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Mark Steyn’s weekly column deals with Iran events.
The polite explanation for Barack Obama’s diffidence on Iran is that he doesn’t want to give the mullahs the excuse to say the Great Satan is meddling in Tehran’s affairs. So the president’s official position is that he’s modestly encouraged by the regime’s supposed interest in investigating some of the allegations of fraud. Also, he’s heartened to hear that O.J. is looking for the real killers. “You’ve seen in Iran,” explained President Obama, “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”
“Supreme Leader”? I thought that was official house style for Barack Obama at Newsweek and MSNBC. But no. It’s also the title held by Ayatollah Khamenei for the past couple of decades. If it sounds odd from the lips of an American president, that’s because none has ever been as deferential in observing the Islamic republic’s dictatorial protocol. Like President Obama’s deep, ostentatious bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, it signals a fresh start in our relations with the Muslim world, “mutually respectful” and unilaterally fawning.
And how did it go down? …
Marty Peretz at another way station in his growing understanding of the weakness of the kid president.
… To have crumbled precisely while the regime of the ayatollahs is facing a real crisis of confidence at home and something of a challenge to its legitimacy abroad is, well, just that: crumbling. It certainly does not testify to American resilience, even diplomatically. My instinct here is that the president and Mrs. Clinton are so eager to engage–engage even for its own sake–that they’ll do anything to please the other. This does not come as a result of analysis. It is, I am sorry to say, a predicated formula. …
Ed Morrissey notes the administration now thinks missile defense might be a good idea.
The Obama administration has decided that missile defense might come in handy after all. Following reports that Kim Jong-Il might launch a Taepodong-2 missile at Hawaii for a Fourth of July message to the White House, the Pentagon has ordered missile-defense systems bolstered around the 50th state. Those preparations include the deployment of a radar system that Obama strangely left in storage during the previous North Korean missile launch: …
… The last time Kim launched a T-2, in April of this year, the US had plenty of notice. However, Obama and the Pentagon neglected to pull its most sophisticated missile-defense radar out of Pearl Harbor in time to at least exercise it under real-world conditions. At that time, the White House didn’t want to “provoke” Kim by using our defense against the weapons with which Kim explicitly threatened us and our allies in April.
How did that strategy pay off? Ask the people of Hawaii when Kim lights the candle on the next T-2, and see if they would have preferred a test run for those missile-defense systems when we had the chance. We certainly now see why the US needs to keep funding those systems.
We get a preview of an upcoming Commentary piece by Joshua Muravchik on Obama’s abandonment of democracy.
Iranian exiles in the U.S. are receiving calls from back home asking why President Obama has “given Khamenei the green light” to crack down on the election protestors. To conspiracy-minded Middle Easterners, that is the obvious meaning of Obama’s equivocal response to the Iranian nation’s sudden and unexpected reach for freedom. How to explain that this interpretation is implausible? That the more likely reason for Obama’s behavior is that he is imprisoned in the ideology of loving your enemies and hating George W. Bush?
Whatever the reason, Obama’s failure may destroy his presidency. His betrayal of democracy and human rights through a series of pronouncements and small actions during his first months in office had been correctable until now. But the thousand daily decisions that usually make up policy are eclipsed by big-bang moments such as we are now witnessing. Failure to use the bully pulpit to give the Iranian people as much support as possible is morally reprehensible and a strategical blunder for which he will not be forgiven. …
The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.
This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. …
… Thus, the Cairo oration was a culmination of the themes of Obama’s early months. He had blamed America for the world financial crisis, global warming, Mexico’s drug wars, for “failure to appreciate Europe’s role in the world,” and in general for “all too often” trying “to dictate our terms.” He had reinforced all this by dispatching his Secretary of State on what the New York Times dubbed a “contrition tour” of Asia and Latin America. Now he added apologies for overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953, and for treating the Muslim countries as “proxies” in the Cold War “without regard to their own aspirations.”
Toward what end all these mea culpas? Perhaps it is a strategy designed, as he puts it, to “restor[e] America’s standing in the world.” Or perhaps he genuinely believes, as do many Muslims and Europeans, among others, that a great share of the world’s ills may be laid at the doorstep of the United States. Either way, he seems to hope that such self-criticism will open the way to talking through our frictions with Iran, Syria, China, Russia, Burma, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela, and the “moderate” side of the Taliban.
This strategy might be called peace through moral equivalence, and it finally makes fully intelligible Obama’s resistance to advocating human rights and democracy. For as long as those issues are highlighted, the cultural relativism that laced his Cairo speech and similar pronouncements in other places is revealed to be absurd. Straining to find a deficiency of religious freedom in America, Obama came up with the claim that “in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.” He was referring, apparently, to the fact that donations to foreign entities are not tax deductible. This has, of course, nothing to do with religious freedom but with assuring that tax deductions are given only to legitimate charities and not, say, to “violent extremists,” as Obama calls them (eschewing the word “terrorist”).
Consider this alleged peccadillo of America’s in comparison to the state of religious freedom in Egypt, where Christians may not build, renovate or repair a church without written authorization from the President of the country or a provincial governor (and where Jews no longer find it safe to reside). Or compare it to the practices at the previous stop on Obama’s itinerary, Saudi Arabia, where no church may stand, where Jews were for a time not allowed to set foot, and where even Muslims of non-Sunni varieties are constrained from building places of worship. …
Roger Simon has part one of a series on the NY Times.
… it took me many years … until about the time I started blogging… to realize what a pernicious influence The Times had had and how no single media outlet ought to have that much power in a democracy… something, by the way, that its editor Bill Keller admitted to me, when we were still friends, back before I fully put on my pajamas… Even now, with its business model failing to the extent that it is selling off its own landmark building while borrowing millions at a usurious rate from a Mexican billionaire, the Times still has an excessive influence, still moves the agenda more than any other media outlet, defining itself with a slogan so cloaked in bogus objectivity – “All the News That’s Fit to Print” – that it might make a Pravda editor blush.
Because, as we know, no one is objective. I’m not, you’re not and certainly not the New York Times. We’re all biased. I could say bias is as American as apple pie, but this is far from just an American trait. It’s a global one. Bias is as human as bread.
But this is nothing new.
What surprised me when I finally woke up to the extreme bias of the New York Times was that it had had a long history – which is what I am going to deal with in the next episodes of this show in my own, and undoubtedly biased, way. …
David Harsanyi starts the humor section with thoughts on teaching his daughters about sex. He has a serious point too.
… In his thought-provoking book “Fooled by Randomness” Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the case that we are constantly affixing deep meaning to meaningless statistics. Did you know, for instance, that as teen birth rates rise, there has also been a national trend of higher rates among women in their 20s, 30s and 40s? What does that tell us?
In this case, none of the numbers prove that kids are becoming more promiscuous or acting less safe than they did 5 or 10 years ago. There is also no proof that either abstinence or sex education programs have had a real effect on teen behavior.
Teen sexual behavior is driven by myriad social, demographic and economic factors (and, perhaps, most importantly: family.) As long we use the thin gruel of these kind of studies to hammer home some ideological point, parents aren’t being helped.
The best antidote is probably some hybrid of abstinence programs and others that teach about disease, pregnancy and birth control.
Certainly we shouldn’t dictate to parents (or, in my case, a wife) how they should teach their kids about sex. We should also avoid mass panic when it comes to teen sex.
Individual panic? Now, that’s a different story.
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