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Mark Steyn thinks our reaction to North Korea’s test was underdone.
… If you’re American, it’s natural to assume that the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they’re not. If you’re starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility. The rest of the world doesn’t observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang’s actions were “a matter of …” Drumroll, please! “…grave concern,” declared the president. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will – wait for it – “not find international acceptance.” As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ‘supercilious and jejune.’”
The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime – via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. – to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket case. This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.
Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but is demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart. …
David Harsanyi says don’t give Sotomayor a free ride.
You know what would be a nice change of pace? A nominee for public office whose compelling life story didn’t remind me of my pitiably self-indulgent life.
Fortunately, while overachievers can induce some self-loathing, when it comes to public service, spectacular life stories are irrelevant.
Adversity does not grant anyone superhuman intellect or a Solomon-like temperament. And gripping tales of perseverance should not make one impenetrable to criticism.
Much has been made of political repercussions for Republicans if they dare target Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina who grew up in a deprived neighborhood in the South Bronx. New York’s hyper-yammering senator, Chuck Schumer, claims that the Republican Party would do so at its “own peril” — in part alluding, no doubt, to blowback from the Hispanic community.
If Republicans take this kind of bigoted advice, they will have done the country a great disservice. …
Jay Nordlinger with interesting background on the Soto story by reminding us of the Dems filibustering of Miguel Estrada.
In recent days, we’ve been hearing a lot about a “wonderful American story” — Sonia Sotomayor’s. Can’t oppose that, can you — that wonderful American story? Oh yes you can, if you’re the Democratic party. They certainly did it in the case of Miguel Estrada.
He came from Honduras, and was no Spanish aristocrat, to put it mildly. Arrived in America at 17 speaking barely any English. Graduated with honors from Columbia and Harvard: Law Review, Supreme Court clerkship, blah, blah, blah. Distinguished record in government service — an American success story, a Movie of the Week, a slam dunk. …
Also from the Corner, Andrew McCarthy tells us how it was Soto was appointed by Bush 41. No, it was not another stupid Souterlike move.
It’s at the top of the Left’s talking-points that Judge Sotomayor was first put on the bench by a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, in 1991. That’s pretty funny when you think about it — the Bush seal of approval is not usually thought an imprimatur by the Left, and it wouldn’t likely be much comfort to conservatives given that Sotomayor’s district court nomination came around the same time GHWB put Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. But there is even less to it than meets the eye. …
Perhaps Sotamayor’s biggest weakness is her record on the second amendment right to bear arms. David Kopel explains in Volokh.
… the Sotomayor per curiam opinion treats any Second Amendment claim as not involving “a fundamental right.”
The Maloney opinion is, on this issue, entirely consistent with Judge Sotomayor’s opinion in a 2004 case: “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.” United States v. Sanchez-Villar, 99 Fed.Appx. 256, 2004 WL 962938 (2d. Cir. 2004)(Summary Order of Judges Sack, Sotomayor & Kaplan), judgement vacated, Sanchez-Villar v. United States, 544 U.S. 1029 (2005)(for further consideration in light of the 2005 Booker decision on sentencing).
Judge Sotomayor’s record suggests hostility, rather than empathy, for the tens of millions of Americans who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.
Charles Krauthammer comments.
… So it’s extremely odd that she would reach all the way back to 1886 and say that a gun case is excluded because it is under state jurisdiction. It would imply to me that she was reaching as a way to undermine gun rights. And it would also imply that she might be inclined to overturn Heller or restrict it in the future.
Corner post on the fiscal problems in England and here.
Last week, Standard and Poor’s warned the British government that it could lose its triple-A rating for sovereign debt if large budget deficits persist in coming years, as currently projected. S&P noted that the U.K. net government debt burden is expected to reach 100 percent of the country’s annual economic output soon — and stay there indefinitely.
Yesterday, John Taylor of Stanford and the Hoover Institution noted in a piece in the Financial Times that there’s every reason to expect the U.S. will soon find itself in the same boat as the British. …
In response, Larry Kudlow says the VAT is out of the bag.
Everyone should closely read today’s Washington Post story on the value-added tax, or VAT. The cat is now out of the bag. For months I have argued that Team Obama and the Democratic Congress were going to be forced to consider a VAT in order to pay for their extravagant spending. Now borrowing almost 50 cents on every new dollar spent, the Democrats will at some point begin to deal with the politics of deficit reduction as a way of countering Republican criticisms about deficit expansion. …
There has been web noise that the administration is targeting GOP car dealers. Jonah Goldberg dismisses the idea.
… Of the 789 Chrysler dealers who were notified that their contracts will not be renewed, 38 are minority owned…
At the end of April, there were 154 minority dealers in Chrysler’s 3,181 total U.S. dealer body network….
You’ll see that 4.8% of the auto dealerships closed were minority owned.
Total percentage of all Chrysler dealerships that are minority owned? 4.8%
Speaking of autos, P.J. O’Rourke mourns the loss ……
The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War. Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass. …
Claudia Rosett has a good take on the Cheerios flap.
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