Mark Steyn: "If you say we're crazy and violent, we'll go nuts and kill you."

George W. Bush to Mark Steyn on Muslims' lack of proportion: "If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons."



Mark Steyn. An International Treasure.

Mark Steyn on Obsolete Format of the TV News

The hat tip goes to Kathy Shaidle who is around my age, I think. I remember someone smuggling that Billy Idol EP Don't Stop to Summer Camp in 1984 and she was actually mentioned in that B-side interview with Martha Quinn. I guess he actually knew her; they had gone to the prom or something.

Anyway, the reason I mention her being the same age is that I think that as conservative Gen-X-ers we share a similar derision for the network TV news which is shared by a slightly older guy, Mark Steyn. I'll excerpt a slightly larger bit:

I would wager, even as Williams read his line, that most everyone who mattered on the show knew it wasn't true. And maybe one or two of them looked nervously at each other in the control room, but let it go. Hey, he's the star, right? NBC Nightly News with Walter Mitty reporting.

Hardly anything on TV at the Bryan Williams level is accidental. That riveting account of death-defying derring-do with Letterman would have been worked out during the pre-interview for the show - in other words, the misremembering was painstakingly rehearsed. Maybe Williams is delusional. Maybe he is to anchors as Anthony Weiner is to wankers - a guy so cocksure he figures he can push it a little further each time.

Thirty years ago, it would be difficult to imagine a liar or fantasist surviving in a job that supposedly depends on one's trustworthiness. Yet today Brian Williams' survival is the way to bet - because the obsolete format of Big Three "network news" is a dinner-theatre exercise that now bears so little relation to real news that Williams' ability to project the aura of authority and integrity trumps the reality that he doesn't actually have any. If you get your news from old-school "network news", you're not actually getting any news, you're watching a guy 'cause he has great hair. So getting it from a delusional narcissist is only taking it to the next level.

As I write, NBC has announced an internal investigation into Williams. We'll see. He was on the bird, he was on the bird behind the bird, but no one at NBC is gonna give him the bird.

Italics around the good stuff, bold italics around my favorite line. Nothing on TV is unscripted, and especially nothing on the TV news. Of course, I've been around people who thought the Rats and Snakes speech from the original Survivor series was, aside from being one of the great moments in human history, made up directly on the spot by Susan Hawk like she was ordering a pizza, as well as a few members of the sorry lot who claim to know that pro-wrestling is "real". So it shouldn't surprise me that most Americans don't find the TV news to be an insult to their intelligence and their credulity, not to mention their sex-drive.

Also, just to anticipate the envy objection, I think that everyone can agree that Mark Steyn has great hair for a fifty-something, so no need to go revisit the Purgatorio on that point.

What's up with Mark Steyn and National Review?

His last post there was Christmas Eve, and his prior post just two days earlier is salted with enough allusions to editorial disagreement to bring John Derbyshire's fate to mind.

Is Steyn just preoccupied playing hockey stick with Michael Mann, or is something else going on?

Mark Steyn: "In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust."

With regard to outreach, Steyn continues his tradition of apocalyptic stand-up and gets the messaging pitch-perfect for the majority of Americans. "Obamacare don't work, Ma."

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.

The emphasis is mine, not because I don't find the philosophical, economic, moral, ethical and constitutional arguments compelling, but because that is where we are now. There is enough to blast about Obamacare now that you don't have to bring up what Reagan thought about government-controlled healthcare systems, nor what chapter of Socialism Ludwig von Mises would have added Obamacare to, nor what Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook about Death Panels. Improving Obamacare with a laughably-named "tech surge" is a worthless exercise in turd-polishing. There is no way they can get to 46,000 signups a day by March, unless maybe they get Michelle Obama's imaginary Facebook friends on welfare and SSA simultaneously and sign them all up.

Steyn ends with the line "Obamacare is not a left–right issue; it’s a fraud issue." I agree. Conservative I-told-you-sos are worthless at this juncture.

Oh, this is good

Prepare to laugh and then get really depressed, maybe. More "apocalyptic standup" from the master, Mark Steyn. I'd say "STEYN FOR PRESIDENT" if his material wasn't too choice to water down for a presidential campaign. Just read the whole thing. Well, OK, here are some grabber lines:

In a post-prosperity West, social solidarity — i.e., socioeconomic fictions such as “Europe” — are the first to disappear.

In effect, Nancy has rolled a giant condom over the entire American economy.

I think this is what they call handing out condoms on the Titanic.

[I]t’s cowardly, and, like so much else about the sexual revolution, very old and wrinkled.

A very effective argument whether or not you think contraception is wrong. This is why political candidates should seriously consider rarely mentioning the topic. If they do, they should immediately do as Steyn does to show the ridiculousness of the state effectively promoting infertility in the shadow of looming insolvency for social programs.

Yeah, 'bout sums it up unfortunately

The conclusion of Mark Steyn's weekend summary:

Amidst all this flowering of democracy, you'll notice that it's only the pro-American dictatorships on the ropes: In Libya and Syria, Gaddafy and Assad sleep soundly in their beds. On the other hand, if you were either of the two King Abdullahs, in Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and you looked at the Obama Administration's very public abandonment of their Cairo strongman, what would you conclude about the value of being an American ally? For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

Bill Bennett and Mark Steyn discuss the Juan Williams issue

Then they go on to discuss the Election.



Hat Tip FlyoverCountry via Kathy Shaidle

Steyn on what Free Speech is not

Mark Steyn points out that no one is denying Helen Thomas the right to free speech. She's just losing her podium, that's all. Most of us don't have podiums that big, so it's not a big deal. She's still absolutely free to say anything she wants to her family, her friends and those cute little magical fairy people she often sees floating above her flower garden.

Steyn quotes a lot of recent nonsense from a wide range of people who still have podiums, including at least surprising one―Charles Krauthammer―who should know better. So Steyn has to meticulously explain that a right to free speech doesn't guarantee freedom from consequences the way one might explain to a 21-year-old that a right to imbibe alcoholic beverages makes one immune from intoxication.

Here's the meat of the article where Steyn explains from his own personal experience "what the First Amendment prevents."

“Free speech” doesn’t mean speech has no consequences – for in that case why say anything at all? What it means is that the government does not determine those consequences. Had Maclean’s magazine been found guilty at our trial in Vancouver of publishing “Islamophobic” content, the statutory penalty under British Columbia law would have made it illegal for them to publish anything by me on Islam, Europe, demography and related subjects ever again. I would have been the subject, in effect, of a lifetime publication ban in Canada – and that ban, under the relevant section of the BC “human rights” code, is deemed to have the force of a Supreme Court decision. In other words, unlike Hearst or the Nine Speakers Agency, Maclean’s would not be free to choose for itself whether it wished to continue its association with a particular writer. In Canada, that decision is made by the state. That’s what the First Amendment prevents.

These posing privileged journalists need to take a lesson from a man mugged by reality.

More Apocalyptic Standup from The Master

I was just remarking to a good friend that I tend to only read articles if I expect they will be funny, either intentionally or unwittingly. So naturally my brain's diet includes a hearty dose of Mark Steyn, like his most recent piece on those scary Tea Party folks. Excerpt:

Will it work? For a long time, tea partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending,” that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.” Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the tea-party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare’s opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank’s sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank’s sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time’s Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was “seditious,” because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to “educator” William Ayers’s education reforms, nobody knows what “seditious” means anymore.

But then it gets even better.

Meanwhile, Comedy Central — you know, the “hip,” “edgy” network with Jon Stewart, from whom “young” Americans under 53 supposedly get most of their news — just caved in to death threats. From a hateful 83-year-old widow who doesn’t like Obamacare? Why, no! It was a chap called Abu Talhah al Amrikee, who put up a video on the Internet explaining why a South Park episode with a rather tame Mohammed joke was likely to lead to the deaths of the show’s creators. Just to underline the point, he showed some pictures of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film director brutally murdered by (oh, my, talk about unfortunate coincidences) a fellow called Mohammed. Mr. al Amrikee helpfully explained that his video incitement of the murder of Matt Stone and Trey Parker wasn’t really “a threat but just the likely outcome.” All he was doing, he added, was “raising awareness” — you know, like folks do on Earth Day. On Earth Day, lame politicians dig a hole and stick a tree in it. But aggrieved Muslims dig a hole and stick a couple of comedy writers in it. Celebrate diversity!

Of course the conclusion is more serious than funny, viz., the media pretends Tea Partiers are a threat and won't say a thing bad about Muslims, of whom they are rightly scared to death.

Steyn on Obama's Incentivizing of Bureaucracy

Now that I've provided a lame excuse for being behind, here's a very funny yet scary Steyn piece which you probably already read reflecting on Obama's SOTU. Excerpt:

In the past 60 years, the size of America's state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it's still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.

And in his college-loan plan he's explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you're a schmuck and a loser. In the America he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama's proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It's the audacity of hopelessness.

This is borne out by all the anecdotes I'm hearing. A friend who is a controller for a medical devices firm was helping me paint trim at the new house. He said "We have a complete hiring freeze on. We have no idea what is going to happen with the health care bill which will effect our sales strategy and outlook and our benefits package. Obama doesn't have any understanding of economics. All my siblings who voted for him are having regrets now." Another friend I have in management said about the same thing, except he has had to take a 5% pay cut. The uncertainty is keeping everything stagnant.


Well, there is one certainty: tax rates will go up at some point.

Mark Steyn on President Obama's "War of Choice"

Who but Mark Steyn can pen a piece that's insightful, clever, dark and dismal yet with a sharp sense of humor shining throughout? I think his Obamacare narrative is right on target and, unfortunately, I agree with his prediction that the abominable thing will be passed, public option and all. Here's the center paragraph of the piece:

And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to "reform" health care. Most voters don't buy it: They see it as Obama's "war of choice," and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he's having difficulty selling it, that's because it's not about "health." As I've written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture—one in which elections are always fought on the Left's issues and on the Left's terms, and in which "conservative" parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail, pledging to "deliver" government services more "efficiently."

Then Steyn goes on to talk about the "lunatic mainstream" of liberalism, picking up his theme of which I had mentioned hearing him speak earlier. It totally makes sense that President Obama would be willing to lose 25 points off his approval rating and the House of Representatives in 2010 to pass this health care legislation. The thing is so huge and so overwhelming that passing it will cause a leftward seismic shift in the entire nation. That's all we need—another third rail.