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Mark Steyn was wearing his Happy Warrior hat at the National Review.
Of late I’ve been having some sport with a fellow named Oscar van den Boogaard. He’s a novelist over in Europe, and, while I’m not the most assiduous reader of Continental fiction, my eye was caught by an interview he gave to the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. Reflecting on Europe’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Eutopia he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
This seemed such a poignant epitaph for the Continent that I started quoting it hither and yon. And one thing led to another and I started explaining that Mr. van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay humanist, which is, as I like to say, pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. A cheap joke, but it got a laugh. And before you know it Mr. van den Boogaard was playing the same function in my act that Elizabeth Taylor does in Joan Rivers’s. (I haven’t seen Miss Rivers since, oh, 1973, so this may have changed.) …
Real Clear Markets has a good piece on the recent voting in Great Britain.
Perhaps it was intense coverage of our own hotly contested Democratic presidential primaries which prompted the American press largely to ignore or downplay the results of elections held in the United Kingdom earlier this month.
Only a handful of America’s newspapers even bothered to mention the U.K vote, in which seats on some 159 local governing councils were up for grabs. Our paper of record, the New York Times, focused most of its coverage on the personality-driven race for mayor of London between eccentric TV personality Boris Johnson and the incumbent and controversial Ken Livingstone–who once compared a newspaper reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard and said in a speech that he longed “for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi Royal Family are swinging from lamp-posts.”
But although Brits were only voting for local councils, the election bears some striking similarities to ours. In the U.K. as here, a party which has been in office through several national election cycles, Labour, faced an electorate at a time of growing economic worry. England’s long housing boom, which has been at times even frothier than ours, has ended, and foreclosures are rising. A major financial institution recently had to be bailed out by the government. Prices, including the already steep price of gas, are rising, eliciting grumbling among voters who have quickly forgotten their own income gains over the last several years.
Facing these circumstances, Labour took a drubbing, winning just 24 percent of the vote nationwide, because its leaders ignored James Carville’s oft-repeated advice that in tough times, it’s the economy that voters care about. Instead, Labour acted positively stupid about the economy, in the process appearing out of touch with voters by seeming almost indifferent to economic news. It’s a lesson that the Republican Party’s looming presidential nominee, John McCain, who occasionally appears as if the economy is the last thing on his mind, can learn from. …
Joe Lieberman gave a good speech last week. WSJ has excerpts.
How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?
Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.
This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.
This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom.” …
Bret Stephens takes up the subject of Obama and the Jews.
America’s Jews account for a mere 2% of the U.S. population. But they have voted the Democratic ticket by margins averaging 78% over the past four election cycles, and their votes are potentially decisive in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. They also contribute an estimated half of all donations given to national Democratic candidates.
So whatever his actual convictions, it is a matter of ordinary political prudence that Barack Obama “get right with the Jews.” Since Jews tend to be about as liberal as the Illinois senator on most domestic issues, what this really means is that he get right with Israel.
And so he has.
Over his campaign’s port side have gone pastor Jeremiah Wright (“Every time you say ‘Israel’ Negroes get awfully quiet on you because they [sic] scared: Don’t be scared; don’t be scared”); former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (“I think what the Israelis are doing today [2006] for example in Lebanon is in effect – maybe not in intent – the killing of hostages”); and former Clinton administration diplomat Robert Malley (an advocate and practitioner of talks with Hamas).
The campaign has also managed to clarify, or perhaps retool, Mr. Obama’s much-quoted line that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” What the senator was actually saying, he now tells us, is that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region.” …
Christopher Hitchens rather likes McCain’s idea for a prez “question time” on Capitol Hill.
… The preferred American way of keeping a bridle and check on the executive branch is the committee system, which has, in turn, been emulated across the Atlantic by some strengthening of parliamentary committees of supervision and inquiry, both permanent and extraordinary. British Cabinet members, too, have to face their own mini-Question Times at regular intervals. Does McCain also propose to subject his appointees to the process? It would be interesting to know. For the moment, though, he has made a rather generous and intelligent offer. He probably thinks that it is in keeping with his expressed commitment to that chimera known as “bipartisanship.” He would soon find out that nothing intensified political rancor more than a good old-fashioned Question Time, but no doubt the idea was well-meant, and I was sorry to see that discussion of it was mostly lost in the general sneering.
Canada’s National Post on globalony’s “settled science.”
… According to the U. S. National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th-Century mean for the first time since 1982.
Also in January, Southern Hemisphere sea ice coverage was at its greatest summer level (January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere) in the past 30 years.
Neither the 3,000 temperature buoys that float throughout the world’s oceans nor the eight NASA satellites that float above our atmosphere have recorded appreciable warming in the past six to eight years.
Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, reluctantly admitted to Reuters in January that there has been no warming so far in the 21st Century.
Does this prove that global warming isn’t happening, that we can all go back to idling our SUVs 24/7? No. But it should introduce doubt into the claim that the science of global warming is “settled.”
Year ago BBC reported we were to have more hurricanes. Now, not. Corner post with details.
Good point to include John Stossel’s column on McCain’s globalony speech.
… As The Wall Street Journal commented, “His plan is ‘market based’ insofar as it requires an expensive, invasive government bureaucracy to interfere with the market“.
McCain’s cap-and-trade system would have a bureaucracy set a limit for CO2 emissions and auction tradable permits to carbon-emitting companies. McCain says the revenue would be “put to good use.” Specifically, “We will add to current federal efforts to develop promising technologies. … We will also establish clear standards in government-funded research, to make sure that funding is effective and focused on the right goals.”
We’ve heard that before. You’d think McCain would have learned that government isn’t cut out for this sort of thing.
For all his lip service to markets, there is no getting around the fact that McCain will use force — that’s what government is — to accomplish his goals. There are only two ways to do things: voluntary or forced. The market is voluntary. No one is ever forced to buy or sell anything.
Cap-and-trade sounds good. Trade is good. But “cap” is force. Government will make arbitrary decisions about how much CO2 will be permitted in a thousand different situations. I can only begin to imagine the bureaucracy that will be required. Will chimney police go to every business and home telling you how much you can emit? Will armed officials from a Department of Global Warming raid your house and jail you if you run your air-conditioner too much? I assume friends of Al Gore will get special dispensation because they are working for the good of the nation. …