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Mark Steyn gives us an excellent article on political correctness, Islamist-style. One of the anecdotes he relates involves the Yale University Press publishing a book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons, without the cartoons.
…The official explanation was the threat of violence. Not any actual violence, and, as it turns out, not even any actual threats. After Roger Kimball poked around a bit, it emerged that the decision to ban both the Danes and Doré was driven not by editors or publishers at YUP but by the very biggest bigwigs of the university itself. The experts were contacted by “the Office of the President,” no less. On its face, the decision to gut its own reputation for editorial and scholarly integrity seems to owe less to unspecified fears of jihadist nuts blowing up a university bookstore than to a cooler calculation of its strategic interests, including (so Mr. Kimball suggests) continued access to wealthy Muslim benefactors.
Yale has thus provided us with a perfect snapshot of where we’re headed. When I fought back against attempts by the Canadian Islamic Congress to get my writing criminalized north of the border, various American readers wrote to say: “Why bother? Who cares about Canada? We’ve got the First Amendment, and nobody’s going to ban you here.” That’s not how the world works, no matter the fond isolationist illusions of Ron Paul types. Restive European Muslims and unlimited Saudi money can put pressure on American publishers, institutions, and media that will eventually render the First Amendment moot. In Denmark and other countries, craven accommodationists can at least plead that they have incendiary majority-Muslim suburbs with 50 percent youth unemployment. That’s not true of New Haven, where the honchos seem to be using fear of violence as a cover for the appetites of their endowment. In other words, they’re merely posing as contemptible Euroweenies. Which, when you think about it, is even more contemptible.
In 2006, during the original cartoon jihad, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto spelled it out: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”
It sounded vaguely ridiculous at the time. And yet, without the demographic pressures of Europe, a scholarly publisher in Connecticut now “obeys Islamic law.” Who’s next?
Turns out Fareed Zakaria recommended the cartoons be censored. What was he thinking? Did he ever hear of a free press?
Claudia Rosett posts on the release of the Lockerbie terrorist.
…If you’d like to learn more about the freed terrorist, al-Megrahi, and why Gaddafi might be so pleased to have him back, there’s an illuminating article on Forbes.com, written just before al-Megrahi’s release: “Don’t Let The Lockerbie Bomber Go Free.”
The author, Mohamed Eljahmi, had an older brother, Fathi Eljahmi, who was Libya’s most prominent democratic dissident. I say “was,” because after five solid years of imprisonment by Gaddafi, Fathi Eljahmi died this past April. There was no compassion shown by Gaddafi of any kind. Isolated much of the time, held in filthy conditions, incarcerated for a long stretch in a Libyan “psychiatric” facility, Fathi Eljhami was deprived of adequate medical care, and blocked from any direct communication with the outside world. He deserved a hero’s salute from both the democratic world and his fellow Libyans, but Gaddafi saw to it that from the day Eljahmi was arrested in 2004 until the day he died in April, 2009, he was never seen or heard in public again. …
Thomas Sowell explains that the price of Hope and Change is Freedom.
…The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.
What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries — the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.
This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet.
It is the America that Reverend Jeremiah Wright denounced in his sermons during the 20 years when Barack Obama was a parishioner, before political expediency required Obama to withdraw and distance himself.
The thing most associated with America — freedom — is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama’s vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.
He may not even think of it in those terms. He may think of it in terms of promoting “social justice” or making better decisions than ordinary people are capable of making for themselves, whether about medical care or housing or many other things. Throughout history, egalitarians have been among the most arrogant people. …
If you can get through the nuttiness and affectations of Peggy Noonan, once and a while a great column pops up.
Looking back, this must have been the White House health-care strategy:
Health care as a subject is extraordinarily sticky, messy and confusing. It’s inherently complicated, and it’s personal. There are land mines all over the place. Don’t make the mistake the Clintons made and create a plan that gets picked apart, shot down, and injures the standing of the president. Instead, push it off on Congress. Let them come up with a dozen plans. It will keep them busy. It will convince them yet again of their importance and autonomy. It will allow them to vent, and perhaps even exhaust, their animal spirits. Various items and elements within each bill will get picked off by the public. Fine, that’s to be expected. The bills may in fact yield a target-rich environment. Fine again. Maybe health care’s foes will get lost in the din and run out of ammo. Maybe they’ll exhaust their animal spirits, too.
Summer will pass, the fight confined to the public versus Congress. And at the end, in the fall, the beauty part: The president swoops in and saves the day, forcing together an ultimate and more moderate plan that doesn’t contain the more controversial elements but does constitute a successful first step toward universal health care. …
Sunday Morning Rasmussen reported Obama’s popularity hit a new low.
David Limbaugh presents a convincing explanation for Obama’s declining poll numbers.
…Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that his mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn’t think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough.
Since assuming office, Obama has been on a mission to fundamentally alter the social compact between the government and a once powerfully sovereign people.
The litany of his shocks to the system is too voluminous to detail in full, but just consider his calculated takeover of GM, his fraudulently marketed trillion-dollar spending schemes, his cap-and-trade boondoggle, his unilateral declaration of an end to the war on terror, his policy to Mirandize terrorists on the battlefield, his cavorting with terrorist dictators, his soft betrayal of Israel, his ceaseless foreign-soil apologies for America, and his crusade to subsume the health care industry.
These are not tweaks to a glorious constitutional republic, but a frantic effort to undo this republic brick by brick. And the American people have finally gotten wise to what’s going on and are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. …
David Warren discusses global warming junk science, and then turns his attention to a book about some real science.
…This has been brought home to me with force, by a magnificent little book, recently published by the Friends of Algonquin Park, and just fallen into my hands. It is the first of their new field guide series, on The Dragonflies and Damselflies of Algonquin Provincial Park and the Surrounding Area — an area extending to Ottawa. The reader who wishes to fill his heart with hope, joy, and beauty, will run out immediately and buy this book, whose authors are Colin D. Jones, Andrea Kingsley, Peter Burke, and Matt Holder.
It was recommended to me, owing to my own love for the Odonates, and all pond life, by a very devout and pious Darwinist of my acquaintance, who has fortunately never read my columns, and who may never speak to me again when he finds that I harbour “designist” heresies.
Indeed, a dragonfly is a wonder of pure brilliant mechanical design — this little roving eye of nature, that first appears, fully-formed with incredible precision, in the fossil records for more than 300 million years ago. And there is little as unforgettable as to watch a dragonfly emerge from its dead larva skin, and crawl tenuously out on a log — pale, utterly feeble, and crinkled. And then, before your eyes in the space of minutes, its abdomen extends, its wings fill out, its colouring begins to appear, and a glorious creature takes its first flight, towards the woods. It is a miracle that will help you contemplate the mysteries of Creation and Resurrection.
This Algonquin field guide is something of which Canadians may boast: I have never seen a better insect field guide, nor one so beautifully and intelligently put together. The existence of the growing market it serves is the more inspiring: for in the background of so much ideological, joke science (or “scientism”), real science is reviving, closely allied with art. It is the science of the field, of close and honest observation, of inferences that can be tested and checked. And like all true science, it teaches reverence.
Andy McCarthy posts on Cash for Clunkers.
Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money — between $3500 and $4500. How hard is that?
Pretty hard, apparently. The Washington Times reports this morning that this simple, basic Big Gummint program has spun totally out of control: it was clearly not thought through (even a little), it was under-budgeted by 2 or 3 hundred percent (and counting), and it was woefully under-resourced — such that staff have to be hired from the outside or pulled away from other government functions (like running air-traffic control) in order to clear the back-log. Clearing the back-log, by the way, is a 24/7 operation that’s also requiring additional budgeting for overtime pay and a training program. …
…All this from the people who, Mark Steyn reminds us this morning, tell you that the way to control healthcare costs is to set up a huge new entitlement program (even as the ones they’ve already set up sink deeper into a multi-trillion dollar sea of unfunded liabilities). Why do we trust them to do anything other than the very few things for which you actually need a government? …
Volokh Conspiracy linked to a coup de grace delivered to a clunker. In this case, a Corvette.
WSJ Editors write on the clunker program.