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Mark Steyn on the post-American America.
According to an Earth Day survey, one-third of schoolchildren between the ages of 6 and 11 think the Earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the Earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club and the eco-propagandists of the public education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.
Call me crazy, but I’ll bet that in 15-20 years the planet will still be here, along with most of the “environment” – your flora and fauna, your polar bears and three-toed tree sloths and whatnot. But geopolitically we’re in for a hell of a ride, and the world we end up with is unlikely to be as congenial as most Americans have gotten used to. …
Mark Steyn Corner posts on confused HomeSec and senile McCain.
Andrew McCarthy writes on BO’s interrogation mess.
… At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission–style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here.) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind.
The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry.
But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the same subject.
… There are two explanations for what happened. One is that the president, without teleprompter and script, messed up — big time — when he blathered on at the press conference with the King of Jordan about the potential for show trials. He was trying to sound sophisticated or thoughtful and instead unleashed the furies. It was a blunder of rather startling proportions.
The other theory is that he changed his mind twice. After shutting the door on Monday he shifted after his CIA visit, trying to mollify the netroot base. He sounded quite sympathetic to the idea of investigations and prosecutions. But when it began to spin out of control he reversed course again and said we’ve had enough. He, in this scenario, is frightfully indecisive and guided by purely political considerations.
We are unlikely to know which it is, but neither paints an impressive picture of our president. …
Krauthammer’s take on the “truth commission.”
Before you can decide whether to have a prosecutor or a commission, you have to know who the players are. The Democrats want to make this a war on the Bush administration.
But there is one inconvenient fact, and it’s stated by none other than Dennis Blair, who’s the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, not under Bush. And he said in writing that the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities to the executive and to members of congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.
Now, he’s a man who’s completely disinterested in this. He does not have a stake in the fight, and that’s what he says. …
Perhaps the kid president can learn how stupid he is by reading Daniel Henninger.
… Hugo Chávez is a tin-pot dictator who has debauched Venezuela’s democracy. Normally in such circumstances, an American president would show reserve. The weirdly ebullient Mr. Obama did not, and that image was the photo seen ’round the world.
In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”
He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”
The hopeful way to view the Obama administration’s openings to Chávez, the Castros, Iran and the others would be: This had better work. Because if it doesn’t, a lot of people who’ve spent years working in opposition to these regimes — in hiding or in prison in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, Burma, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan — are going to get hammered. …
David Harsanyi comments on the “tortuous debate.”
… If your contention is that the outcome of torture is immaterial — whether it’s one life saved or a thousand lives — you’ve taken a principled stand. I’ve yet to hear a policymaker who opposes “torture” be honest and take accountability for the potential consequences of abandoning harsh interrogation techniques.
I put the word torture in quotation marks only to acknowledge that I — and many of you, I’m sure — do not know exactly how to define it. Most laws offer a thoroughly ambiguous definition, which can cover nearly any unpleasant interrogation.
Any parent can tell you that sleep deprivation is mental torture. Does it rise to the level of a crime? Waterboarding? OK, how about pushing someone against a wall? Scaring a grizzled terrorist with a caterpillar? Such techniques inflict “stress and duress,” for sure, but do they “shock the conscience” (one definition offered for torture)?
When President Obama decided to release the “torture memos,” the door was open for a mere debate. When he opened the door for prosecution of lawyers who opined on what constitutes torture — despite encouraging everyone not to spend “time and energy laying blame for the past” — we face something far more important. …
Marty Peretz locates Edward Jay Epstein’s rundown of Steve Rattner’s problems.
… On March 29th 2009, Steven Rattner, President Obama’s new car czar, met with Rick Wagoner, the chairman of General Motors, in Rattner’s new office in the Treasury Department, and in one of the most dramatic confrontations of the Obama administration in its first 100 days told him he would have to resign because he had lost the confidence of the Obama Administration. Wagoner, a 30-year veteran of GM, fell on his sword. Now, less than a month after disposing of Wagoner, Rattner may confront a similar decision about his own tenure. …
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