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David Warren on Ezra Levant and Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.
… Though appalled, I am not myself surprised by the nature of the cases now being brought before Canada’s “human rights” commissions, with a view to extinguishing free speech in Canada. I have seen this coming for decades, and have argued all along it would come to this. My only surprise is that it took more than three decades for the ideology behind “multiculturalism” and collective “human rights” to bear this kind of fruit.
This is the ideology of Canada’s “liberal” elites. (I stand it in quotes because it is another Orwellian reversal of a term: the contemporary liberal has views directly opposed to those traditionally associated with liberalism.)
Every society contains people who are seething with resentment against some individual or class — sometimes with cause, and often without it. The creation of any quasi-legal bureaucracy to purge notional sins plays into their hands. If that bureaucracy also subsidizes complaints, and strips all defendants of due process, of course it will be used for execrable motives. The complainant can’t lose, the defendant can’t win, under such a system. Canada’s “human rights” commissions were designed to be abused.
There are many, many other examples of the same principles at work in the Canadian bureaucracy: where the victim is “tried” before a secretive chamber, often in absentia, or without proper representation. Where the charges are vague; where he cannot face his accuser; where there is no presumption of innocence; where there are no rules of evidence, or of procedure; where there are no fixed penalties; where he will be shaken down financially and put under extreme stress whether or not he is nominally “cleared” at the end of the day; where there is no recourse against a frivolous suit. The tax system and family law in Canada are now riddled with just such arrangements, and grant-giving bureaucracies run them in reverse.
Re-establishing the rule of law in Canada is a huge task. But it has to start somewhere, and getting rid of the obscene “human rights” commissions is a good enough place to start.
Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the flesh and blood Reagan.
… Ronald Reagan has been beatified into some sort of saint, as if he were above the petty lapses and contradictions of today’s candidates. The result is that conservatives are losing sight of Reagan the man while placing unrealistic requirements of perfection on his would-be successors.
They have forgotten that Reagan – facing spiraling deficits, sinking poll ratings and a hostile Congress – reluctantly signed legislation raising payroll, income and gasoline taxes, some of them among the largest in our history. He promised to limit government and eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy. Instead, when faced with congressional and popular opposition, he relented and even grew government by adding a secretary of veteran affairs to the Cabinet.
Two of his Supreme Court appointments, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, were far more liberal than George W. Bush’s selections, the diehard constructionists, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Reagan’s 1986 comprehensive immigration bill turned out to be the most liberal amnesty for illegal aliens in our nation’s history, and set the stage for the present problem of 12 million aliens here unlawfully.
Republicans forget all this – but so do Democrats, who for their own reasons want to perpetuate an unflattering myth of Ronald Reagan as an extremist right-wing reactionary. …
Obama was caught saying nice things about Reagan. Peter Wehner fills us in.
… Senator Obama’s words are not only true, they are a reminder of what an intriguing political figure he is. In the midst of an intense Democratic primary battle, he had good words to say about President Reagan, a very popular figure with most Americans, while he succeeded in linking (and properly so) Nixon and Clinton in terms of their impact on our country.
But Obama’s words also reflect on him. So far his campaign is largely about capturing a mood rather than about advocating a set of ideas–and at the end of the day, changing the trajectory of America depends on ideas and policies, not sentiment. Reagan was an optimistic person–but that is not his lasting achievement. And if Reagan’s policies had failed rather than succeeded, his optimism would have looked badly misplaced and would now be used against him. Barack Obama, who so far has shown himself to be an utterly orthodox liberal (as has Hillary Clinton), now has to take the next step and show that he is bold and creative in the realm of ideas and policies, which was a hallmark of Reagan. So far Obama hasn’t–and that has been the glaring weakness in his otherwise impressive campaign.
Obama’s problem is he’s up against the slimiest two in the country. Margaret Carlson explains.
At approximately 6 p.m. on Jan. 15, three hours before a Kumbaya interlude at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, I saw Al Sharpton defending Senator Barack Obama from charges of youthful drug abuse.
As we all know by now, the accusation arises from Obama’s own admission in his modern Horatio Alger tale, “Dreams From My Father,” published long before he became a presidential candidate, that he tried cocaine as a teenager.
The hoopla over this has validated the judgment of George W. Bush eight years ago to refuse to answer questions about his own alleged drug use, which many believe continued well beyond his teen years. This is why honesty isn’t considered the best policy by political consultants. But I digress.
Sharpton has done things to redeem himself in recent years, but his presence is a one-way ticket back to Tawana Brawley, boycotts, shakedowns and good old-fashioned, in-your-face confrontational race-based politics. Seeing him in that box on TV, I realized that the Clintons had done what they needed to do to stop Obama’s historic surge in its tracks.
From the start of his career, Obama wanted, and needed, to remove the race card from the political deck. While it isn’t clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose.
If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern, with Clinton’s former New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Representative Charles Rangel, Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act. …
Debra Saunders defends John McCain. We’ve picked on him a lot, and think he deserves it. However, Debra is one of our favorites and worthy of a listen. We still prefer Clinton to McCain.
Rush Limbaugh launches daily rants against John McCain. Fellow conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham dismissed the Arizona senator on Wednesday as “the Democrats’ favorite Republican.” Hugh Hewitt blogged on Townhall.com that a vote for McCain “is a vote for an old warrior way past his prime and the prospect of three debates against Barack Obama in which the age and energy gap goes unremarked upon while devastatingly obvious.”
A washed-up old warrior? McCain deserves more respect for risking his life in Vietnam and enduring five years in a Vietnamese POW camp, as he refused his captors’ offer to free him. Of course, engaged Republicans have a right to criticize McCain on the issues — but they go too far, and they are sabotaging their party’s chances in November. …
More of Monica Week from Mark Steyn.
… She was never very happy with the designation “First Lady” and determined, on her arrival in the White House, to redefine the role. In the end, she hasn’t, but her husband has. It used to refer to her status as First Lady of the United States. Under the Clinton presidency, it’s more proprietorial – the First Lady of Bill Clinton: as in some ramshackle sultanate, it now suggests the faded precedence accorded someone otherwise long since superseded by fresher concubines.
In the past week alone, the First Lady has had to contend not only with The Other Woman (Monica Lewinsky) but also The Other Other Woman (Shella Lawrence, widow of disgraced Clinton ambassador and make-believe war hero, M. Larry Lawrence), The Other Widow (White House aide Kathleen Willey, who told Paula Jones’s lawyers that, on the day her husband committed suicide, Clinton groped and fondled her, saying: “I’ve always wanted to do that”) and The Other Intern (another perky, chipmunk-cheeked college girl who supposedly is about to come forward).
Faced with a White House that’s now all mouth and trousers, the President’s dwindling band of cheerleaders is down to a group of starry feminists whose main reason for supporting him in ’92 was that he was married to Hillary. “He’s a terrific President,” says Hollywood actress Mary Stuart Masterson. “I’ve met him. He never hit on me.” That would make Miss Masterson and Mrs Clinton the only two women in America that he hasn’t tried to have sex with (or, as he sees it, non-sex with) in the past month. …
Turns out Liberals are better at some things. They are really good at hate. Arthur Brooks in WSJ with details.
A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros — he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, “Southerners are prejudiced.”
The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, “The right wing, that is not where America’s at . . . It’s just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots.” …
Times,UK Editor thinks complaints about Bill Kristol’s Times,YUK column are foolish.
… The most remarkable aspect of this bizarre controversy has been the performance of the paper’s ombudsman Clark Hoyt. Well, it was remarkable to me at least. Mr Hoyt argued that Kristol should not have been appointed (or at least that he, Hoyt, wouldn’t have appointed him) because Kristol had been a fierce critic of the NYT, and had argued, at one point, that the paper should be prosecuted for an aspect of its coverage.
The job of a reader’s editor, surely is to defend the rights of its readers, all of its readers. It is not to start picking a “Fantasy Columnist” team to reflect his own politics. What of people who agree with Kristol? Do they not deserve the protection of the reader’s editor?
And as for Hoyt’s statement that:
This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.
Isn’t this the most pompous sentence you have ever read in your life? …
Speaking of liberal foolishness, Tech Central examines Tom Friedman’s reaction to the $2,500 car. You already know where this is headed, don’t you?
… New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reacted to the first news of the Nano’s planned introduction with a hysterical call of “No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us“—us being the industrialized West and the place to not follow into being access to one’s own wheels.
“We have no right to tell Indians what cars to make or drive,” Friedman admits. “But we can urge them to think hard about following our model, without a real mass transit alternative in place.” And how might those alternatives come about? India, he says, “should leapfrog us, not copy us. Just as India went from no phones to 250 million cellphones—skipping costly land lines and ending up with, in many ways, a better and cheaper phone system than we have—it should try the same with mass transit.” …