Steyn’s 2012 picks, et cetera

Cross-posted at the WP version of P&P

I had a busy day yesterday and didn’t even notice that Blogger was down and my morning post had vanished. (Re-cap of that: Chinese commies bad, Obama bad, Mark Steyn great, cheating and plagiarism bad, etc. I guess you didn’t miss much.)

A few items as I play catch-up:

Mark Steyn talked with Hugh Hewitt last night, and I’m very pleased to hear that Mark admires Dick Van Dyke and his excellent performances in Bye Bye Birdie and Mary Poppins, two of my all-time favorite movies. How about some Ann-Margret fabulousness:

Wrenching our attention back to politics, Steyn tells Hewitt he’s “happy for us to be the moat with alligators party.” Lauri B. Regan at American Thinker agrees:

Well Mr. President, I am proud to say that I do want alligators in a moat that protects our country. And I hope to God that you have one or more decision-makers in your administration that understand that it will take a lot more than killing Osama bin Laden and occasional drone strikes in Afghanistan to protect the citizens who hired you for that job. For while you traverse the country spiking the football and fundraising for the 2012 election, there are way too many terrorists who want to see each and every U.S. citizen dead and who are not taking time out of their planning stages to play golf; party with hateful, racist rappers; and hobnob with the rich and famous at $35,000 a plate dinners.

Yeah. I hear you.

More Steyn: He assesses the 2012 GOP field with Sean Hannity — video here. Excerpts:

Tim Pawlenty:

I’ve got a soft spot for Tim Pawlenty. I think the last time I saw him was when he and I were on your show together a couple of weeks ago and I think this is a guy who is more likely to wind up with the nomination. He hasn’t got an albatross like Obamacare and he hasn’t got the personal baggage that Newt Gingrich has. He’s got a good record that is flawed. But everybody is flawed. But I think he’s closer to someone who is at ease with himself, is authentic and conservative enough. And, I think someone like Tim Pawlenty could be the last guy standing.

Michele Bachmann:

I do like Michele Bachmann. And I think her instincts are good. Whether you can go from a short congressional career to the presidency, I don’t know. But Michele Bachmann is a terrific campaigner and just adorable to watch in that sense.

The field overall:

I don’t — all I ask is I don’t want a candidate we have to drag across the finishing line. I want one we can get behind and cheer all the way.

No, I’m happy to go with the Pawlenty-Bachmann ticket if it comes to that, Sean.

Adorable! I love it. Read the rest. He has something to say about Gingrich, Trump, Palin, Huckabee, Paul, Daniels, and Romney.

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Buffalo beheader convicted in one hour

Via Mark Steyn:

Muzzammil “Mo” Hassan chopped off his wife’s head, and then claimed it was because she’d been spousally abusing him. This was not in Yemen or Waziristan but in Buffalo. Despite the chutzpah (if he’ll forgive the expression) of his defense, yesterday the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty of murder.

The Hassan case was fascinating not just because his entire public identity was a fraud but because the media so enthusiastically promoted that fraud. Two years ago, in Headless Body In Gutless Press, I wrote:

You must click to read the rest.

***

Weasel Zippers: Moderate NY Muslim Convicted of Beheading Wife…

Cross-posted.

The return of Steyn, et cetera

Thank you, Santa.  Mark Steyn is back and I think he’s allowed to toot his own horn just a little:

~In John Hawkins’ ninth annual Blog Awards, Mark narrowly lost the Best Columnist category to Charles Krauthammer. On the other hand, coming second isn’t bad for a columnist who hasn’t written a column in six months. On the other other hand, you don’t really need any new columns when the old ones stand up so well. Here’s a Steyn I-told-you-so moment from just before the 2008 election.

Click to read.

Other stuff:

• Various & sundry reads here.

• I’ve written about some good books for kids at RightNetwork.  If you like it, please “like” it. Thank you.

Rumor has it . . .

. . . Steyn lives! Husband emailed the following:

Listen starting around 1h13m.

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcast.ricochet.com/ricochet-podcast-episode-29.mp3

Cure for blogger burnout?

The NR post-election cruise!

It would be fabulous. But I don’t have the time or the money. And someone is notably absent. I guess he’s the guy who has to hunker down in an undisclosed location in case the ship and its cargo of conservative punditry gets sucked into a vortex or something. Steyn would be the one left to carry on. If he ever returns from hiatus, that is. :-/

Cross-posted at P&P.

Goldberg on Steyn

After Mark Steyn there is no second. But if there were, if might be Jonah Goldberg. From the Goldberg Files:

Yes, that Mark Steyn. Who, you may not know, is actually one of three identical triplets, each of them assigned a different nefarious role in their plot to overthrow the world as we know it. One of them travels through Europe constantly, “coincidentally” hailing cabs that he ends up sharing with potentates, movie stars, and 1950s singers everyone has long assumed were dead. The other writes for nearly every newspaper and magazine in the world, the perfect cover for activating sleeper agents in remote corners of the globe. Need to “turn on” the Steynian assassin in Munich? Just sneak a seemingly innocuous reference to the chorus vocals in the 1979 off-Broadway version of 42nd Street into your Sunday Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung column. Need to notify your asset in the Congo that the CIA is coming for him? Why, just compare Mel Torme’s vocal stylings to the total fertility rate of Manchester, England. As for the last Steyn (soon to be the title of my novel), he spends his entire time expanding his Bond-villainesque headquarters in New Hampshire — and choking mallard ducks, for some reason.

Sign up for the Goldberg Files here.

And I don’t believe that last part about the mallards.

McChrystal’s poor judgment

Though it’s undoubtedly true that President Obama was unprepared on Afghanistan and continues to lag sadly behind the competency curve on all matters presidential, how to explain the incredibly poor judgment shown by Gen. McChrystal in airing his dirty laundry in a lengthy Rolling Stone profile? A terminal case of buyer’s remorse? He did vote for Obama. Hot Air:

Via Chris Cillizza on Twitter, Politico has the PDF of the Rolling Stone article that has created a firestorm for General Stanley McChrystal — and it’s at least as bad as advertised.  Michael Hastings paints a damning picture of a military leader who seems to have built a toadying entourage, whose disdain and contempt for the political leadership of the country drips from every page, and who doesn’t seem to mind who knows it — until it hits the presses.

Hot Air quotes a McChrystal aide from the article:

Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his [bleeping] war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

Of course this is perfectly consistent with everything else we know about Obama’s “leadership style.” But I don’t see how Obama can do anything but fire him. Read the rest at Hot Air.

Updated to add insight from Byron York, quoting a source who knows McChrystal well:

“Those of us who knew him would unanimously tell you that this was just a matter of time,” the man says.  “He talks this way all the time.  I’m surprised it took this long for it to rear its ugly head.”

“He had great disdain for anyone, as he said, ‘in a suit,’” the former military man continues.  “I was shocked one day in a small group of people when he took [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld to task in front of all of us.”

“The other thing about him is that he is probably one of the more arrogant, cocksure military guys I have run across.  That in itself is not necessarily a character flaw, but when you couple it with his great disdain for civilians, it’s a very volatile combination.”

Other items:

Guy Benson does justice to Obama’s wasteful, politically partisan commissions:

Candidate Barack Obama famously ridiculed his 2008 opponent for suggesting the next president establish a bipartisan commission to thoroughly investigate the myriad factors that contributed to the financial meltdown.  Obama snarked that John McCain was employing the “oldest…stunt in the book” and seeking to “pass the buck” by tasking others to “study the problem.”  (Here he paused for laughter).  Building up to an audience-fueled crescendo, Obama bellowed, “What we need now is leadership.”

Once elected president, Obama changed his tune.  Having created and exacerbated record budget deficits, Obama cracked open the old Washington playbook and found a certain stunt he thought might be useful.  Hello, deficit commission.  It promptly ran out of money.  Beyond that irony, many observers suspect Obama ultimately intends to use the panel as political cover (sometimes known as buck-passing) to violate his campaign’s central “firm pledge.”

Now the president is facing one of the gravest environmental disasters in US history.  Managing the crisis effectively, providing leadership, etc. has proven rather difficult, so Obama has found himself once again strangely attracted to the stunt he forcefully rejected on the campaign trail.  Hello, oil spill commission — for which Obama has requested $15 million in funding. Their job? To study the problem.  [Pause for laughter]. A wise use of taxpayer dollars? You’ll have to ask the deficit commission.

What we still need now is leadership. Read the rest.

Lastly, Peter Robinson interviews Mark Steyn and Rob Long, all week.  Part 1, about 8 minutes, is on the continuing relevance of Ronald Reagan.  Part 2, 5 minutes long, is on Reagan’s prescient opposition to government healthcare. Worth watching. (Mark looks very dapper, as usual.)

Steyn on Obama on Daniel Pearl

Thanks to Mark Steyn for doing justice to Obama’s weak, misleading remarks of last week, in which he glossed over the butchering of Daniel Pearl:

Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.

This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”

Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

Read the rest.

Related post here.

Saturday miscellany

First things first. Check out Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge conversation with Mark  Steyn. The videos are served up in manageable portions of about 5-10 minutes a piece. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Steyn’s  Saturday column: Welcome to Fascizona

You couldn’t get sanctions like these imposed at the U.N. Security Council, but then, unlike Arizona, Iran is not a universally reviled pariah.

Ain’t it the truth. Here’s  John Bolton on our refusal to take a stand on human rights at the UN:  “We shouldn’t be afraid to be isolated; we should be proud of it.”

Horror story in Pakistan: Christian barber beaten, sodomized for cutting a Muslim’s beard

“Shakeel Cheema said, ‘Now we are going to teach you a real lesson for shaving the beard of a Muslim man,” Masih said, and after a long, pained pause he related how Cheema and the seven others sodomized him. “I started bleeding and fell unconscious.”

Oremus.

Jeanette Pryor presents the logical feminist position on abortion. Excellent piece, but . . . good luck with that. My post here.

Video: Obama sings the praises of government: “We’ve also clearly  seen the dangers of too little government.” Aargh.

That calls for a palate cleanser. For you old fogies, try this. Whippersnappers, go here.

How exceptional?

A must-read from Mark Steyn. Not short. One excerpt:

Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

On keeping the Change

Steyn:

Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people.

Krauthammer:

“This is a historic moment, this is a moment I think America changes, I don’t think this will ever end up repealed, there’s no way it could happen before 2013, I think it’s unlikely to happen anytime at all, I think in terms of our debt it’s gonna be huge and also in terms of health care.”

Klein:

If efforts to repeal or overturn Obamacare fail, then the battle will have to enter the next stage. At some point after its implemented — whether this is five years or 10 years from now, there will be another major health care debate. Despite President Obama’s promises, premiums will still be skyrocketing and the spiraling cost of health care will be putting a strain on individuals, businesses and the federal government.

When that day comes, liberals will argue that the reason why all of those problems exist is that Obamacare 1.0 didn’t go far enough. They’ll say that the government needs to spend more money on subsidies, place more regulations on insurance companies, and introduce a public option to drive down costs — or maybe even go the single-payer route altogether. Conservatives cannot be in a position to lose that argument.

Eric Cantor says they don’t have the votes

Cantor’s statement here. Other health care war items here. Read them quickly before they expire.

Also: Steyn on our crazy descent into banana-land.

Not Obamacare —

Chris Christie, I think I love you. Those two speeches made my heart go pitter-pat. Now this:

In his 2010-2011 budget proposal, Christie removes $7 million in funding that mainly goes to abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

Your Saturday Steyn reader

First up, an excerpt from Mark’s Saturday column, Gordon Brown’s Cry of Impotence:

In the old days, I used to wake up to the morning paper, neatly folded on a silver salver and presented by my valet along with the kedgeree and the brace of grilled quail. Now I wake up to an inbox of Internet stories forwarded by readers that cumulatively feel like the front page from some bizarro kingdom cooked up for an unpersuasive dystopian satire. For example, a headline from the Washington Examiner:

“Transsexual Cabaret Performer Vomits on Susan Sarandon.”

An accident? Or the pilot for a hot new reality format? In other news, the London Evening Standard reports:

“Number 10 Denies Naked Gordon Brown Called Aide C-word.”

Read the rest if you can. Moving on, Mark on why Obama and Congress persist in their legislative death march:

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture.

It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. [. . .]

Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass ObamaCare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years.

And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier.

Mark on a Muslim woman’s objection to full body scans on religious grounds:

MKH: Well, and finally, we’ve got a story from across the pond. A Muslim woman refuses body scan at airport from the Times. A Muslim woman was barred from boarding a flight after she refused to undergo a full body scan for religious reasons. She was warned she would be stopped from boarding the plane, but decided to forfeit her ticket to Pakistan than to submit to the scan. And I believe she’s believed to be the first person to refuse on religious grounds. Frankly, what do think about that one?

MS: Well, I’m actually opposed to the full body scan, because I don’t actually think it’s what we need at airports. So our best shot at getting rid of it is eventually, a Supreme Court judgment comes down that it’s religiously discriminatory for TSA operatives to get their jollies from looking at Islamobabes under the burka.

Lastly, Mark on “the impact of Big Government on free peoples”:

Or take Scotland. Most anywhere you go around the planet, from Hong Kong to Hudson’s Bay, almost everything that works was created and developed by Scotsmen. Now the whole joint’s a statist swamp where government spending accounts for 75 percent of the economy and the menfolk idle away their days on a diet of drugs and fried Mars Bars with a life expectancy in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow getting down to West African standards. They’ll never make any contribution to the world again.

Listen to Steyn in conversation with Rob Long, Peter Robinson, and others, at Ricochet.

If it passes

If Obamacare passes: What the Dems are saying about reconciliation and Andy McCarthy’s must-read on what’s really going on. A bit of that:

You have a party with the numbers to do anything it puts its mind to, led by movement Leftitsts who see their window of opportunity is closing. We seem to expect them to moderate because that’s what everybody in their position does. But they won’t. They will put their heads down and go for as much transformation as they can get, figuring that once they get it, it will never be rolled back.

Other stuff at P&P:

Coming to a grimy clinic near you: So some of us will die in our own excrement. No one said fairness and compassion were free. Oh, wait a sec. Yes, they did say exactly that. But in truth government-run “healthcare” is the worst of both worlds — fiscally unsustainable and deplorably poor in quality.

Children last: Mark Steyn writes:

When state-of-the-art totalitarianism meets primitive village culture, the result is industrial-scale depravity.

Our next post will have to be something very upbeat.

Steyn on the Olympics

Here we are at our bright and shiny brand-new group blog. How about some Mark Steyn to get things started:

Hugh Hewitt: Now Mark, how do you feel about the Canadian Olympics? Are you watching them?

MS: Well, I do like, I mean, I do like the winter Olympics in an entirely non-nationalistic way. I mean, I like, I like these sort of strange sports. I like the two man luge. I can’t think why anyone would invent a two man luge. I have no idea how it originated, but I can’t think, you know, presumably on top of an Alp one day in the 19^th Century, two guys thought hey, this would be more fun if we went down the hill together. I have no idea how the thing got started, but I just like the idea of the two man luge, and same with the ice dancing. I love the ice dancing, because the chicks are generally hot, and then the guys in those stupid, little bolero jackets all sort of twirling about like some camp waiter after John Kerry’s decided to send back the Belgian endive, I mean, I just find the whole idea of the winter Olympics, and I especially love curling, of course, which is fantastic, because curling is, the most unfit guys at the winter Olympics are guys in their sort of late 40s, early 50s, chain-smoking guys who look they’ve been sleeping in a dumpster all week…

The curling jokes are so very easy. But still funny.

On the liberal media, their denseness, and those tea party women:

HH: Last question, CNN put out a new poll yesterday, and based on talking to 1,024 people, of whom 124 had been to a Tea Party, they announced that the Tea Parties were male, overwhelmingly conservative, upper class and rural. What do you think of basing an assessment of Tea Parties on 124 people, Mark Steyn?

MS: Yeah, that’s great polling.

HH: (laughing)

MS: I don’t know why, I think CNN is just determined to destroy itself. And it’s really beyond salvation now. And I assume they’re just kind of staggering on until eventually Larry King decides he wants to hang up his hat. The fact is you see an awful lot of women at these Tea Parties.

HH: Yup.

MS: It’s amazing to me that you spend two minutes with those crowds, and the one thing you see tons of is feisty women. There’s a lot of feisty women in that movement.

Read the rest.

This post was just an ice-breaker. Stay tuned for a torrent of incisive commentary.