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Mark Steyn writes about the ominous restraint of free speech in two countries.
You’ve probably heard of Geert Wilders, the “far right” Dutch politician currently on trial in Amsterdam for offending Islam. But have you heard of Guy Earle? He’s a Canadian stand-up comedian currently on trial in Vancouver for offending lesbians. Two lesbians in particular. They came to a late-night comedy show he was hosting and got a table near the stage. They were drunk, and began disrupting the act, and so he did the old Don Rickles thing and put down the hecklers. So, naturally, the aggrieved party went to the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, and Mr. Earle has now been hauled into the dock for the “homophobic” nature of his putdowns.
Between them, these two trials symbolize where most of the Western world is headed, and very fast. Geert Wilders is an elected member of parliament and the leader of what is, since last month’s local elections, the second-biggest political party in The Hague and, according to recent national polls, tied for first place as the most popular party in the country. So, although he’s invariably labeled “far right” in European and U.S. news reports, how far he is depends on where you’re standing: When the “extreme right” “fringe” is more popular than the “mainstream,” maybe the mainstream isn’t that mainstream, and the center isn’t exactly where the European establishment would like it to be. …
Christopher Hitchens comments on the 1915 genocide committed by the Ottoman Turks against Armenians, and the continuing denials and repercussions.
…The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsored pogrom in Istanbul burned out most of the city’s remaining Armenians, along with thousands of Jews and Greeks and other infidels. The state-codified concept of mandatory Turkishness has been used to negate the rights and obliterate the language of the country’s enormous Kurdish population and to create an armed colony of settlers and occupiers on the soil of Cyprus, a democratic member of the European Union.
So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey’s unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament that should be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.
Bill McGurn of the WSJ defends the Pope and the Church against the attacks by the NY Times. Readers are reminded it was seven years ago the Times ran a campaign against the Augusta National Golf Club. It became such a NY Times obsession, the editor, since fired, spiked columns by Times’ sports writers that criticized their own paper. McGurn reveals the same unbalanced coverage in the case of the Church.
…It’s accurate to say Murphy was never convicted by a church tribunal. It’s also reasonable to argue (as I would) that Murphy should have been disciplined more. It is untrue, however, to suggest he was “never” disciplined. When asked if she knew of these letters, Ms. Goodstein did not directly answer, saying her focus was on what was “new,” i.e., “the attempts by those same bishops to have Father Murphy laicized.” …
…A few years later, when the CDF assumed authority over all abuse cases, Cardinal Ratzinger implemented changes that allowed for direct administrative action instead of trials that often took years. Roughly 60% of priests accused of sexual abuse were handled this way. The man who is now pope reopened cases that had been closed; did more than anyone to process cases and hold abusers accountable; and became the first pope to meet with victims. Isn’t the more reasonable interpretation of all these events that Cardinal Ratzinger’s experience with cases like Murphy’s helped lead him to promote reforms that gave the church more effective tools for handling priestly abuse?
That’s not to say that the press should be shy, even about Pope Benedict XVI’s decisions as archbishop and cardinal. The Murphy case raises hard questions: why it took the archbishops of Milwaukee nearly two decades to suspend Murphy from his ministry; why innocent people whose lives had been shattered by men they are supposed to view as icons of Christ found so little justice; how bishops should deal with an accused clergyman when criminal investigations are inconclusive… Oh, yes, maybe some context, and a bit of journalistic skepticism about the narrative of a plaintiffs attorney making millions off these cases. …
It is always a pleasure to read the products of writers who can turn outrage into well-reasoned and well-worded commentary. We have two such writers commenting on the fake hate-crimes scandal. First up is Peter Kirsanow, in the Corner.
As Mark Steyn noted this past weekend, the smearing of tea-party members by elected representatives and their media acolytes demonstrates the desperation and bankruptcy of many of today’s arguments in support of the liberal agenda — in this case, health-care reform. The claim that black Democratic congressmen courageously defied being spat upon and being called the n-word reflects a pathetic attempt to equate their support for the cynical, corrupt process by which the health-care bill was passed with the heroic efforts of the civil-rights movement.
Unable to marshal coherent arguments in favor of the bill’s merits, Obamacare supporters resort to a most reliable standby: accusing their opponents of racism. But time has passed these liberals by. The ubiquity of new media exposes the calumny as a fraud. Despite the presence of dozens of reporters, recorders, and cameras, no evidence has been produced in support of the accusations. …
And next is Abby Thernstrom. Read her full post to get her thoughts on the Tea Party.
Like Mark Steyn, I regard Rep. John Lewis as a true American hero. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, to face Alabama state and local troopers willing to use electric cattle prods, nightsticks, and tear gas to suppress a peaceful voting-rights march. Not for the first time, Lewis ended up bloodied, with scars that have never entirely faded.
Undoubtedly, the psychological scars have not faded either; those were the formative years for Lewis, and he has clearly not been able to move past them entirely.
And thus I partially forgive him — but only him — when he is quick to see racism in an angry white crowd. Not a single one of his Congressional Black Caucus colleagues has the same excuse, and it was disgraceful (needless to say) for Nancy Pelosi to equate that brutal struggle to make good on basic constitutional rights with the sordid effort to pass a mess of a health-care law whose moral force did not even remotely resemble that of the great mid-1960s civil rights acts. …
Ward Connerly also comments on various aspects of the scandal.
…If I have learned one thing from life, it is that race is the engine that drives the political Left. When all else fails, that segment of America goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives. In the courtrooms, on college campuses, and, most especially, in our politics, race is a central theme. Where it does not naturally rise to the surface, there are those who will manufacture and amplify it. …
…In a video that has been played repeatedly showing CBC members as they walked past the tea partiers, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is seen using his telephone to tape the event. If he had any evidence to corroborate the racial claims, why hasn’t he come forward with his phone by now to settle this matter? I believe we all know the answer. …
More on the subject in The Corner. This from Hans A von Spakovsky.
For another good example of how civil rights “icons” like John Lewis use racial scare-tactics for political purposes, listen to this audio recording sent to me by a friend in Atlanta in reaction to Mark Steyn’s note in The Corner. This political ad was run in a county commission race in Fulton County, Georgia in 2006 the day before the election.
Thomas Sowell criticizes race-baiting politicians and reminds us where this can end.
… The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don’t need to repeat in the United States of America.
Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country– now called Sri Lanka– that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.
The world has been shocked by the mass slaughters of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda but, half a century ago, there had been no such systematic slaughters there. Political demagoguery whipped up ethnic polarization, among people who had co-existed, who spoke the same language and had even intermarried.
We know– or should know– what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A “race card” is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
In the LA Times, David Crane discusses the Government Employees’ Republic of California, and their pension debt disaster.
The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported. …
…What can we do about this? For the promises already made, nothing. They are contractual, and because that $500 billion of debt must be paid, retirement costs will rise dramatically no matter what we do. But we can reduce the sizes of promises made to new employees and require full and truthful disclosure so that pension debt can never again be hidden.
Last summer Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed exactly that. Since then? Silence. State legislators are afraid even to utter the words “pension reform” for fear of alienating what has become — since passage of the Dills Act in 1978, which endowed state public employees with collective bargaining rights on top of their civil service protections — the single most politically influential constituency in our state: government employees.
Because legislators are unwilling to raise issues that might offend that constituency, they have effectively turned the peroration of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on its head: Instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have become a government of its employees, by its employees and for its employees. …
In Power Line, Scott Johnson discusses some kerfuffle regarding California’s last-place credit rating.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the sale was the nation’s largest ever long-term general-obligation deal, and the third-largest tax-exempt offering in U.S. history. The Journal cited the office of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer for that proposition, while noting that California’s credit rating is the lowest among 50 states. I’m pretty sure the latter observation did not derive from Lockyer. …
…The Financial Times asks where Borat is when you really need him: “Maybe Bill Lockyer ‘not make benefit glorious state California’? Taking a page out of Greece’s playbook, the peeved treasurer of America’s largest state fired off letters this week to the chiefs of Goldman Sachs and other banks questioning their marketing of credit default swaps on California’s debt.”
Addressing the gist of Lockyer’s complaint, the FT rises to the defense of Kazakhstan’s financial standing compared to that of California: “The real Kazakhstan, although not problem-free, looks fairly solid compared to California and many other states – a fact that should spook investors in America’s $2,800bn municipal bond market.” A letter from Lockyer to the FT is undoubtedly in the mail. …
In the WSJ, John Pancake reports on an interesting piece of architecture in Ukraine. Pickerhead added photos so you can see for yourself.
Eastern Europe is not awash in whimsical extravagance.
Which is why Vladislav Gorodetsky’s House of Chimeras in Kiev is so wonderful. Its skin bulges with frogs, elephants, catfish, stags, lizards, rhinos. A snake hangs down one corner like a scaly drain pipe. Mermaids straddle thrashing fish on the roof. It couldn’t be more over the top. …
…When I look at the House of Chimeras, I think about the idea of inequality and about Gorodetsky. Here was a man committed to the idea that some people were going to live a lot better than other people, or so it seems to me. It’s such a clear statement that I sometimes wonder how his building survived. …
The Economist has an article about the benefits of straw houses.
…It is, for one thing, a great insulator. That keeps down the heating bills in houses made from it. It is also a waste product that would otherwise be burned, and is therefore cheap. And—very much to the point in a place like California—it is earthquake-resistant. A year ago, a test conducted at the University of Nevada’s large-scale structures laboratory showed that straw-bale constructions could withstand twice the amount of ground motion recorded in the Northridge earthquake that hit Los Angeles in 1994. Mr Brush’s ranch is a mere 18km (11 miles) from the San Andreas Fault. …
… But straw buildings of this sort might do well in seismically active places that are less wealthy. Spurred by the earthquake that devastated Pakistan in 2005, Darcey Donovan, a structural engineer from Truckee, California, set up a not-for-profit straw-bale-construction operation that has since built 17 houses there. …