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Mark Steyn comments on how Obama’s ideology distorts reality, this time in his refusal to understand what led to the death of Daniel Pearl.
…”Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”
Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.
Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.
Even if Americans don’t get the message, the rest of the world does. This week’s pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity. …
Marty Peretz risks his son’s wrath by citing the above by Mark Steyn.
… Apparently, the president doesn’t believe that this killing had anything to do with Pearl being a Jew … and an American besides. What he also doesn’t seem to believe is that Pearl was a target—like thousands of other targets, named and nameless—of the Islamic jihad.
It is appalling to have to come to grips with the raw facts of Obama’s ignorance. Or with his feigning of ignorance. Disguising the enemy is… well, you finish the sentence.
I am always a bit wary when I cite Mark Steyn. Not because I don’t like his writing, which, within measure, I do. But because my son gives me the cold shoulder for a few days after I cite him. So, here, Jesse, I court your coolness. I wouldn’t have had to do it if any liberal columnist had noticed this appalling performance by the president of the United States. …
Rick Richman further analyzes Obama’s inane thoughts.
…Pearl was beheaded by the architect of 9/11, on video, immediately after he pronounced himself an American Jew. No one watching it was reminded of how valuable a free press is; nor did it capture anyone’s imagination, other than that of the jihadists who downloaded it to congratulate themselves, re-energize their efforts, and recruit others. It came five months after jihadists flew two aircraft into the World Trade Center, murdering 3,000 people, and two months before a jihadist murdered another 30 people (the demographic equivalent of 1,350 people in a country the size of Israel) during a Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya. These were not moments reminding us of the importance of tall buildings and nice hotels. …
David P. Goldman comments on global affairs.
Iran openly supports terrorists–Hamas in Gaza, Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and sundry suicide squads in Iraq–and is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. North Korea demonstrated what a terrorist state can do with nuclear weapons, namely, whatever it wants. How will the world respond to North Korea’s unprovoked sinking of a South Korean naval vessel? Not at all. What will Iran do once it has nuclear weapons? Use your imagination. …
Jennifer Rubin reviews the Democrats’ troubles with Alexi Giannoulis, and ends on a comment to Republicans.
…Republicans should take note for 2010 and 2012. The reason the Democrats are in disarray and the race is competitive is not merely because the Democratic nominee has a load of problems; it is because the Republicans were wise enough to select a top-notch candidate well-suited to the state. (Politico notes: “Kirk already is popular in the politically competitive Chicago suburbs he represents and has a strong relationship with the state’s pro-Israel voters and donors.”) It’s really not enough in a deep Blue State to luck into a flawed Democratic candidate. For Republicans to win, they need smart candidates well-attuned to the electorate. Otherwise, golden opportunities will slip through their fingers.
Jennifer Rubin also discusses the WSJ editorial criticizing Rand Paul.
The Wall Street Journal editors aptly makes this point:
‘[Rand Paul] has now renounced the doubts he expressed last week about some parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and has declared the matter closed. But before we move on, it’s important to understand why Mr. Paul was wrong even on his own libertarian terms.
The federal laws of that era were necessary and legal interventions to remedy the unconstitutional infringement on individual rights by state and local governments. On Thursday Mr. Paul finally acknowledged this point when he told CNN, “I think there was an overriding problem in the South so big that it did require federal intervention.”
As the editors note, Paul’s difficulty in supporting civil rights legislation not only casts doubt on the Tea Party supporters who have strived to repudiate media claims that they are racists, but it has “let them change the campaign subject from the Obama Administration’s willy-nilly expansion of the corporate state.” …’
Christopher Booker, in the Telegraph, UK, comments on the outcome of the European intelligentsia’s grand plan for the Euro. About which you may remember, Milton Friedman said would not survive its first crisis.
…When the 10-year-long construction of the euro began in the 1990s, all these warnings were ignored. The cart was put before the horse. So fixated were the Eurocrats on the need to get their grand project in place that the “rules” were treated as mere window dressing. The member states were locked together willy-nilly in a one-size-fits-all system, with a single low interest rate, enabling countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece to live on a seemingly limitless sea of borrowed money. And now, entirely predictably, judgment day has come.
If the euro does disintegrate, as Mrs Merkel warns, the consequences would be incalculable. Replacing all the national currencies was a gargantuan task, by far the most ambitious ever attempted in the name of European integration, and there is no Plan B. Without a currency, trade would collapse – leaving Britain, dependent on Europe for 50 per cent of its trade, just as seriously affected as everyone else. A system failure on this scale would make the 1930s pale into insignificance. …
Matt Ridley explains the new theory in human evolution: collective intelligence; kind of like “spontaneous order” brought to us by the Austrian School of economics.
Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once “progress” started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?
The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. …
… But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.
In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book “The Nature of Technology,” nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. …
…Dense populations don’t produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.
Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty. …
Mark Steyn has an unbelievable post from Kate McMillan on two items that show just how haywire the government has gone. First, a customs official says maybe the Feds will ignore referrals of illegals from Arizona, but on the other hand …
…At the Morses Line Port of Entry, on the U.S.-Canada border, the border station is located smack-dab in the middle of a Vermont dairy farm.
On average, 2 1/2 cars pass through an hour. The pace is so slow that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who man it have been known to fill out their days by driving golf balls in an adjoining meadow, shooting skeet or washing their cars. …
The government, which got $420 million from the federal bailout to modernize land ports like this, wants to spend about $7 million to build an expanded station. …
…Owners of the Rainville dairy farm were told last week that if they won’t sell the hayfield for $39,500, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will use eminent domain to seize it. …