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Mark Steyn gets us up to speed on the latest hoax.
Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet – coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men. On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl In Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. …
… The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of “Paula Brooks,” shortly before “Paula” was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker from Ohio. “He would have got away with it if I hadn’t been such a stand-up guy,” the second phony lesbian said of the first phony lesbian. As to why stand-up guys are posing as sit-down lesbians, “Paula” told the Associated Press that “he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.”
“He got that one right,” sneered the Toronto gay magazine Xtra.
Indeed. A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly partial. …
… From CNN to The Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why?
Because they wanted to. It would be nice if “Amina Arraf” existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction – a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at No. 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other’s diversity. …
… You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. “Amina Arraf” was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the liberal worldview is a fiction.
While Mark was busy, the village idiots of Montgomery County, MD were providing him with a subject for next week’s column. They put the squeeze on a some kids’ lemonade stand.
Lemonade stands are supposed to come with lessons — about camaraderie, teamwork, entrepreneurship.
Or, if you are in an elegant swath of Montgomery County, outside the gates of Congressional Country Club and the U.S. Open, the all-American rite of passage might instead become a master class in government overreach and how officials can score some truly atrocious press.
But is there any extra credit for the complete backpedal?
First, the basics: On Thursday, the first day of the Open, a cameraman from WUSA (Channel 9) captured a county inspector attempting to shut down a roadside stand manned by a half-dozen adorable children. They didn’t have a vendor’s permit, the inspector informed the moms. The result? A $500 ticket. …
The president who thinks we need to know his opinions on a never-ending variety of subjects has been curiously quiet on a very important one. WSJ editors tell the story of the NLRB v Boeing.
Did you hear what President Obama said about the National Labor Relations Board’s complaint against Boeing Co.? We didn’t either.
Mr. Obama has been touting his plan to double the country’s export growth by 2015, thereby creating two million new jobs. Now one of the country’s foremost exporters is under assault for seeking a lower-cost venue for manufacturing to stay globally competitive, and the President has had nothing to say. …
As far as the recent “joke” from the president about the lack of shovel ready jobs, Jonah Goldberg reminds us;
… Obama has pretty much said the same thing several times. In a New York Times Magazine profile last October, the president admitted he had to learn the hard way that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
This is a staggering indictment of the president, the team he assembled, and the journalists who accepted this administration’s arrogant assertions that they knew exactly what to do, how to do it, and what would happen as a result. Remember, this is the administration that to this day insists it is “pragmatic” and simply cares about “what works.”
“I think we can get a lot of work done fast,” President-elect Obama said shortly after a gathering of governors in December 2008. “All of them have projects that are shovel-ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door.”
Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden — the White House’s point man on the stimulus — said in a cable-news interview in February 2009: “I think what people need to understand is that this really isn’t rocket science.” Spend a bundle on public works projects and — boom — you get a lot of people working.
They were wrong. …
Points and Figures blogger says Iceland let the stupid banks fail and the economy is better off for it.
… Iceland didn’t rescue its banks. It couldn’t afford to do it. So, they went bust. Iceland looked like it was going down a path of permanent financial armageddon. However, Iceland is in better financial shape than the rest of Europe today. …
More on this from a WSJ Op-Ed.
Iceland’s government last week raised $1 billion through an issue of five-year bonds at yields just above 3%. This successful return to private debt markets presents the best evidence yet that financiers approve of Reykjavik’s handling of the financial crisis and think the country is on the road to recovery. Therein lies a lesson for the rest of Europe.
Three years ago, Iceland forced its over-leveraged financial sector into a painful debt restructuring instead of bailing out its banks. The government had no other choice: Icelandic banks’ assets totaled roughly 1,000% of GDP, and in the world’s smallest currency area, no less. The central bank could not take on the role of lender of last resort without igniting a currency crisis.
Critics dubbed this response disastrous, and Iceland served as the cautionary tale of an “Icarus economy” whose banks had grown too big to save. Today, though Iceland’s banking system defaulted, its government remains solvent, with debt levels close to the European average of between 80% and 90% of GDP.
Iceland’s luck was that it did not qualify for a bailout. …
Michael Barone has more, writing that governments always try to save the past, while free markets look to the future.
… With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that our leaders, in both the Bush and the Obama administrations, responded to crises and challenges all too often with measures that attempted to revive the old pre-financial crisis economy rather than with policies that would allow a new economy to grow.
As in Paulson’s comment, the thinking seems to have been that if we can just get things back in place then we can attack the underlying problems.
Such was the theory behind the now seemingly puny stimulus package agreed to by George W. Bush and Democratic congressional leaders in early 2008. And behind the Federal Reserve’s rescue package for Bear Stearns in March 2008.
It was behind the argument that Paulson used to persuade Congress to pass the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program package in October 2008. He said he’d use the money to buy toxic mortgage-backed securities from the banks, but then decided to lend the banks tranches of $25 billion instead.
The Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package doled out one-third of its $787 billion to state and local governments so that public-sector employees (and union members) would not lose their jobs as so many private-sector employees were. That worked for a while but did not prevent painful cuts and layoffs later.
Then there were the various mortgage forbearance programs, designed to prevent foreclosures. Precious few homeowners took advantage of them, and many who did ended up losing their houses anyway.
And of course there was cash for clunkers, which increased car sales in the summer only to see them decline in the fall. Hundreds of millions were spent, but with no permanent effect except to increase used-car prices because clunkers traded in had to be junked.
Decision makers have responded as if they were facing liquidity crises (we don’t have enough cash to pay off debts immediately) instead of solvency crises (we will never be able to pay off these debts). Too often pain has not been prevented, but just postponed — and prolonged. …
David Brooks discovers Reckless Endangerment.
Most political scandals involve people who are not really enmeshed in the Washington establishment — people like Representative Anthony Weiner or Representative William Jefferson. Most scandals involve spectacularly bad behavior — like posting pictures of your private parts on the Web or hiding $90,000 in cash in your freezer.
But the most devastating scandal in recent history involved dozens of the most respected members of the Washington establishment. Their behavior was not out of the ordinary by any means.
For that reason, the Fannie Mae scandal is the most important political scandal since Watergate. It helped sink the American economy. It has cost taxpayers about $153 billion, so far. It indicts patterns of behavior that are considered normal and respectable in Washington.
The Fannie Mae scandal has gotten relatively little media attention because many of the participants are still powerful, admired and well connected. But Gretchen Morgenson, a Times colleague, and the financial analyst Joshua Rosner have rectified that, writing “Reckless Endangerment,” a brave book that exposes the affair in clear and gripping form. …
Brooks closed with some unfortunate thoughts which were noted by Instapundit.
Reader Jody Green writes:
“I read this rather surprising article by Mr. Brooks and thought it amazing that he might call out Michelle Bachmann as a possible star on the side of good governance but he ended with the word “Pungent” to describe her. A hard working, self made, seriously altruistic (24 foster kids), intelligent and patriotic American citizen who questions the horrid mess that the ruling class has made of the Federal Government, must be “Pungent” if she accurately questions the Ruling class and it’s corruption. Please bring on the “Pungent” horde. Am I reading this wrong?”
Alas, I don’t think so. She may be necessary, and Brooks may even realize that she’s necessary, but there’s still the NOKD factor. (Not our kind, Dear)
Mark Thiessen calls our attention to the headline writers of the NY Post.
The New York Post is famous for its page one headlines, such as the classic “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and the understated “UN Meets” (with a photo of weasels sitting in the French and German chairs of the UN Security Council before the Iraq war). But the Anthony Weiner scandal has been an unprecedented headline bonanza for the New York tabloid. …