stevens’s cables about the deteriorating security situation in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office”-- and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. She is as out of it as President Jefferson, who complained to his secretary of state James Madison, “We have not heard from our ambassador in Spain for two years. If we have not heard from him this year, let us write him a letter.” Today, things are even worse. Hillary has apparently not heard from any of our 1.43 million ambassadors for four years. When a foreign head of state receives the credentials of the senior emissary of the United States, he might carelessly assume that the chap surely has a line of communication back to the government he represents. For six centuries or so, this has been the minimal requirement for functioning inter-state relations. But Secretary Clinton has just testified that, in the government of the most powerful nation on earth, there is no reliable means by which a serving ambassador can report to the cabinet minister responsible for foreign policy. And nobody cares: What difference does it make?#page#

Nor was the late Christopher Stevens any old ambassador, but rather Secretary Clinton’s close personal friend “Chris.” It was all “Chris” this, “Chris” that when Secretary Clinton and President Obama delivered their maudlin eulogies over the flag-draped coffin of their “friend.” Gosh, you’d think if they were on such intimate terms, “Chris” might have had Hillary’s e-mail address, but apparently not. He was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends cabling the State Department every hour of the day.#ad#

Four Americans are dead, but not a single person involved in the attack and the murders has been held to account. Hey, what difference does it make? Lip-syncing the national anthem beats singing it. Peddling a fictitious narrative over the coffin of your “friend” is more real than being an incompetent boss to your most vulnerable employees. And mouthing warmed-over clichés about vowing to “bring to justice” those responsible is way easier than actually bringing anyone to justice.

And so it goes:

Another six trillion in debt? What difference does it make?

An economic-stimulus bill that stimulates nothing remotely connected with the economy? What difference does it make?

The Arab Spring? Aw, whose heart isn’t stirred by those exhilarating scenes of joyful students celebrating in Tahrir Square? And who cares after the cameras depart that Egypt’s in the hands of a Jew-hating 9-11 truther whose goons burn churches and sexually assault uncovered women?

Obama is the ultimate reality show, and real reality can’t compete. Stalin famously scoffed, “How many divisions has the Pope?” Secretary Clinton was more audacious: How many divisions has reality? Not enough.

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

Staying the Course

As is well known round these parts, universities nowadays are no friends of free speech, honest inquiry and vigorous debate. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear that students at Ottawa's Carleton University had installed a "free speech wall". I was less surprised by what happened a few hours later:

By Tuesday morning the wall was gone, destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance,” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.

Seventh year? Wow! Is that a record for the grueling academic discipline of "human rights"?

Maybe not. Three years ago, when protestors shut down Ann Coulter's appearance at Ottawa's other university, I was struck by the senescence of the mob:

Sameena Topan, 26, a conflict studies and human rights major.

I'm thinking of holding a competition to find Ottawa's oldest "human rights" major. First prize: a copy of Lights Out, my free speech book. It's great for burning at demos, and easy to tear up.

Sarko on Elba

In the old days, Napoleon went into exile. But these days French leaders go into tax exile:

Sarkozy's Plans 'To Dodge New 75% French Tax Rate By Moving To London With Wife Carla And Setting Up £1bn Private Equity Fund'

This bit is very Gallic:

Details of the planned move were uncovered during a raid by fraud police on Sarkozy’s Paris mansion last June.

When your tax rates are so high even the corrupt politicians are moving out, you've got a problem.

My Kind of 'Inauguration'

Mindful of Kathryn's observation that even NR types are resisting "the urge to rain on the president's parade today," I thought I'd nevertheless venture a wee bit of criticism -- not of the speech, which was true to form, but of the overall vibe of the event, which seemed to me big but empty. The ceremonial lunch (I caught Nancy Pelosi speaking as the Obamas, Biden, Boehner, and Mrs. Clinton looked on) seemed especially reductive of this great nation, but Chuck Schumer as Friar's Club emcee, and that poet from hell, and Beyoncé and Kelly Clarkson all contributed to the general pseudo-monarchical tinniness.

I see that if not quite raining I'm certainly drizzling. So let me cite my favorite presidential "inauguration." I've written before about how much I enjoy visiting the Calvin Coolidge homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vt., and how it embodies the republican ideal of the citizen-executive. It's very moving to stand in the small, humble sitting room where, just before 3 in the morning, Colonel John Coolidge, a notary public, administered the oath of office to his son by kerosene lamp. The character of the place and its moment in history are as far away from the palaces of mighty emperors as you could get, and uniquely American in their spirit. Granted, Coolidge assumed the presidency in very different circumstances, but I don't think he'd have missed Kelly Clarkson or the poem guy -- and I wish there were a little room for that spirit amid all the celeb-stuffed bombast.