Steyn: The slow death of free speech

Mark Steyn, brilliant as always:

But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in ‘striking the balance’; they’ve drawn the line and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: ‘“Shut up,” he explained.’

A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

Read it all...

Steyn: Laws Are for Little People

Even among Steyn columns, this is a standout.

Which is saying something...

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Anything involving guns is even less amenable to “obviousness.” A few years ago, Daniel Brown was detained at LAX while connecting to a Minneapolis flight because traces of gunpowder were found on his footwear. His footwear was combat boots. As the name suggests, the combat boots were returning from combat — eight months of it, in Iraq’s bloody and violent al-Anbar province. Above the boots he was wearing the uniform of a staff sergeant in the USMC Reserve Military Police and was accompanied by all 26 members of his unit, also in uniform. Staff Sergeant Brown doesn’t sound like an “obvious” terrorist. But the TSA put him on the no-fly list anyway. If it’s not “obvious” to the government that a serving member of the military has any legitimate reason for being around ammunition, why should it be “obvious” that a TV host has?

Read it all...

Steyn: "A Nation of Sandra Flukes"

The always brilliant Mark Steyn, on one of the Democrats prime-time speakers...

So this is America’s best and brightest — or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” — and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”

Another Steyn must-read.

The always brilliant Mark Steyn...

...with the line of the day.

Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes

Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn’t a threat to one’s sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation’s most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first “woman of color” on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor’s favorite crab dish to a tribal cookbook.

Steyn - Obama’s History Lesson

Mark Steyn eviscerates the President over his latest set of cheap rhetorical speech points...

So let’s see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th-century Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste. Marie. A man who sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers.” A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.”

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It’s not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle Crowd-Pleasing for Dummies as a keynote address.

Read it all...

"Our pitchforks are misdirected..."

Steyn, with a must read...

So, at the News of the World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of Big Government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability — legal, fiscal, electoral, popular. A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

"like watching your parents do the Macarena..."

Yup...

Now he’s come out in favor of global warming not when it was actually happening (over a decade ago) but two years after the peer-review hit the fan in East Anglia, Copenhagen, and at the IPCC.

This is like watching your parents do the Macarena: It’s embarrassing and it’s dated.

Mitt had a lot going for him last time round, but he seems determined not to learn from experience. And the least that voters are entitled to in a time of crisis is a presidential candidate who’s one step ahead of the conventional pieties, not someone so out of it that he orders his political positions from the remainder bin.

Mark Steyn, who is absolutely right.

My take on it? Mitt's trying to position himself for the general election, but in ways that pretty much guarantee that he won't be a part of it. And I've been a Romney supporter all along. If I'm telling you this, you know that there's no chance...

Writing in Cold Blood About Itamar

Claire Berlinski, Writing in Cold Blood About Itamar...

This story is above all about murder. They were children and they were murdered. Two more children were orphaned. The children were targeted deliberately. This was a premeditated murder--not a crime of passion or self-defense--and it was a psychotically savage crime. Anyone who in any way tries to rationalize or minimize this or to suggest that this is a fitting punishment for anything needs to go out and look at a three-month-old baby and ask himself what it would take to climb over a fence, climb in a window, and cut off that child's head. If that act seems an "understandable" reaction to a political grievance to him, I don't think we can have much of a conversation.

You all know what she's talking about of course.

Oh, you don't? You mean that wasn't headline news in the American media? I guess not.

"All the news that's fit to print" really means "All the news that fits [our storyline] we print." And if you print stories like this one, it doesn't fit with the storyline that it is Israel, and Israel's intransigence, and Israel's stubbornness, that's the source of all problems in the middle east, not the death cult known as Islam, and the evil anti-semites that use it to carry out an ancient race-war.

These people are the enemies of civilization. There is no room for this behavior in a civilized world.

Seems like old times...

Steyn:

But Abe Foxman thinks Rush Limbaugh is the problem...

"His musings were wafted upwards...to a global fait accompli..."

Steyn:

But where did all these experts get the data from? Well, NASA’s assertion that Himalayan glaciers “may disappear altogether” by 2030 rests on one footnote, citing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report suggests 2035 as the likely arrival of Armageddon, but what’s half a decade between scaremongers? They rate the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high”—i.e., more than 90 per cent. And the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that report, so it must be kosher, right? Well, yes, its Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.

Al Gore was unavailable for comment.

As always, Steyn's brilliant. Read it all...

Petulance

I wasn't the only one, as these comments from the Corner show...

Mark Steyn:

...the petulance is all too obviously real...

Peter Robinson:

While offering up such stale, unimaginative policy proposals that liberals could only have moaned and gnashed their teeth, Obama adopted a tone of such petulance, peevishness and condescension that independents could only have recoiled.

Robinson again:

I forgot to add "petulant."

Around the blogosphere - Joe Klein edition

Some others talking about Joe Klein, as I did earlier...


Mark Steyn:

Having elected the Smartest Administration of All Time, the Obammysoxers are understandably drawn to the notion that the problem right now is that you knuckledragging rubes are too dumb to understand all he's done for you. If I were Mr Klein, though, I'd surely be smart enough to wonder if stating it quite so explicitly is really the way to go.

The Philipic:

Do I think a “magical” $60 a month is nice? Sure. Do I think it actually solves anything? No, and neither, it seems, does Klein. So why is he so dismissive of the argument that adding $288 billion to the deficit, when we’ve managed to add several trillion over the last two years, is probably a bad idea? Because he’s a partisan and an arrogant elite without a sense of hubris (except to point out the flaw in others).

I “get” the idea behind the stimulus. At it’s basic core, it’s Keynesian economics. That doesn’t mean that I agree with it, or that I think that even within the framework of Keynesian economics it would work, but I at least understand the intellectual ground from whence it sprang. It’d be nice if Klein at least gave those of us in opposition to it the same courtesy and at least conceded that we aren’t just a bunch of ignorant hicks that take our marching orders from Roger Ailes. Of course, I get the feeling that Klein isn’t too upset at the idea that we’re ignorant hicks, but that we aren’t taking our marching orders from *him*.

The Jawa Report:

Joe, let me put this in terms that someone like you, a sheltered ultra-liberal media parasite, can understand. The stimulus package operates on the economy in a zero-sum manner. If the government, which produces nothing, decides to spend however many tens of billions of dollars on "shovel-ready" boondoggles and buy-the-vote projects, that money comes from taxpayers, the people who are actually producing things.

So the wealth gets spread around the way the politicians see fit, with a big healthy dollop off the top to support the grotesquely inefficient government bureaucracies administering the socialist money grab redistribution of resources. Instead of letting market forces steer the money to where it will do the most good for the economy, the stimulus funds are steered by bureaucrats to where they'll give the best spin for the political party in power.

In other words, it's rearranging the deck furniture instead of manning the lifeboats or trying to fix the big, gaping hole in the hull.

Doug Ross

You can almost visualize the drool gumming up Klein's keyboard as he secreted this pathetic paean to his Democrat overlords. A Democrat leadership, by the way, that is in so far over its head it needs scuba gear.

The bureaucrats, the public sector unions and the trial lawyers are ripping Americans off and Joe here is telling us we're not paying enough.

No, Joe, the real dodos are the legacy media propagandists that publish state-approved press releases straight from the mouths of Axelrod and Emanuel. And judging by the circulation of your noxious rag, it won't be long before you're officially on their payroll.

VerumSerum

Maybe three out of four Americans are smart enough to realize that the “magical” money isn’t really magic. It’s all being borrowed from China and will have to be repaid with interest. Maybe 3/4 of Americans would rather not run up the national credit card right now for the sake of $60 a month.

Rick Moran:

Sure it would be great if everyone could intelligently discuss cap and trade or the latest Commerce Department regs dealing with sales of restricted items overseas. We could all sit down in Klein’s drawing room, good cigar smoke wreathing our heads, a glass of Courvoisier giving everything an agreeable blurriness around the edges, while Klein and his friends could tell us what we should be thinking.

Until then, Joe is just going to have to put up with people and their own, flawed perceptions of government and politics. After all, we can’t all be as astute and brilliant as Joe Klein. If that were the case, who would pay him too much money to write like an elitist pig?

Steyn, brilliant again

Mark Steyn is almost always good. This week, he's excellent...

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year.

...

In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:

“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview...

Read it all...

Quote of the day (so far)

Steyn:

Pity the poor Democrats. It's so easy to "misjudge" [the electorate] when you read The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

Sunday Steyn

Steyn:

For three days, he had remained silent — which I believe is a world record for the 44th president. Since Jan. 20, 2009, it’s been difficult to switch on the TV and not find him yakking — accepting an award in Oslo for not being George W. Bush, doing Special Olympics gags with Jay Leno, apologizing for America to some dictator or other . . . But across the electric wires an eerie still had descended. And when the president finally spoke, even making allowances for his usual detached cool, he sounded less like a commander-in-chief addressing the nation after an attempted attack than an assistant DA at a Cook County press conference announcing a drug bust: “Here’s what we know so far. . . . As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device. . . . The suspect was immediately subdued. . . . The suspect is now in custody and has been charged.” Etc, etc, piling up one desiccated legalism on another: “Allegedly . . . ” “suspect . . . ” “charged . . . ” The president can’t tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy-land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it’s hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: The president referred to the Knickerbomber as an “isolated extremist.” By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a Westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.

...

The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration’s foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal: “No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue.” True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year’s Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.

And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dimestore jihadist got that message loud and clear — and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy twelve months ahead. Happy New Year.

This guy is a treasure. Oh, not the President, of course, and obviously not the non-rotariann whose religious beliefs [whatever those might be - is he an Episcopal? A Methodist, maybe?] led him to set his crotch on fire on an international flight. No, the treasure is Steyn, the one-man global content provider. Fabulous. As always...

Gatekeepers

Climategate. Details of health care bills. Cap-and-trade. Van Jones. Anita Dunn.

It's amazing what never makes the papers.

Mark Steyn:

If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.

Jonah Goldberg:

It is amazing how so much of the news today is stuff you don't find in the news...I'm beginning to wonder if the metaphor has the guards on the wrong side of the gate. These days the press seems more interested in guarding you from the news they don't want you to know, even if you would very much like to hear it.

Quote of the day (so far...)

Short, sweet, to the point. And exactly right.

Steyn:

"Climate change" and "health care" are different ends of the same stick: They're both all-purpose pretexts for regulating every aspect of your life.

Sunday Steyn

Earlier in the week, I noticed (but didn't mention) Obama adviser Valerie Jarret's comment that they were going to "speak truth to power." The leftist cant is so firmly ingrained in these people that they don't even recognize that they're now the ones in power.

But the best comment on the Jarret comment comes from the inimitable Steyn:

The most powerful woman in the inner circle of the most powerful man on Earth has decided to speak truth to powerful people standing in the street with handwritten placards saying "THIS GRAN'MA ISN'T SHOVEL READY." Was it only a week ago that I wrote about this administration's peculiar need for domestic enemies?

Mr. Tough Guy

Mark Steyn on "the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer."

If you’re going to attack the press, you need a lightness of touch, not a ham-fisted crowbar such as the White House wielded on Thursday, attempting to ban Fox from the pool interviews with the “pay czar.” Another bit of venerable Disraelian insouciance, on the scribblers of Fleet Street: “Today they blacken your character, tomorrow they blacken your boots.” For two years, the U.S. media have been polishing Obama’s boots, mostly with their drool, to a degree unprecedented in American public life. But now it’s time for the handful of holdouts to make with the Kiwi — or else.

Read it all.

Odds and ends...

...from the last 24 hours in the Corner...

Jay Nordlinger:

A woman in a hybrid SUV with a bumper sticker that says, “I think, therefore I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh.” That symbolizes Ann Arbor almost perfectly, and sums up what I rebelled against. Stupidity that is arrogant and mean is an especially repellent kind of stupidity.

Eric Cantor (US House Minority Whip):

Under fire for its management of a wave of problems, the Obama administration has reached into its bag of tricks and pulled out a new bogeyman: Fox News....Freedom of the press is a celebrated right that has shaped our society for more than 200 years. Accordingly, tough scrutiny by the media is something all administrations should expect and accept. Our nation faces many difficult challenges, and the White House should be focused on the truly pressing issues that require our prompt attention.

Mark Steyn:

Newt really needs to re-think his support for Dede Scozzafava. This isn't RINO but DIABLO - Democrat In All But Label Only. It's not one of those "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" bi-swinger deals — not when you're pro-"stimulus", pro-cash-for-clunkers. And the reductive argument that her sole redeeming value - a willingness to vote for John Boehner as Speaker — is reason enough to support her is silly in a special election. If he's ever Speaker, Boehner won't be till January 2011, and it's 12 months premature for Newt to be telling voters they need to suck it up and accept that a handful of Jim-Jeffords-in-embryo-form are necessary for the Republican tide.

(The NY-23 special election has some very interesting things going on, and I may try to find a good synopsis, or put one together, later tonight or tomorrow.)