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The Brit hostage dénouement draws Mark’s ire.
Watching Tottenham Hotspur fans taking on the Spanish constabulary at a European soccer match the other night, I found myself idly speculating on what might have happened had those Iranian kidnappers made the mistake of seizing 15 hard-boiled football yobs who hadn’t got the Blair memo about not escalating the situation. …
… Europeans and more and more Americans believe they can live in a world with all the benefits of global prosperity and none of the messy obligations necessary to maintain it. And so they cruise around war zones like floating NGOs. Iran called their bluff, and televised it to the world. In the end, every great power is as great as its credibility, and the only consolation after these last two weeks is that Britain doesn’t have much more left to lose.
Charles Krauthammer seconds that emotion.
Claudia Rosett writes on the Pelosi visit.
This is not just nutty politics; it is dangerous. For Pelosi, this may count as interaction. But for Assad’s regime in Syria, this amounts to chumps on pilgrimage. Damascus is infested by a dynastic tyranny in which “dialogue” serves chiefly as cover for duplicity and terror. These traits are not simply regrettable habits that Assad might be charmed out of. They are big business and prime instruments of power.
An example of how visits like Pelosi’s can harm us is in David Brooks’ column.
Power Line has a great post on how media bias is brought to bear on an offending target. This times it’s a renowned hurricane forecaster who takes exception to many of Al Gore’s ideas.
Little bit of the same from Contentions.
And Jim Taranto slays the NY Times and its hypocritical reactions to two recess appointments. One by Clinton and one by Bush. Can you guess which one the Times liked?
Fred Thompson posts at Redstate. Captain with details.
George Will is not impressed.
Back then (1994), Thompson believed, implausibly, that voters are “deeply concerned” about campaign finance reform. Today, many likely voters in Republican primaries are deeply concerned about what Thompson and others have done to free speech in the name of “reform,” as John McCain is unhappily learning.
Corner post on Will’s complaint.
Dick Morris does a tour of dem fundraising.
Mona Charen reviews Thomas Sowell’s autobiography.
This may be the most unlikely tale of a high-school dropout you will ever read—and the most satisfying. Thomas Sowell (he went back to school after testing the market’s receptivity to a skill-free youth of 16) is one of those rare people who is so organized that he kept copies of all of his letters even before the days of e-mail and computers. We are the richer for it. In his new book, A Man of Letters, Sowell has mined his files to offer us keen insights into our nation’s recent history and into the soul of an extraordinary man.
Like most young intellectuals of his generation, Sowell began his adult life as a leftist. But he was prematurely wise. By 1962 he was already showing impatience with the twaddle peddled by left-wing admirers of third-world despots. Responding to an article about Cuba and Ghana, Sowell wrote, “Perhaps there can legitimately be double standards of morality . . . but there can never be double standards of truth. If, for example, we are justified in saying that tyranny in Ghana is serving a noble purpose, we are still not justified in saying that it is not tyranny.†…
Right Coast posts on a Michael Crichton interview. … In response to the question, “What is the most serious threat facing our civilisation?,” he writes:
Loss of classical liberal values in those western societies that embraced them.
England was the first modern state, the first superpower, the first nation to deal with moral issues around the world, and the first nation to install the benefits of what we might now loosely term a liberal society. I mean that in the 19th century sense of liberalism. That notion of liberalism was also present in America, but made it to the Continent only in a pale and limited form. It is a wonderful social conception that must be vigilantly guarded. It is not shared by other nations in the world. Nor is it shared by many citizens in English-speaking countries. Peculiarly, many of our most educated citizens are least sympathetic to classical liberal ideals. …We know about carbon offsets. A writer at Wired comes up with new types of offsets. Like say, jerk offsets. Fork over the bills and we’ll go out and perform random acts of … kindness.