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Sobering thoughts from Mark Steyn.
… In Afghanistan, the young men tying down First World armies have no coherent strategic goals, but they’ve figured out the Europeans’ rules of engagement, and they know they can fire on NATO troops more or less with impunity. So why not do it? On the high seas off the Horn of Africa, the Somali pirates have a more rational motivation: They can extort millions of dollars in ransom by seizing oil tankers. But, as in the Hindu Kush, it’s a low-risk occupation. They know that the Western navies that patrol the waters are no longer in the business of killing or even capturing pirates. The Royal Navy that once hanged pirates in the cause of advancing civilization and order is now advised not even to take them into custody lest they claim refugee status in the United Kingdom under its absurd Human Rights Act.
“Weakness is a provocation,” Don Rumsfeld famously asserted many years ago. The new barbarians reprimitivizing various corners of the map are doing so because they understand the weakness of what Brian Kennedy quaintly calls “the Free World.” One day the forces of old-school reprimitivization will meet up with state-of-the-art technology, and the barbarians will no longer be on the fringes of the map. If that gives you a headache, I’m sure President Obama will have a prescription-drug plan tailored just for you.
Christopher Hitchens helps us understand why Bombay is important.
… I hope I am not alone in finding the statements about Bombay from our politicians to be anemic and insipid, and the media coverage of the disastrous and criminal attack too parochially focused on the fate of visiting or resident Americans. India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a strong regional counterweight to Russia and China. Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism. Its political and economic and literary echelons speak English better than most of us do. Its parliament in New Delhi—the unbelievably diverse and dignified Lok Sabha—was viciously attacked by Islamist gangsters and nearly destroyed in December 2001, a date which ought to have made more Americans pay more attention rather than less. Since then, Bombay has been assaulted multiple times and the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan blown up with the fairly obvious cross-border collusion of the same Pakistani forces who are helping in the rebirth of the Taliban.
It would be good to hear from the president and the president-elect that we regard attacks on the fabric and society of India with very particular seriousness, as assaults on a close friend that was battling al-Qaida long before we were. In response, it should be emphasized, our military and financial and nuclear and counterinsurgency cooperation with New Delhi will not be given a lower profile but a very much higher one. The people of India need to hear this from us, as do the enemies of India, who are our sworn enemies, too. …
Mark Steyn liked Hitchens piece too.
John Fund with Eric Holder and Mike Huckabee thoughts.
… In interviews promoting his book, Mr. Huckabee also admits to some puzzlement about the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running-mate, a job he thought himself in line for. “She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair,” he told the New Yorker magazine. “It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”
Perhaps one reason why Mr. Huckabee’s critics weren’t enthusiastic about him joining the GOP ticket was his attitude. Rather than attack free-market groups like the Club for Growth as “the Club for Greed,” Mrs. Palin assembled a broad coalition to win the Alaska governor’s race in 2008 and maintained warm relations with both free-marketers and social conservatives. That’s a page from the Reagan playbook that Mr. Huckabee seems not to have mastered, and indeed seems intent on ripping up.
The Austrian Economists Blog has a fascinating story about the Schechter Bros. who ran “two kosher butcher shops, poultry specifically, in Brooklyn.” This is a reminder that behind all the high-flying rhetoric you will find a bunch of government thugs.
In preparation for my spring senior seminar on the Great Depression, I’m currently reading Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man. The book is a wonderful history of the Great Depression, written by a journalist who knows enough good economics to tell the story well. In reading it last night, I had the wonderful experience of learning something new that made me think about a whole bunch of interesting questions I hadn’t considered before. As a scholar, there really isn’t a better feeling and it’s one I wish I could convey better to students so they would see that what appears to be the dorkiness of their professors is really our desire to share one of life’s most profound joys. What I learned was the story of the Schechter brothers of Brooklyn, NY.
The Schechters ran two kosher butcher shops, poultry specifically, in Brooklyn. They were Jewish immigrants in the 1930s. Running a kosher butcher shop is a complicated affair, as the Laws of Kashrut are far more than a “dietary” code. Normally, keeping Kosher is thought of as just a set of rules about what food observant Jews cannot eat (e.g., pork, shellfish, scavengers, etc and no mixing milk with meat), but it is at least as much an ethical code. And that ethical code involves both how humans are to treat the animals they kill (humanely, as kosher butchers must follow specific rules about how animals are killed) as well as how they must treat their customers. For observant Jews such as the Schechters, the Laws of Kashrut were both a matter of religious observance and good business.
Enter FDR and the NRA. …
John Stossel says the bailouts will set us up for the next bust.
If an athlete injures himself and suffers great pain, we’d recognize the shortsightedness of giving him painkillers to keep him going. The pain might be masked, but at the risk of greater injury later.
That’s a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily “stimulate the economy,” but they also disguise and aggravate the underlying problems. We will all pay a serious price. …
Human Event’s Jed Babbin with a bailout we can live with.
Washington is dizzy with a bad case of bailout fever. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been dispensed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson without apparent success in reviving the financial markets. Now one Texas conservative is challenging Congress and the White House with a common-sense plan that is much more likely to help our economy recover more than bank bailouts or any handouts to carmakers.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), a member of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, proposes to use the $350 billion left of the $700 billion bank bailout to fund a two-month tax holiday that would put money in the pockets of American taxpayers. …
If you’re wondering how our country came to elect a shallow, self-absorbed person like Obama, Walter Williams has part of the answer.
How about a few civics questions? Name the three branches of government. If you answered the executive, legislative and judicial, you are more informed than 50 percent of Americans. The Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently released the results of their national survey titled “Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions.” The survey questions were not rocket science.
Only 21 percent of survey respondents knew that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” comes from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Almost 40 percent incorrectly believe the Constitution gives the president the power to declare war. Only 27 percent know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States. Remarkably, close to 25 percent of Americans believe that Congress shares its foreign policy powers with the United Nations. …
Harry Reid is delighted the new visitor’s center opened at the capitol since he won’t have to smell the tourists anymore. Examiner with the story.