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Mark Steyn takes us back to Putin’s star turn at the NY Times OpEd.
For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.
It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.
All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” …
… When the president’s an irrelevant narcissist and his secretary of state’s a vainglorious buffoon, Marco Rubio shouldn’t be telling the world don’t worry, the other party’s a joke, too.
Charles Krauthammer thinks we got a bad deal in Syria last week.
… And what does America get? Obama saves face.
Some deal.
As for the peace process, it has about zero chance of disarming Damascus. We’ve spent nine years disarming an infinitely smaller arsenal in Libya — in conditions of peace — and we’re still finding undeclared stockpiles.
Yet consider what’s happened over the last month. Assad uses poison gas on civilians and is branded, by the United States above all, a war criminal. Putin, covering for the war criminal, is exposed, isolated, courting pariah status.
And now? Assad, far from receiving punishment of any kind, goes from monster to peace partner. Putin bestrides the world stage, playing dealmaker. He’s welcomed by America as a constructive partner. Now a world statesman, he takes to the New York Times to blame American interventionist arrogance — a.k.a. “American exceptionalism” — for inducing small states to acquire WMDs in the first place.
And Obama gets to slink away from a Syrian debacle of his own making. Such are the fruits of a diplomacy of epic incompetence.
Responding to the new Putintate, Peggy Noonan has good ideas about what is exceptional in our country.
… America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world, it attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional. It is a nation formed not by brute, grunting tribes come together over the fire to consolidate their power and expand their land base, but by people who came from many places. They coalesced around not blood lines but ideals, and they defined, delineated and won their political rights in accordance with ground-breaking Western and Enlightenment thought. That was something new in history, and quite exceptional. We fought a war to win our freedom, won it against the early odds, understood we owed much to God, and moved forward as a people attempting to be worthy of what he’d given us.
We had been obliged, and had obligations. If you don’t understand this about America you don’t understand anything.
I don’t know why the idea of American exceptionalism seems to grate so on Mr. Putin. Perhaps he simply misunderstands what is meant by it and takes it to be a reference to American superiority, which it is not. Perhaps it makes him think of who won the Cold War and how. Maybe the whole concept makes him think of what Russia did, almost 100 years ago now, to upend and thwart its own greatness, with a communist revolution that lasted 75 years and whose atheism, a core part of its ideology, attempted to rid his great nation of its faith, and almost succeeded. Maybe it grates on him that in his time some of the stupider Americans have crowed about American exceptionalism a bit too much—and those crowing loudest understood it least.
But I suspect on some level he’s just a little envious of the greatness of America’s beginnings. The Russian Revolution almost killed Russia—they’re still recovering. The American Revolution has been animating us for more than two centuries. …
Wait until you see the example of media protecting president bystander provided by Power Line.
Congress (Dems included) was mugged by minimum-wage reality last week. Kate Bachelder has the story in WSJ’s Political Diary.
Members of Congress sometimes bump into economic reality. Take Tuesday’s vote on a bill to delay federally mandated minimum-wage increases in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, U.S. territories in the South Pacific. Congress agreed, 415-0, that a minimum-wage requirement can worsen economic mobility, though apparently only on small islands.
The government has historically granted the territories an exemption from minimum-wage requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The last federal increase in 2007, to $7.25 from $5.15, required CNMI and American Samoa for the first time to raise their minimum wage by $0.50 per year until it reached parity with the states. The bill included American Somoa only after Nancy Pelosi came under attack for granting an exemption to a place that had factories for companies headquartered in her district.
Even with the minimum wage currently only at $5.55 in CNMI after three increases, the requirement has caused so much economic tumult that Congress has now passed two pieces of legislation, in 2010 and on Tuesday, to extend the transition period for the islands.
That’s because the minimum-wage hikes have slammed local economies, which were already reporting years of declining GDP when the increases began. Government Accountability Office studies have shown that wage floors tend to do precisely the opposite of what their supporters purport. …
Michelle Malkin celebrates the gun control loss in CO.
Quick, call the CDC. We’ve got a RockyMountain outbreak of Acute Sore Loser Fever. After failing to stave off two historic recall bids on Tuesday, two delusional state legislators and their national party bosses just can’t help but double-down and trash voters as dumb, sick, criminal and profligate.
The ululations of gun-grabbing Democrats here in my adopted home state are reverberating far and wide. Appearing on cable TV Thursday to answer the question “What happened?” Pueblo State Sen. Angela Giron sputtered that she lost her seat due to “voter suppression.” Giron whined to CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin that voters “weren’t able to get to the polls” and that there was “voter confusion.”
“Voter confusion”? My goodness. You’d think there were no public libraries, local television stations, talk radio, newspapers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter or government websites to get information about the elections. (Oh, and pay no attention to the massive 6-to-1 spending advantage that Giron and her fellow recall target John Morse, formerly the president of the state Senate, enjoyed.)
“Voter suppression”? Dios mio! You’d think there were New Black Panther Party thugs standing outside the polls shouting racist epithets and waving police batons!
But no, there was no “voter confusion” or “voter suppression.” In fact, as the Colorado Peak Politics blog pointed out, the “majority of turnout in (Giron’s) district was Democrat, by a large margin. And she still lost. Voter suppression (is) not even believable.”
Giron lost in her Obama-loving Democratic Senate District 3 by a whopping 12 points. …
For what it’s worth, turns out it was Sec. Clinton who first proclaimed the “red line.” At least that is the story from Daily Caller.
.. On August 11, 2012, ten days before Obama’s statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had a joint press conference in Istanbul. During that press conference the following exchange happened:
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, for you, can you tell us a little bit more in detail about your meeting with the opposition activists? Did you get a better sense of whether they are really prepared to be able to be involved in leading a transition? What kind of questions did you ask them about who is actually doing the fighting on the ground? And what kind of answers did you get?
And then, for both of you, there has been a lot of talk about this common operational picture. What exactly is that common operational picture? Does it involve the potential of this corridor from Aleppo, north to the border here, turning into some kind of safe haven? And does it include anything on how to deal with the chemical weapons that everyone has expressed concern about? Thank you.
SECRETARY CLINTON: [yadda yadda] And both the minister and I saw eye to eye on the many tasks that are ahead of us, and the kinds of contingencies that we have to plan for, including the one you mentioned in the horrible event that chemical weapons were used. And everyone has made it clear to the Syrian regime that is a red line for the world, [italics mine] what would that mean in terms of response and humanitarian and medical emergency assistance, and of course, what needs to be done to secure those stocks from every being used, or from falling into the wrong hands.
It appears that where Obama deviated from script was in omitting “for the world” and substituting “for us.” …