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Mark Steyn reviews Norman Podhoretz’s new book for The New Criterion. This is long, but worthwhile.
… But the people who got World War III wrong (That would be the Cold War) *Pickerhead (and, in its darkest hours, potentially fatally wrong) were given a pass: they got to skate. Moral equivalists, looking-at-the-world-through-Red-colored-glasses sentimentalists, hardcore anti-Americans, all were as entrenched as ever in the institutions of the West when the new struggle began—and with an even freer hand to get it wrong one mo’ time. In a particularly sharp chapter, “From World War III to World War IV,†Podhoretz traces the links between the two: the forces of defeatism in the Cold War’s bleakest decade—the Seventies—that also emboldened new enemies. He quotes Jimmy Carter’s mockery of the old assumptions, the “belief that Soviet expansionism was almost inevitable and that it must be contained. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.â€
No fear of that anymore. And so the Shah fell to the Ayatollah Khomeini. “Just how blind the Carter administration was to this portentous development,†writes Podhoretz, “can be gauged by the fact that Andrew Young, Carter’s own ambassador to the UN, hailed the radical Islamist despot now ruling Iran as a saint and a great believer in human rights.â€
The seizure of the U.S. Embassy disabused even Carter of Carterian delusions. He loosed Zbigniew Brzezinski to deal with the Soviets in Afghanistan. In post-Watergate post-Vietnam Washington, the “covert mission†barely existed, so Zbig outsourced the Afghan operation to Pakistan’s ISI and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki, and they in turn signed up Osama bin Laden and other excitable types. Thirty years on, the idealist buffoon Carter and the wily “realist†Brzezinski are not laughingstocks but prominent and reasonably respected and indeed bestselling analysts of our present woes.
Carter got it exactly wrong. It was precisely because we were not “confident of our own future†that we were so tentative in response to provocations. There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the east, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation at home only accelerated. …
NY Observer comments on the deflating Harry Reid.
Harry Reid left Washington last month a frustrated but optimistic man. He is returning, it seems, a humbled one—at least as far as the Iraq debate goes.
It was at the end of July that just about every Republican in the Senate—plus Joe Lieberman—stood together to block a vote on a troop withdrawal plan, dealing a blow to Mr. Reid and his antiwar allies, who had championed the proposal. But Mr. Reid was also confident that the August Congressional recess would change the math, with irate constituents giving the holdout Republicans a piece of their mind about their unwillingness to end the war.
But recess is almost over now, and with the Senate reconvening on Sept. 4, Mr. Reid doesn’t seem nearly as sure of his hand. Of the Iraq debate that will soon resume, the majority leader told The Washington Post late last week that “I don’t think we have to think that our way is the only way.†…
The Captain posts on Hillary’s depraved privatization thoughts.
Hillary Clinton has an interesting view of the American economy, if her remarks to the AARP serve as any sort of guide. She told its legislative conference that Social Security is the “most successful domestic program” in American history, and that only government can make the necessary decisions for its beneficiaries (via reader Online Analyst):
“This is the most successful domestic program in the history of the United States,” Clinton said to applause from seniors gathered in Washington to push their policy agenda. “When I’m president, privatization is off the table because it’s not the answer to anything.” …
Kathleen Parker’s cartoon column is sneaky good. She starts out writing about the Swedish cartoons showing Mohammed’s head on a dog. Then she flips to American editors who cave preemptively.
… Outrage, never far from the front burner where the date palms grow, was swift. Egypt complained, Jordan condemned, Afghanistan protested, and Iran — that arbiter of taste and protocol — suggested ways Sweden could become a better country. In Pakistan, where effigies are a cottage industry, “Muslim youth” burned a straw likeness of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who bravely and beautifully articulated why Westerners allow cartoonists to be offensive: …
… These lessons of freedom and tolerance, which we can’t seem to export with much success, are also apparently lost on some American newspaper editors who declined recently to run two of Berkeley Breathed’s “Opus” comic strips out of concern — or was it fear? — that they were potentially offensive to Muslims. …
… The first “Opus” strip, which can be viewed on Salon.com and at comics.com, shows Lola Granola dressed in a Muslim headscarf and veil. “A Muslim fundamentalist?” asks her boyfriend, Steve. “No. Radical Islamist. Hot new fad on the planet.” The final panel suggests that, given Lola’s new identity, Steve will be denied her affections. The second strip continues the plotline and shows Lola and Steve preparing for the beach. Steve urges Lola to wear that “smokin’ hot yellow polka dot bikini” and reminds her, “You love freedom. You love hotness. And you love that I’m so darned smart about what’s best for you.” Lola emerges from the dressing room covered head-to-toe in a “burqini.”
OK, who gets the joke?
Interpreting cartoons is risky business, as they’re not intended to be taken literally. And, reading letters posted at Salon.com, it’s clear that everyone has his own interpretation of what the strips are saying. Breathed himself prefers to stay strictly out of it. What seems clear, however, is that strip is making fun of a certain shallowness on our side of the pond. Breathed is often hard on males and no one looks more foolish in these strips than the character Steve, who is oblivious to all but his own needs and desires.
If anyone is offended, it should be American males.
What is also clear is that the editors who killed these strips surrendered in advance of controversy. Thanks to previous acts of protest and intimidation, radical Muslims have succeeded in directing editorial content of America’s free, and formerly courageous, press.
The joke really is on us. And it’s not funny.
Mark Steyn with a surprising Corner post that grew out of an Orwellian Sunday Telegraph item.
A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way. …
… The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.
Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption “targets”. …
John Stossel gets a return engagement with “toilet man.”
I didn’t recognize him until he reminded me I’d interviewed him a decade ago. Then I remembered he was “toilet man.” That’s what I called him privately when he was the energy department bureaucrat under President Clinton who defended the government’s demand that all of us buy “low-flow” showerheads and “water-saving” toilets.
I did a “Give Me a Break” segment on that for “20/20″ mocking the endless rule-making process, which somehow concluded that exactly 1.6 gallons is all that every toilet needs. I interviewed people who were so unhappy with their new toilets that they were combing junkyards for old ones, or going to Canada to buy them, because 1.6 gallons doesn’t always get the job done. Homeowners and apartment managers kept telling meme, “The toilets don’t work!”
“They do now,” Romm said to me last week. Manufacturers eventually made 1.6 gallons flush successfully, proving, he suggested, that my “Give Me a Break” was misguided and that government rules spur improvements. Now, he says, we need to save the earth by passing rules that restrict carbon use.
The fact that it took years for manufacturers to solve the flushing problem, at great expense to consumers, and that during that period many people had to flush several times, wasting lots of water, and that the one-size-fits-all rule applied to all of America, forcing flushing embarrassment and lousy showers on people in Vermont and other places that have plenty of water and don’t need to conserve, and the water savings were less than 6 percent of what farms use every day for irrigation — none of that bothers Romm.
He now works at the Center for American Progress, a lefty think tank where policy wonks seem to think that government telling us what to do is the solution to many problems.
Nice Samizdata post.
… There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left. …
Reason’s Hit & Run tries to take the NY Times where an intelligent policy might lead.
… Surely one of the chief reasons the DC school system is so wasteful and unproductive is because it’s in nobody’s interest to save taxpayer money or provide a quality education. Generally public schools are not run for the benefit of students. Instead they are run for the benefit of teachers and the educrats in the central office. So why not make it someone’s interest to save money and turn out a quality education? Take the $11,000 per pupil the DC public schools spend and give it to parents as a voucher. Then let parents make the decision about which schools are actually educating their children. Or at the very least adopt the successful school choice program that San Francisco has.
Paul Greenberg sips from the cup that keeps on flowing – John Edwards’ hypocrisy.
… Hypocrisy, said La Rochefoucauld, is the tribute vice pays virtue, and let it be said John Edwards never stops paying tribute to virtue.
It hasn’t been too long since he was urging his Democratic rivals for the presidency to return any money they’d received from press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the publisher the left loves to hate, and refuse to appear on Murdoch’s Fox News network. Mr. Edwards himself had appeared on Fox News 33 times at last count. And he’s collected $800,000 for a book published by a subsidiary of a Murdoch corporation, HarperCollins. (The candidate says much of the money went to charities. One of them, College for Everyone, turns out to be one he founded.)
Presidential campaigns have a way of attracting gold-plated phonies and, before this one is over, no doubt the inconsistencies of other candidates will be laid bare, too. But for now, when it comes to deciding who’s the phoniest of them all, John Edwards leads the pack — and his lead may be unbeatable.
Carpe Diem posts on globalization’s benefits.
Hit & Run posts on progress in the Venezuelan economy. NOT!
Gay Patriot with a wonderful story.