Bowing to the Mob

Government-funded film critics do grotesque damage to freedom of speech.

I see the Obama campaign has redesigned the American flag, and very attractive it is too. Replacing the 50 stars of a federal republic is the single “O” logo symbolizing the great gaping maw of spendaholic centralization. And where the stripes used to be are a handful of red daubs, eerily mimicking the bloody finger streaks left on the pillars of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as its staff were dragged out by a mob of savages to be tortured and killed. What better symbol could one have of American foreign policy? Who says the slick hollow vapid marketing of the Obama campaign doesn’t occasionally intersect with reality? Mark Steyn -  NRO - Click To Read More...

Could not have possibly said it better myself. The latest, the greatest Mark Steyn who knows a thing or too about free speech. -  DSMW

Islamist Generation

Media types like to talk about “the narrative”: News is just another form of storytelling, and certain plot lines grab you more than others.

The easiest narrative of all is anything involving young people. “I believe that children are our future,” as the late Whitney Houston once asserted. And, even if Whiney hadn’t believed it, it would still as a point of fact be true. Any media narrative involving young people presupposes that they are the forces of progress, wresting the world from the grasping clutches of mean, vengeful old men and making it a better place.

In the West, young people actually believe this. Thus, in 2008, Barack Obama, being the preferred choice of America’s youth, was by definition the candidate of progress and the future. In humdrum reality, his idea of the future doesn’t seem to be any more futuristic than the pre-Thatcher statist wasteland of Britain in the Seventies, but that didn’t stop the massed ranks of fresh-faced youth chanting “We are the Hopeychange!” in adoring if glassy-eyed unison behind him at every campaign rally. Four years later, half of recent graduates can’t find full-time employment; Americans’ college debt is now larger than credit-card debt; the number of young people with summer jobs is at a record low; and men in their late 20s and early 30s trudge upstairs every night to the same bedroom in which they slept as a kindergartner. Mark Steyn - Nation Review Online - Click to read more...

It's time to re-aim our pitchforks

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, "respectable" newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees' penchant for "hacking" the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn't as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday, it emerged that The News Of The World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voice mails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. Mark Styen - Click To Read More...

Mark Steyn: Weiner helping junk the country

After the tumult of the First World War, noted Winston Churchill, only the intractability of the Irish Question had emerged unscathed:

"Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed," he told the House of Commons. "But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again."

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. Mark Steyn - The Orange County Register - Click To Read More...

Mark Steyn: Who will restore reality to politics?

Unless things change, the man (or woman) elected in 2012 will be the last American president to preside over the world's leading economy. If things get really bad, he will find himself presiding over the early stages of American collapse. Not "decline" but "collapse." "Decline" is what happens when you're Britain in the 1940s, and you cede global dominance to a major ally that shares your language, legal system, cultural inheritance and broad geopolitical objectives. That deal isn't on offer this time round.

Mark Steyn - Orange County Register - Click To Read More...

Losing The Future

Mark Steyn referring to Obama's lazy speech writers in preparring his recent budget address calling it "Lame Cobwebbed Brain-Dead Sloganizing." He goes on the say about TSA and the President's address: 

“Our airports,” continued the president, “would be worse than places that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure.” Maybe he should get out of the motorcade once in a while and swing by LAX or LaGuardia: They’re already decrepit cheerless dumps, mainly because they’ve been lavishly governmentalized into bureaucratic holding pens through which the citizenry dutifully shuffle while armies of crack TSA operatives poke around in the panties of six-year-old girls.

Don't ever miss Mark Steyn in NRO - Click To Read More...

Cowboy Subsidies

How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! Last Tuesday, Harry Reid, the majority leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain’t big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner).

“The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 . . . eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Senator Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy-poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.” Mark Steyn - NRO - Click To Read More...

The Post-Western Middle East

Listening to lifelong regime toadies belatedly call for the seizure of Mubarak's assets or calibrate the precise moment when it's safe to demand the overthrow of the strongman you've happily served all your life, I'm reminded of the Hakim of Bahrain's visit to London for the Queen's Coronation in 1953. Late in the evening, at the end of the banquet, the diminutive Sheikh Salman came upon the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sitting at the bottom of a staircase, and attempted to ingratiate himself with a view to winning support for some land claim Bahrain had against Qatar. It had been a bibulous night and Sir Winston was in no mood to discuss the fine points of Arabian territorial disputes.

"Tell him," the PM instructed David Weir, Britain's Political Resident in Bahrain and "gentleman in attendance" to the non-English-speaking Hakim, "tell him that we never desert our friends." Pause. "Unless we have to." 

Mark Steyn at his very best. Click To Read More...

Mark Steyn When We Need Him

Iran is nuclearizing, Turkey is Islamizing, Egypt is ...what exactly? Well, we'll find out. But, given that only the army and/or the Muslim Brotherhood are sufficiently organized to govern the nation, the notion that we're witnessing the youthful buds of any meaningful democracy is deluded. So who'll come out on top? The generals or the Brothers? Given that the Brotherhood got played for suckers by the army in the revolution of '52, I doubt they'll be so foolish as to make the same mistake again - and the hopeychangey "democracy movement" provides the most useful cover in generations. Meanwhile, James Clapper, the worthless buffoon who serves as the hyperpower's Director of "Intelligence", goes before Congress to tell the world that the Muslim Brotherhood is a "secular" organization. Americans ought to take to the streets to demand Clapper vacate whatever presidential palace in DC he's holed up in. DSMW, Mark Steyn, Egypt and the Middle East

THE STATE OF THE UNION 2011

The "new Obama"? All I saw was a dull dissembler, inadequate to the charge history's given him. 2009 buzz word: "Stimulus." 2011 Clinton-era revival: "Investment". Either way, it means "massive government spending". On what? "Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 per cent of Americans access to high-speed rail"?

Good grief, how can even the hackiest of Big Government hacks read that line with a straight face? Or think it has any meaningful contribution to make to the crisis we face?   Mark Steyn