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Chris Hitchens wonders why Mandela is AWOL when it comes to the Mugabe mess next door.
The scale of state-sponsored crime and terror in Zimbabwe has now escalated to the point where we are compelled to watch not just the systematic demolition of democracy and human rights in that country but something not very far removed from slow-motion mass murder a la Burma. The order from the Mugabe regime that closes down all international aid groups and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations is significant in two ways. It expresses the ambition for total control by the state, and it represents a direct threat—”vote for us or starve”—to the already desperate civilian population. The organization CARE, for example, which reaches half a million impoverished Zimbabweans, has been ordered to suspend operations. And here’s a little paragraph, almost buried in a larger report of more comprehensive atrocities but somehow speaking volumes:
The United Nations Children’s Fund said Monday that 10,000 children had been displaced by the violence, scores had been beaten and some schools had been taken over by pro-government forces and turned into centers of torture.
While this politicization of the food situation in “his” country was being completed, President Robert Mugabe benefited from two things: the indulgence of the government of South Africa and the lenience of the authorities in Rome, who allowed him to attend a U.N. conference on the world food crisis—of all things—despite a five-year-old ban on his travel to any member of the European Union. This, in turn, seems to me to implicate two of the supposed sources of moral authority on the planet: Nelson Mandela and the Vatican. …
Rich Lowry columns on Steyn’s trial in Canada.
At its best, Western civilization has fostered freedom of speech and of thought. But Canada has a better idea.
Last week, a Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia considered a complaint brought against journalist Mark Steyn for a piece in the Canadian newsweekly Maclean’s. The excerpt from Steyn’s best-selling book “America Alone” argued that high Muslim birthrates mean Europeans will feel pressure to reach “an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots.”
The piece was obviously within respectable journalistic bounds. In fact, combining hilarity and profound social analysis, the article could be considered a sparkling model of the polemical art — not surprisingly, given that Steyn is one of North America’s journalistic gems.
The Canadian Islamic Congress took offense. In the normal course of things, that would mean speaking or writing to counter Steyn. Not in 21st-century Canada, where the old liberal rallying cry “I hate what you say, but will fight for your right to say it” no longer applies.
The country is dotted with human-rights commissions. At first, they typically heard discrimination suits against businesses. But since that didn’t create much work, the commissions branched out into policing “hate” speech. Initially, they targeted neo-Nazis; then religious figures for their condemnations of homosexuality; and now Maclean’s and Steyn. …
Mickey Kaus turns his attention to one of Obama’s early appointments.
Obama’s Friend of Angelo: Barack Obama’s choice of Jim Johnson to vet his VP prospects is already embarrassing his campaign, thanks to a WSJ story reporting that Johnson (according to the NY Sun)
took at least five real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corp. through an informal program for friends of the company’s CEO, Angelo Mozilo. …
Mozilo and Countrywide were deeply enmeshed in the subprime meltdown, of course, and Mozilo has been denounced by Obama for his business practices and multi-million dollar compensation. …
Andrew Ferguson tells us about Hyde Park – Obama’s neighborhood.
When Barack Obama was briefly embarrassed earlier this year by his association with the onetime bomb-builder and wannabe bomb-exploder William Ayers, he blamed his neighborhood, sort of. “He’s a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Obama said with a shrug, as if to say, “Don’t we all have to put up with these cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard?” But of course not every neighborhood has a former Weatherman and his wife, former Weathermoll Bernardine Dohrn, living in it, especially not as twin pillars of the community. Obama’s casual dismissal led people all across America, people who live in all kinds of communities without bombers, to look at each other and say: “Wow, what kind of neighborhood does Barack live in?”
It’s not a trifling question. Like a gabby relative or a crooked business associate, a membership in a restrictive golf club or a long-forgotten bisexual fling, a neighborhood can be a problem for a candidate. Voters often feel that incidentals like these reveal something essential about a potential president. Just as important, political consultants often go to great lengths to make voters feel that way. Recall poor Michael Dukakis, the hapless Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. He lived in the Boston suburb of Brookline–a “progressive” village where the townsfolk congratulate themselves for riding mass transit, eating fibrous bread, holding Winter Festivals in place of Christmas parties, joining committees, attending meetings that last many hours and result in the appointment of more committees, growing organic Chinese vegetables in sideyards, and hanging potted plants in macramé hammocks on the front porch. Brookline was an eddy of American life, a pocket of preciosity set apart from the world that most Americans struggle through, and Republican operatives made it a symbol of Dukakis’s disconnection from the common man. Maybe this was a low blow, but the Republicans had a point. Anyone who knew Brookline would not have been surprised to learn that Dukakis, as one of its favorite sons, liked to take books about Swedish land-use planning with him to the beach, thus disqualifying himself from the presidency. …
… The comedian (and later movie director) Mike Nichols, who got his start in a club on the old 55th Street, defined Hyde Park liberalism for all time: “Black and white, marching arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder against the poor.” …
Daily Telegraph blogger says Ethiopia needs free markets.
Peter Schweizer says liberals are cheapskates and misers.
Samuel Johnson once reported on a man who was privately stingy but publicly touted the merits of sharing. Dr. Johnson said sarcastically that the man was a “friend of goodness.” What he meant was that flesh-and-blood goodness is very different from supporting “Goodness” in the abstract.
Many modern liberals like to openly discuss their altruism. Garrison Keillor explains that “I am liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness.” But it rarely seems to turn into acts of kindness, especially when it comes to making charitable donations.
Consider the case of Andrew Cuomo, current New York Attorney General and advocate for the homeless. He has, according to his website, “compassion toward the most vulnerable of us.” And this is how the New York Times described the courtship of Kerry Kennedy (of guess which family): “Ms. Kennedy-Cuomo, 43, said she fell in love with Mr. Cuomo, 45, when he took her on a tour of a homeless shelter on their first date and agreed to fast for the labor leader Cesar Chavez.”
But that advocacy should not be confused with actually giving to the less fortunate. Cuomo was a homeless advocate throughout the 1990s, but according to his own tax returns he made no charitable contributions between 1996 and 1999. In 2000 he donated a whopping $2,750. In 2004 and 2005, Cuomo had more than $1.5 million in adjusted gross income but gave a paltry $2,000 to charity.
Cuomo made no charitable contributions in 2003, when his income was a bit less than $300,000. …
The world is in balance. While we’re getting slammed with heat on the east coast, Aspen is opening up the slopes this weekend. Story from Channel 9 Denver.