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Mark Steyn thinks we talk too much.
… So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a “fascist.” then anyone can fight fascism. It’s no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you’re a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they’re a long way away, and it’s all a bit complicated and foreign, and let’s not “confuse the very dire human rights situation” in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending “academic freedom” in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of “A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here].” Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia’s Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television. …
Claudia Rosett with a couple of posts on the Ahmadeninejad visit.
The most important news this week is breaking not at the UN, but on the streets of Rangoon, where Burmese monks have been braving armed security forces to protest years of brutal, military rule — Richard Fernandez of Pajamas Media has a roundup here.
If the UN were a healthy institution, some of those monks would be speaking to us this week from the General Assembly stage.
Instead, courtesy of his hosts, the UN General Assembly, we have had Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad traipsing around New York, in what has been for the past few days the 24/7 Ahmadinejad Top Hits Propaganda Parade. He has had time to speak at the National Press Club, Columbia University, the UN General Assembly, attend a reception, hold a UN press conference, appear on the Charlie Rose show, and of course taped a curtain-raiser with CBS’s 60 Minutes from Tehran which aired Sunday as he was arriving in New York. …
John Fund comments on the last Dem debate.
The Captain with the lowdown on the O’Reilly smear.
… Just like Bush’s analogy about Nelson Mandela and the Rush Limbaugh controversy, this is another effort to discredit someone by cherry-picking the transcript and stripping something of all context. I don’t even care for O’Reilly’s show. I never watch it unless Michelle Malkin appears on it. I don’t like shoutfests on TV and haven’t gone out of my way to watch them in quite some time. That, however, doesn’t mean that O’Reilly should be pilloried for supposedly saying something almost completely opposite of what he actually said. …
Roger L. Simon posts on some of the Rather detritus.
Mark Steyn Corner posts on Katie Couric.
Power Line posts on the Columbia visit, Duke, and FISA problems.
Tech Central says Gore keeps dodging debates.
As over 150 heads of state and government gather at UN headquarters in New York to discuss climate change, former Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of the theory of the human-induced, catastrophic global warming, continues to refuse repeated challenges to debate the issue.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who addressed the General Assembly on climate change September 24, is but the latest global warming skeptic to receive the cold shoulder from Gore. In ads appearing in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Times, Klaus has called on Gore to face him in a one-on-one debate on the proposition: “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis.” Earlier in the year, similar challenges to Gore were issued by Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Lord Monckton of Brenchley, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. All calls on the former vice president to face his critics have fallen on deaf ears. …
Contentions post on the Dem debate.
Peter Wehner posts on Chris Matthews.
… Chris Matthews, ever voluble and confused on the facts, is critical of the President for not being sufficiently multilateral and (presumably) not solicitous enough of regimes like Syria and China—yet he appears to be morally indifferent to a great struggle for liberty that is unfolding before our eyes. All of which is a reminder why Chris Matthews is a perfect choice to host a program on MSNBC.
Todd Zywicki in Volokh has a short review of John Lott’s Freedomnomics.
I just finished reading John Lott’s marvelous and entertaining book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t. It is very well-written and it really reminds you of what an extraordinarily creative and interesting thinker Lott is. Much of the book is a translation of his many papers in different areas into prose and concepts accessible to general readers. …
American Thinker with more ethanol foolishness.