Mark Steyn is sharp-tongued as ever on the topic of the week: the latest scandal-mired abrasive, self-righteous, egomanaical, ultra-liberal democrat.
And so it goes after another tumultuous week in American politics. Nearly a third of homeowners are “underwater” – that’s to say, they owe more on their mortgages than the property is worth. Private-sector job growth has all but vanished. The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling.
But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot.
For the benefit of the few remaining American coeds Rep. Weiner isn’t following on Twitter, the congressman’s initial position when his groin Tweet went viral was that his Twitter had been hacked. Could happen to anyone. …
Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”
It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it’s a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or Tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, Tweet on, MacDuff.
Walter Russell Mead thinks the American intellectual establishment ought to have taken the occasion of this year’s Memorial Day to face the truth and applaud the victory delivered by American servicemen in the face of their own betrayal.
The story of Iraq has yet to be told. It is too politically sensitive for the intelligentsia to handle just yet; passions need to cool before the professors and the pundits who worked themselves into paroxysms of hatred and disdain for the Bush administration can come to grips with how wrongheaded they’ve been. It took decades for the intelligentsia to face the possibility that the cretinous Reagan-monster might have, um, helped win the Cold War, and even now they haven’t asked themselves any tough questions about the Left’s blind hatred of the man who did more than any other human being to save the world from nuclear war.
It may take that long for the truth about the war in Iraq to dawn, but dawn it will. America’s victory in Iraq broke the back of Al-Qaeda and left Osama bin Laden’s dream in ruins. He died a defeated fanatic in his Abbotabad hideaway; his dream was crushed in the Mesopotamian flatlands where he swore it would win.
Osama’s goal was to launch the Clash of Civilizations against the West. He would be Captain Islam, fighting against the Crusader-in-Chief George W. Bush. By his purity, wisdom, daring and above all by his special knowledge of the hidden ways of God, Captain Islam would crush and humiliate the evil Bush-fiend and unite the Muslim world behind the Truth. Osama would complete at a spiritual level the mission his father undertook on the physical plane. His father’s construction company rebuilt and modernized the ancient holy city of Mecca; Osama would rebuild and restore the entire Muslim world.
The 9/11 attacks propelled Osama to the historical height he sought: in the minds of many he had become a caliph-in-waiting, the fierce servant of God whose claims to leadership were vindicated by the dramatic success of his plans. Angry young people across the Islamic world, frustrated by a host of frustrations and privations, wondered if this was the charismatic, God-aided figure who would overturn the world order and lead Islam to its old place on the commanding heights of the world.
9/11 was the trumpet, Iraq was the test. The US invaded an Arab country, overthrew its government, and found itself condemned to the hardest task in international politics: nation building under hostile fire. More, the US had taken a country run by its Sunni minority and put power into the hands of an inexperienced and fractious Shi’a majority. Then the US occupation began to fail: the government institutions fell apart, there was no security in country or in town, the economy went into free fall, and basic services like electricity and health failed across the land. The provocations were serious and real; the Americans were clumsy and awkward. US checkpoints and raids were humiliating and degrading; the scalding Abu Ghraib scandal was a propagandist’s dream come true. The ham-handed diplomacy and tongue-tied defense of American policy from Washington created a sense of rising, unstoppable global opposition to Bush’s War. …
For roughly three years America writhed in the toils of our predicament in Iraq. The Democratic establishment had supported the war. Some leading Democrats did so out of conviction, some out of a political calculation that no other stand was viable in the post 9/11 atmosphere. Now the grand panjandrums of the Democratic Party, one after another, made their pilgrimage to Canossa. Some came to believe and perhaps more came to say that the war was lost and that their original backing for it had been a mistake.
Well do I remember the many impassioned statements in those dark years by leading politicians and pundits that the war was lost, lost, irretrievably lost. It was over now, they wailed on television and in print. The Iraqi government was a farce and could never take hold. These clowns made Diem look like Charles de Gaulle. We had no option but to get out as quickly as possible. On and on rolled the great choir of doom, smarter than the rest of us, deeper thinkers, capable of holding more complex thoughts behind their furrowed brows.
Now they have glibly moved on to other subjects; the mostly complicit media is helping us all to forget just how wrong — and how intolerant and moralistic — so many people were about the ‘lost’ war.
While the politicians washed their hands and hung up white flags, and while the press lords gibbered and foamed, the brass kept their heads and the troops stood tall. And gradually, a miracle happened. America started winning the war.
The French scholar Gilles Kepel, no friend of the war in Iraq and no admirer of George Bush, makes the core point. Osama’s dream was to shift history into the realm of myth. He passionately believed that the ordinary course of mundane history wasn’t what really mattered: there was a divine and a miraculous history just behind the veil. Osama aimed to pierce the veil, to bring hundreds of millions of Muslims into his reality, transfixed and transported by the vision of a climactic fight of good against evil, of God against America and its local allies.
That dream died in Iraq.
But on this Memorial Day it is not enough to remember, and give thanks, that Osama’s dream died before he did and that the terror movement has been gravely wounded at its heart.
Because the dream didn’t just die.
It was killed. ..
All wars are tragic; some are also victorious. The tragedies of Iraq are real and well known. The victory is equally real — but the politically fastidious don’t want to look. The minimum we owe our lost and wounded warriors is to tell the story of what they so gloriously achieved.
Pete Robinson reflects gloomily about Republican prospects, noting that the Republican base is bound to dwindle as the national illegitimacy rate skyrockets. (AEI article:)
Forty years after the Moynihan report, the tragic saga of the modern black family is common knowledge. But the tale of family breakdown in modern America is no longer a story delimited to a single ethnic minority. Today the family is also in crisis for this country’s ethnic majority: the so-called white American population….
Consider trends in out-of-wedlock births. By 2002, 28.5 percent of babies of white mothers were born outside marriage in this country. Over the past generation, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded, quadrupling since 1975, when the level was 7.1 percent. The overall illegitimacy rate for whites is higher than it was for black mothers (23.6 percent) when the Moynihan report sounded its alarm….
Today no state in the Union has an Anglo illegitimacy ratio as low as 10 percent. Even in predominantly Mormon Utah, every eighth non-Hispanic white infant is born out of wedlock.
Pete discusses these demographics over dinner in Hanover, New Hampshire with Mark Steyn, who points out that the dramatic changes to the American national character can be readily observed even in rural Northern New England.
For miles in every direction, Mark noted, lay country that until just a few decades ago represented the heartland, so to speak, of the flinty, resourceful, independent Yankee spirit. Now? “You’ll see lovely girls in the local high schools,” Mark said. “When you come across them again five years later, they’ll each have three children by three different fathers.” Then Mark told a story.
In colonial times, it was against crown law to cut down any pine that exceeded a certain girth–twenty-some inches, as I recall–because all such trees were reserved for the use of the Royal Navy, which required a ready supply of masts. Every time you see a colonial house with floorboards more than two feet wide, you’re witnessing an artifact of the American spirit–an act of rebellion. Mark pointed to the floorboards in the restaurant, some of which were certainly more than two feet wide. “Two centuries ago,” he said, “the families in these parts were felling trees in defiance of the crown. Today they’re raising their children on welfare checks.”
Woe to us all.
It probably is worth noting that both of the last two presidents elected by the democrat party may not have been born in wedlock. William Jefferson Clinton, given the name William Jefferson Blythe III at birth, is widely rumored not to have really been the offspring of the traveling salesman William Blythe II who perished in an automobile crash three months before Bill Clinton’s birth. Barack Hussein Obama is certainly of illegitimate birth, as his parents’ marriage was bigamous and invalid.
Barack Obama, Sr. had married Kezia Aoko aka “Grace” in 1954 and had already had two children, prior to his attending the University of Hawaii and marrying Stanley Ann Dunham in 1961. No divorce from Kezia ever occurred, and Barack Sr.’s first wife Kezia is still alive today.
Mark Steyn comments acidly on Barack Obama’s estrangement from reality and the democrats’ futile politics of denial.
The other day, Barack Obama was in the oddly apt town of Fairless Hills, Pa., at what the White House billed as one of those ersatz “town hall†discussions into which republican government has degenerated. He was asked a question by a citizen of the United States. The cost of a gallon of gas has doubled on Obama’s watch, and this gentleman asked, “Is there a chance of the price being lowered again?â€
As the Associated Press reported it, the president responded “laughinglyâ€: “I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. . . . If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon — (laughter) . . . â€
That’s how the official White House transcript reported it: Laughter. Big yuks. “So, like I said, if you’re getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. You can get a great deal.†…
America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.
So what? Your fault. Should have gone to Columbia and Harvard and become a community organizer.
Another ten years of this, and large tracts of America will be Third World. Not Somalia-scale Third World, but certainly the more decrepit parts of Latin America. There will still be men with motorcades, but they’ll have heavier security and the compounds they shuttle between will be more heavily protected. For them and their cronies, the guys plugged in, the guys who still know who to call to figure out a workaround through the bureaucratic sclerosis, life will be manageable, and they’ll still be wondering why you loser schlubs are forever whining about gas prices, and electricity prices, and food prices.
What’s about to hit America is not a “shock.†It’s not an earthquake, it’s not a tsunami, it’s what Paul Ryan calls “the most predictable crisis in the history of our country.†It has one cause: spending. The spending of the class that laughs at the class that drives to work to maintain President Obama, Senator Reid, Senator Baucus, Senator Harkin, and Minority Leader Pelosi’s “communications director†in their comforts and complacency.
The Democrats’ solution to the problem is to deny there is one. Unsustainable binge spending is, as the computer wallahs say, not a bug but a feature: We’ll stimulate the economy with a stimulus grant for a Stimulus Grant-Writing Community Outreach Permit Coordinator regulated by the Federal Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications. What’s to worry about?
Paul A. Rahe, as he watches democrat political prospects cratering all over America, begins to entertain an amusing, but fantastical, theory that liberals have not turned into a horde of lemmings suddenly swarming into a mad dash toward self destruction on the basis of ideology, that there had to have been a plot and a program of calculated and deliberate enemy action to produce such ruin. And if there really was a plot by some political mastermind to destroy the American left, the genius behind it had to have been Karl Rove.
“Could it be true?†I ask myself. “Has everything that we have seen in the course of the last twenty-seven months been engineered by the supreme Machiavel of our age – that evil genius Karl Rove? Did he “discover,†in the manner of a Hollywood agent, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid? Were they found at a drugstore soda fountain? Or did he find them at Central Casting? Stranger things have happened. After all, it was Pat Sajak who “discovered†Keith Olbermann and sent him on to infamy.
“Wanted,†Rove must have thought, “the Keystone Politicos – a gang supremely capable of winning an election but utterly incapable of shooting straight once in office. Let’s start with an American half African caught up in a Third-World ideology invented in the 1950s and long out of fashion, vain beyond belief, obsessed with the notion that he is a world-historical figure, hostile to compromise, contemptuous of his compatriots, apt to think disgraceful conduct on the part of one or more of his own supporters provides him with ‘a teachable moment’ in which he can hector his fellow citizens, and so persuaded that as an orator he has ‘a gift’ that he supposes that, if he delivers three hundred speeches a year, people will bow down, strew myrtle at his feet, and chant, ‘Hosanna in excelsis.’ Then, we will need a lady legislator willing to advocate passing a bill so that we can see what is in it, and a half-senile clown from a state where the prostitutes greatly outnumber the preachers, a man who owes everything to the gambling industry.†“Wanted,†he must have thought, “an opportunity to impose this gang on the opposition and ruin them for a generation or more!â€
I know, I know. It is madness! But ask yourself whether what everyone now takes to be true about what has happened in this country is not even stranger than my lunatic hypothesis. In 2006, you might have imagined that the Democrats would sweep in 2008. Many of us feared as much. But, if someone had also told you that, after the election, they would pass a series of bills without a shred of Republican support, bills thousands of pages in length that no one had bothered to read and that no one understood – well, what would you have said?
Consider the evidence! Just when Dennis Hastert and the Republicans in Congress had demonstrated that the Democrats were not the only corrupt, patronage-oriented party in Washington, just when you think that it really is over for the Republicans, along comes Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid to remind the American people just how bad it can get and to treat the opposition with so much disdain that the Republicans in Congress begin to grow backbones.
And how can you explain Wisconsin? In November, 2010 – when the Republics won both state houses and the governorship in that state, would you have predicted that the Democratic Senators in that state would charter a bus to flee to the People’s Republic of Illinois in order to shirk their responsibilities, paralyze legislative activity, and leer at the waitresses at Rockford’s Tilted Kilt? Did you foresee that thousands of teachers, who make on average a hundred grand a year, would call in sick and then descend on at the capitol in Madison carrying signs denouncing the state’s newly elected governor as a Mubarak and a Hitler for having the effrontery to think that he and the Republicans swept into office with him should enact the platform on which they campaigned? Would you have imagined that Barack Obama would then wade in, announcing his support for public-sector workers, making twice what ordinary Cheeseheads make, who think it unthinkable that they should be called upon to do what private-sector workers customarily do: contribute to their pension funds and help pay for the healthcare insurance from which they benefit? Had I predicted any of this, you would have thought me daft. You would have said, “Come on! The Dems may be corrupt, but they are not stupid!â€
So, I suggest that this must all be the result of machinations on the part of Karl Rove. Rush Limbaugh failed with Operation Chaos, but Karl has succeeded with Operation Annihilation. Think about it. After the events of this week, what are the chances that Barack Obama will take Wisconsin in the general election scheduled to be held a bit more than eighteen months from now? What, do you think, is going to happen in Ohio and Michigan in the next couple of months? And what will be the consequences?
In 2010, the Democrats passed ObamaCare by a 7 vote margin. In 2011, the Republicans passed the bill to repeal ObamaCare with a 55 vote margin.
Three out of four democrats voting for repeal were members of the 26 member Blue Dog Coalition: Dan Boren (2-OK), Mike McIntyre (7-NC), and Mike Ross (4-AR). Larry Kissel (8-NC), who also voted for repeal, is not a member.
Is there a place for him in the Marine Corps? He thinks so.
One of the few things Bill Clinton did that I thought reflected favorably on his leadership was the attempted “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” compromise on the issue of persons inclined toward homosexual activity serving in the military.
Clinton’s DADT policy was intelligent and philosophically libertarian. I’m not sure that it was actually necessary, as I do not believe that there exists a significant number of persons of the homosexual-activities-inclined persuasion both eager to enlist in the military and emotionally stable and responsible enough to serve, but in so far as real persons meeting that description may actually exist, President Clinton’s DADT policy satisfied both their military ambitions and the needs of the armed forces for good order and discipline.
The attempt underway by the democrat party leadership of the 111th Congress, a Congress currently enjoying a 13% favorable public approval rating, to ram through a repeal of DADT in a lame duck session has more of the character of a legislative coup d’etat than conventional legislation.
The radical ideologues that found themselves suddenly empowered by a congressional majority resulting from the electorate’s choice of the only alternative in the American two-party system to the incumbent party in response to economic disaster refuse to recognize their repudiation at polls nationally in November and are proceeding to attempt to force through yet more unpopular and extremist legislation in the same high-handed fashion used to enact Obamacare.
The leftwing-controlled House has passed legislation repealing DADT and Harry Reid has expressed the intention of holding in the Senate the same kind of all-night sessions used to enact socialized health care to clear the way, in time of war, to use the American military for an unpopular form of ideological-motivated coercive social engineering.
People who have imperfect vision are not accepted for military aviation. The US military rejects people for being too short, too tall, too fat, and too thin, and even for having flat feet. I don’t know the current policy, but some years ago, persons with too many visible tattoos were not permitted to join the service. Open expression of any form of bizarre behavior, open sexuality, interest in sexual fetishism, confused gender identity, and perversion ought to remain valid grounds for exclusion or separation from the service.
The repeal of DADT will make homosexuals a privileged and protected class within the American Armed Forces. Activists and sexual predators oriented toward young persons of service age will flock to the military to plant their subcultural flag. A cloak of federal protection will descend over flamboyant displays of homosexual identity and desire and the symbolic language of sexual fetishism will take its place beside the traditional emblems of military ranks and organized units. Just as a number of Roman Catholic seminaries, in the period of vocational decline following Vatican 2, were transformed into organs of the Hominterm, there will undoubtedly before long be significant non-combat military units completely taken over by, and operated for the benefit of, perverse sexual activity to the most profound detriment of their legitimate purpose.
The kinds of American families which today send their children to serve in the American Armed Forces will think twice, after incidents featuring the abuse of authority to extort sexual access become commonplace.
The presence in the military of larger numbers of a non-combat-oriented minority privileged by a system of political protection will inevitably lead to more military personnel resembling PFC Bradley Manning working in clerical positions of trust and responsibility, and over time advancing in rank. The homosexual subculture is characteristically leftist and radically hostile to conventional society, the United States, and US Foreign Policy. Members in good standing of that subculture are highly likely, statistically speaking, to oppose the operations the US military is engaged in, and to have sympathies for, and ties, to leftwing activist groups. It is no accident that many of the most prominent British traitors of the WWII and Cold War period, the Cambridge spies, Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean, were all homosexuals.
Republican in Name Only Senators Murkowski, Collins, Snowe, and Brown have pledged to vote to break the filibuster. Let’s hope that responsible conservative Republican leadership is up to the job of stopping this outrageous assault on the American military by an insolent and irresponsible gang of politicians whose opinions and loyalties are representative of only a minority of Americans
When journalists diffidently inquired a few months back about the Constitutional basis for mandated health insurance purchases, the response of democrat party Solons typically varied between blank incomprehension and clear indignation at the effrontery of anyone suggesting that any kind of limits on their power might exist.
Walter Olson remarks on a recent demonstration for the need of remedial high school civics lesson for US senators.
Last Tuesday, despite warnings of regulatory overreach, the Senate voted 73-25 in favor of S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which would greatly expand the powers of the federal Food and Drug Administration and impose extensive new testing and paperwork requirements on farmers and food producers. Almost at once, however, the bill was derailed — whether temporarily or otherwise remains to be seen — by what the New York Times called an “arcane parliamentary mistake†and the L.A. Times considered a purely “technical flaw“. Roll Call put it more bluntly: “[Senate] Democrats violated a constitutional provision requiring that tax provisions originate in the House.†While the New York Times weirdly cast Senate Republicans as the villains in the affair, other news sources more accurately reported that it was the (Democratic) House leadership that was standing up for its prerogatives:
“Unfortunately, [the Senate] passed a bill which is not consistent with the Constitution of the United States, so we are going to have to figure out how to do that consistent with the constitutional requirement that revenue bills start in the House,†[House Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer said.
According to Hoyer, this has happened multiple times this Congress, causing severe legislative angina.
“The Senate knows the rule and should follow the rule and they should be cognizant of the rule,†Hoyer scolded. “Nobody ought to be surprised by the rule. It is in the Constitution, and you have all been lectured and we have as well about reading the Constitution.â€
To those familiar with the history of the U.S. Constitution, the Origination Clause should hardly count as arcane or technical. It stands as the very first sentence of Article I, Section 7: “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.†…
With its two-year terms of office and less populous constituencies, the House of Representatives was of course designed to be the legislative branch closest to the people, most readily thrown out of office when it strays from the public mood. Those considerations aside, the Constitution is rightly celebrated for the way its framers made the House and Senate different from each other precisely in order to ensure jealousies and dissensions between the two, those jealousies and dissensions serving as a safeguard against hasty or ill-considered legislation. In this case it worked exactly as planned, and the self-regard of the House leadership will serve as the reason for another round of scrutiny for a bill that could badly use some. Somewhere up above the spirit of James Madison may have heard the scolding words of Rep. Hoyer, and smiled.
Things, of course, are not really different among House democrats either. Remember Alcee Hastings’ analysis of the legal dynamic behind the operations of American government?
Yoshitoshi Tsukioka, Akashi Gidayu, No 83, 100 Views of the Moon series, Woodblock Print, c. 1890.
Wow! Liberal democrat strategists Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell, in the Washington Post, are urging Barack Obama to do the honorable thing and announce that he intends to be a one-term president.
This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.
To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.
All the folderol about how much more effective Obama would be as a lame duck is obviously patent rubbish. What they want is Obama the albatross to unfasten himself from the democrat party’s neck.
