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December 31, 2011
Perry and Gingrich might get on Virginia ballot after all
The Attorney General of Virginia “plans to file emergency legislation to address the inability of most Republican presidential candidates to get their names on the ballot;” as everyone reading this already knows, the recent Virginia primary ratification process ended up with only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul getting on the ballot. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry had too many of their signatures invalidated by the process; the other candidates didn’t even try. As I understand the situation, emergency legislation will require a super-majority in the state (well, Commonwealth) legislature; but the fact that Cuccinelli is already getting bipartisan backup (and the reported support of the Governor) suggests that such a thing may be actually achievable.Cuccinelli, via Pat Austin:
"Recent events have underscored that our system is deficient," he said in a statement. "Virginia owes her citizens a better process. We can do it in time for the March primary if we resolve to do so quickly."Meanwhile, in Iowa:
Trying to close the deal, Perry leaves a good impression
TRENDING: Perry bets Iowa fortunes on robust ground game
Perry's Faith Talk Appeals to Iowa Voters
Rick Perry Bus Tour Day 12: The Momentum Has Caught On!
After Iowa, Perry plans to skip New Hampshire and head straight to South Carolina.
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Quoteworthy 2011
I certainly hope Mitt Romney is as insincere as he appears to be. Kevin Williamson
It was true in the trenches of 1916. It remains true now. The dark forces of Mordor are on the march. We really might wish it otherwise but such is life, such is fate. Are we going to stay cowering in the false security of the Shire, waiting for the Orcs to arrive? Or we going to screw up our courage, seize that ring and venture all on the perilous journey to Mount Doom? James Delingpole
Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool. Mark Steyn
Can you name one important positive thing that Romney accomplished as governor of Massachusetts? Can anyone? Thomas Sowell
. . . absolution of sins does not eradicate all the effects and consequences of those sins on the shaping of one’s character. This requires ongoing conversion, including detaching oneself from those things that may provide an occasion for sin. It seems to me that a man whose sins arose as a consequence of the pursuit of political power and the unwise use of it after he became Speaker of the House should not be seeking the most powerful office in the world. Francis J. Beckwith
For this the Tea Party spent three years organizing and agitating? Mark Steyn
Take Willard. If he sweated more, he’d be this generation’s Tricky Dick Nixon in golden underpants: shifty, evasive, a guy trying to pick your pocket even though you’ve grabbed his other hand and are yelling for the cops. David Kahane
We should all envy Newt Gingrich’s vitality that he has been capable of such youthful indiscretions in his mid to late 60s. Rich Lowry
Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. George Will
The “New Newt” surging in the Republican polls overlaps so significantly with the former version that the “Old Newt” should be suing for copyright infringement.
“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date.” Let’s translate that Jon Corzine quote into Latin, engrave it in stone, and make it the official motto of Congress. Kevin Williamson
When citizens are taking pictures of couples with children because it is so rare to see such a sight you know the country has failed. In Europe, if you have three or more children, it is common to be stopped and asked to pose for a picture. Strangers will sometimes even swoop the youngest out of a stroller, holding the baby to pose for the camera as if they might never see such perfection again. Amy Owen
Yet, a constant theme of Gingrich’s career is a desire to use government to fix the culture. Indeed, there’s no Republican in the field with a more robust faith in the power of government. Jonah Goldberg
US airport “security” serves no serious purpose except to accustom free-born peoples to behaving like a compliant bovine herd. America is now a land where 85-year old grannies are strip-searched without probable cause. You’re extremely naive if you think that, once government acquires a taste for that, it will remain confined to the airport. Mark Steyn
And yet, underneath the attitudinal swagger, Americans are — to a degree visiting Continentals often remark upon — an extremely compliant people. Mark Steyn
So this is my choice now? Newt or Mitt? Wow, life sucks. Patrick Archbold
Enjoy the turkey, count your blessings, and then start reclaiming your glorious inheritance: Mark Steyn
The knock on Gingrich is that he has ten ideas a day, five possibly good, five obviously bad, and can't distinguish between the two types. (Actually I'd complain differently: He has ten ideas a day, one possibly good, four that sound good on a superficial level but in fact are just campaign-trail chum without substance or usefulness, and five which are bad.) Ace
This year's Christmas miracle will be Washington borrowing more money from itself so it can bail out Europe. Eat your heart out, Santa! John Hayward
The disease: Entrenched incumbency. The cure? Fresh fiscal conservative blood. Remember in November. Michelle Malkin
Do you know how much parents pay to send their kids to that pervert Quaker school? $27,400 in annual tuition, for high school. For a middle-aged weirdo to stand up there and corrupt their children. Rod Dreher
If social workers and judges can take your child away without due process, the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper the powerful can continue to ignore with impunity. Barbara Hollingsworth
Taking a sledgehammer to Washington is a line that Perry’s been rolling out since day one: this reform plan is the real fulfillment of that, and it will be instructive to see the reactions to this regardless whether Perry is the people's champion this time around. It is based on a fundamental belief that government is a problem, not a solution, to what ails the nation. This used to be a widely accepted conservative idea. I expect the reaction to Perry's proposals will tell us if it still is. Ben Domenech
Jordan and her fellow “revolutionaries” like to assure us that they’re the future. And in the sense that, in a post-prosperity America pox-ridden encampments of the homicidal, suicidal and narcotically inept will not seem that unusual, she may have a point. Mark Steyn
Somewhere in either my current book or the previous one (or possibly both), I cite the line Gerald Ford used to use to ingratiate himself with conservatives: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” That may be true, but there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the problem Mr Papandreou’s ministry has in Athens, and the Kasich administration in Ohio, and many other governments around the western world.
So it’s easy for reformers to get voted in, and easy for their opponents to make sure their reforms get voted down. I’m afraid things are going to get a lot worse before that dynamic shifts. Mark Steyn
First, as an historian with a passion for medieval history, I have often wondered what odors would assail the senses if one was among a large group of individuals who had only a passing acquaintance with concepts of hygiene. I no longer have to wonder. Jim Lacey
Yet for the first time in decades I feel a sudden craving for nicotine, possibly while making non-sexual gestures of an uncomfortable nature. Mark Steyn
There's nothing wrong with lower revenue. I think Americans are ready for Washington DC to quit spending money that they don't have. Gov. Rick Perry
An able-bodied man paid by the government of the United States to lie in a giant crib, wetting his diaper week in week out, is almost too poignant an emblem of the republic at twilight. Mark Steyn
When “youthful idealism” is an implausible euphemism for mopey solipsistic passivity (“I am a first semester college student, I have no idea where I will be in 4-5 years“), it’s hardly surprising it degenerates into party time for crack dealers, granny-preying thugs, statutory rapists, and transgenderphobic looters. What else is there? The slogans, the drum circles, the D.O.A. gig, and the endorsements of opportunist celebs like the Rev Jackson and Michael Moore is like a Starbucks compilation CD of revolutionary chic. Mark Steyn
Emoticons are coerced emotion, unearned communication. They are a prefab cheat-sheet for those too lazy or sub-verbal to say what they mean. And they are as propagandistic as anything out of Mao’s smiley-faced Great Leap Forward, which featured posters of agricultural workers laboring with forced cheer under headers such as, “We sell dry, clean, neat selected cotton to the state.”
Unlike Mao, Yahoo! has not murdered millions. It is, however, helping millions of its customers murder the English language. For its emoticons are not the primitive colon-dash-parenthesis :-) type that requires you to look sideways to decipher it, as though staring at an optometrist’s eye chart designed by M.C. Escher. No, this is the hard stuff—fully formed, animated glyphs—the heroin of emoticons. There are 12,000 in all, and they cover just about every emotion you’ve had, and probably several you haven’t. Matt Labash
There's nothing wrong with lower revenue. I think Americans are ready for Washington DC to quit spending money that they don't have. . . . I don't want more revenue in Washington DC's hands. I want more revenue in the private sector job creators' hands and in American citizens out there. I guarantee you they'll make better decisions about how to spend that money than Washington DC will. Gov. Rick Perry
Shoot, I might be a good debater before this is all over. Rick Perry
Nobody Messes With Joe. Except Jason Mattera, Who Now Lives in His Head Rent-Free Bryan Preston
In moving into the White House -- a very fancy address -- Obama bought a lot more house than he could afford, based on his ability and experience. James P. Gannon
It’s like Walmart for rats. Wayne Yon
. . . all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones. . . . Barack Obama
You embarrassed me on the senate floor and if you ever do it again I will kick your ass. Barack Obama
I say to myself, ‘You did well.’ Were they to come to life, I would do it again. Mohammed Shafia
But to my knowledge, no country has ever whined its way back into prosperity. Matt Labash
Go ahead, GOP. Nominate this health-care regulating, pro-abortion, flip-flopping, liberal, phony, RINO stiff. But believe me when I say that I will NEVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER vote for him. Jay Anderson
If it's not narcissism, what explains President Obama's habit of demanding something against the people's will, being rejected, refusing to take no for an answer and berating the public he is pretending to represent? David Limbaugh
Here is something I don’t understand. Why is it the Tea Partiers were able to clean up after themselves at all of their gatherings, no matter how large, but the Wall Street “occupiers” have to be told to leave the park so the city can clean up after them, at which time they will be able to re-enter the park and mess it up, again, without responsibility or accountability? Is this what we’ve come to? Treating adult people like infants in need of a diaper change? Elizabeth Scalia
We don’t know where it comes from. It just appears, and we eat it. OWSer Tom Hintze
Which is another way of saying he’s sawed the lady in half and her corpse has been carted away. He tried to pull a rabbit out of the hat and came up with a handful of lint. He’s tried to escape from strait jackets in chains and is still trying, long after the audience went home. Like Goldberg says, “where is the magic?” Richard Fernandez
Back at the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, it’s a hygienic disaster area: greasy hair, stained shirts, crusted trousers—and that’s just the journalists. Matt Labash
It’s not clear if Mrs. Obama took her own taxpayer-funded private jet to the store or perhaps three jets to accommodate her entourage, as she did for her European vacation. Milton Wolf
Doesn’t the New York Times care about dead Mexicans? Mark Steyn
go away, Kinsley, and take your tofu curd with you! Mark Finkelstein
Friedman’s gut is a terrifying thing. Jonah Goldberg
I think they will have difficulty “saving themselves.” I have many in-laws and friends in delightful corners of village England, where as the sun rises on ancient hedgerows and thatched cottages it is easy to believe the paralytic chavs and incendiary imams and all the rest are somewhere far away and always will be. As leftie columnists in their Hampstead redoubts began (privately) to calculate as the rioters moved in from the less fashionable arrondissements, on a small island the mob doesn’t stay beyond the horizon for long. Mark Steyn
Mr. Martin now asks customers to prove their heritage and residency. "You get real smart after they come to your house and arrest you and make you feel like Charles Manson," he says. WSJ via Backyard Conservative
It has also been learned that the last Chicago Cubs world championship team was not been honored with a White House ceremony either, however attempts to arrange for a reunion photo-op featuring Barack Obama and members of the 1908 Cubs have encountered certain insurmountable difficulties. Phil Boehmke
On the merits, Romney’s attempt to differentiate his plan from Obama’s doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. He is consistently making a series of blatant lies. Will any of his opponents hold him accountable? Philip Klein
As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as President. Under Obama, America’s foreign policies are a mixture of confusion and costly impotence. Rex Murphy
After finishing reading the book I wasn't sure whether to get pregnant or kill myself. Wendy Sullivan to Mark Steyn
And Milbank notes that it wasn't only Republicans who made a mockery of Obama's travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham of a speech to a joint session of Congress. James Taranto
Moreover, a nation of children who get dropped off each morning as they kick and scream for their mommies can hardly be described as a net positive. Suzanne Venker
The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term. Maureen Dowd
Unlike the other, and fake, men of the people running (this issue doesn’t apply to the women), he doesn’t roll up his damned sleeves. Anonymous
They are the children of dependency, the product of what Sir William Beveridge, the father of the British welfare state, called a world without want. And certainly these ski-masked bandits do not want. They do not want to work, they do not want to marry and raise children, they do not want the responsibilities of adulthood, they do not want to live productive lives of any kind. Mark Steyn
Self-indulgence is the common thread that runs through most culture war issues. From marriage to divorce to cohabitation to abortion, the desperate desire to satisfy the longings of our heart collides with a Judeo-Christian moral tradition that calls for children to be raised in faithful, married mother-father households. And so we make endless accommodations to our desires — protecting as a legal right the quest to satisfy every personal whim — and our culture cracks and crumbles. David French
It’s not true that kids grow up fast. What is true is that it seems fast if you’re paying too much attention to other stuff. Joel Achenbach
I, for one, am trying to determine which of my children to love less in order to make more room in my heart to love Paul Ryan more. Christian Schneider
You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western Civilization's descent into barbarism. Mark Steyn
Permanence is always an illusion.
Mark Steyn, After America, p. 190.
If you haven't already read America Alone, you simply must. It will make you want to have kids and buy guns. Dr. Milton Wolf
In short, Obama is a fighter for the progressive cause. Progressives are upset with him because he is a loser. James Taranto
I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. London shop owner
What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass. Lord Melbourne via John Derbyshire
It’s not hard to understand Obama once you grok that the only thing he cares about is himself and his continued residence in the White House through 2016 — after which he’ll be free to make millions and millions of dollars (maybe even trillions!) doing that post-presidency thing. The man is riding the greatest gravy train in the history of both trains and gravy, and you can’t blame him for not wanting to get off any sooner than he has to. Michael Walsh
The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people. Peggy Noonan
When Obama spoke at the University of Maryland on Friday, student Jerome Lincolns explained how his attitude toward the president had shifted since Obama last visited the campus in 2009. “He’s like a new car: First it’s really awesome, and then you realize it’s a lot like the other cars,” Lincolns told USA Today. Elise Jordan
Charm is no substitute for substance. And they aren’t that charming. Jennifer Rubin
She won't get headaches, she'll give them. Tom Maguire
Come on, geezers of America: Take one for the kids. John Derbyshire
When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks? Michael Walsh
That’s yet another small peep into an alternate universe in which, to paraphrase Steven Chu, Americans need guidance on how to spend their money, and need government to adjudicate what is fair compensation — sort of taking from those who are arbitrarily paid too much and don’t “need” “hundreds of thousands of dollars in income” to give to those who deserve it. Victor Davis Hanson
It's a dead parrot economy. The media are loyally doing their best for the Flatline Administration by insisting that the dead parrot economy is not deceased but merely resting for an "unexpectedly” longer period of time than had been expected. Mark Steyn
Isn't it ironic that I find pretty much everything written at CNN's "Belief blog" unbelievable? Matthew Archbold
June 29 was the day that Wisconsin was to be no more. The streets were going to be deluged with sewage. Children would begin pouring bleach into their cereal, as they would cease to learn otherwise in school. The state would devolve into a fiery Mad Max–style wasteland, where people feast on squirrels and barter their pelts. For it was the day that Governor Scott Walker’s plan to scale back public union collective bargaining took effect. Christian Schneider
And then here’s my favorite. I worked it out in the car on the way here. If you collect the corporate jets and the oil tax together — get all the bad guys and the fat cats at once — and you collect it for 100 years, it covers the amount of debt Obama added… in February! Charles Krauthammer
That’s great news! Somewhere on page 273 of the handbook, there’s a graphic detailing the precise point on the upper thigh where the licensed state groper is obliged to invert his paw. Mark Steyn
“We don’t estimate speeches," Elmendorf shot back. "We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis." Douglas Elmendorf
Careful - or I might pick Macca's "Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime" for my Yuletide single this year. And that's no idle threat. Mark Steyn
No - the real outrage is that Anthony Weiner has a cushy athletic club, paid for by us, as a backdrop for his stupid photos. I pay money every month to work out on weight machines at our local gym while these do-nothing gas bags in Washington hang out in their very own taxpayer funded gym. Now, that's outrageous. Adrienne
I don't think Congressman Weiner should have a federal bathhouse to auto-snap his towel in. In fact, I believe there's a direct line between the existence of a House gym and the likes of Anthony Weiner. When the people accept that the political class has the right to send them the bill for an activity that every other American has to make private provision for, it's telling you something about the relationship between the citizenry and their rulers. Mark Steyn
And why is it that when Sarah Palin talks about "death panels", she's an idiot, but when a psychologist does (because isn't that what is implied by restricting care to the elderly?), his ideas are printed up in a journal? Dr. Helen
The governing class are not “high functioning men”. Function-wise, they’ve been abysmal: Collectively, they’ve beggared the nation. While you low-functioning types were busy going off to work every day and providing for your family like a bunch of saps, lifetime politicians like Weiner – the Emirs of Incumbistan – comprehensively wrecked everything they touched, squandering this country’s inheritance and lining it up for an imminent existential crisis those on the receiving end will have to figure some way out of. Ceasing to think of time-serving mediocrities and opportunist creeps like Weiner as some kind of “high-functioning” elite leadership class is a good place to start. Mark Steyn
So, to one degree or another, is any healthy political culture. Whether or not Tweeting your privates hither and yon is something sophisticates like David Gelernter are cool with, the malevolent toad Weiner has spent the last ten days lying to his constituents and to the American people on radio, TV, the Internet and in print, trashing anyone who got in his way, from ideological foes like Andrew Breitbart to those CNN producers and ABC reporters who couldn’t quite bring themselves to swallow his guff. Those who did, such as George Soros’ head stenographer Eric Boehlert and Salon’s Joan Walsh made fools of themselves. They’re at least private-sector rubes. But Weiner also deployed his vast retinue of taxpayer-funded staffers in service of his lie.
Whatever one feels about the pants on fire, the liar ought to be an issue. Why would any sentient being believe a word the right honorable Weiner says about anything ever again? The debt ceiling, Libya, Medicare, anything? Look at what this thuggish narcissist grotesque was prepared to do over the last week, and ask yourself. If Weiner is fit for “public life”, who isn’t? Mark Steyn
For me, when the mass of lies equals the mass of apologies, the whole package congeals into some new sociopathic form for which there is yet no name. (Weinerite, perhaps?) That he was caught lying about his personal life, and not about public policy, doesn't really matter to me. By demonstrating that he's as good a liar as he is an apologizer, Weiner tells us everything we need to know about him. Jack Shafer
According to Christopher Hitchens, politics is show business for ugly people. If Anthony Weiner is anything to go by, it seems more like high school for ugly people. Mark Steyn
What the hell is wrong with Weiner and everyone? The guy deserves a rap in the mouth for that, doesn't he? Where are the feminists? Matthew Archbold
What makes Sarah stand out in the national GOP field is that she is beholden to no one and controls her own destiny. She doesn’t need media kingmakers to make her. They need her. She doesn’t need newspaper or TV producers to drive her story. She drives them. Crazy. Michelle Malkin
Cut him some slack. Hey look, Rep. Weiner’s a busy guy. Who can possibly expect him to keep track of every picture of his own crotch he’s ever taken? Sure, it could be his junk. But how can he possibly know with any certainty? I mean it’s not like he has an elaborate filing and labeling system for his penile photography. He’s not some weirdo. This looks like one of his many, many bulge shots, it might even be one of them. But how can he be expected to be definitive? Jonah Goldberg
". . . speaking on behalf of myself as a hoity-toity, cocktail-swilling elitist . . ."
Charles Krauthammer
Supposedly, this young, devoutly religious woman, whom Fox’s sources describe as “a model employee with a pristine work record who doesn’t drink or smoke and rushes home after work to take care of her children,” was simply overwhelmed with lust at the sight of this aging troll waddling towards her? Allahpundit
I was interested to discover recently that Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky has conducted a survey of “linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions” in popular music from 1980 to 2007, and concluded that we are in (to use the book title of two of his co-authors) a narcissism epidemic. Once upon a time, love songs were about other people: “Me, Myself, and I (Are All in Love with You)” — Billie Holiday, 1937. Seventy-odd years later, Fergie sings in unconscious echo that she needs more time to be with herself; Beyonce sings about how hot she looks when she’s dancing; and, on the increasingly rare occasions when a vocalist directs her attention to an object of her affection other than herself, it sounds more like self-esteem boosterism than a love ballad. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pink’s current blockbuster hit, “F**kin’ Perfect”:
Pretty, pretty please
Don’t you ever, ever feel
Like you’re less than
F**kin’ Perfect.
Mark SteynDon’t you ever, ever feel
Like you’re less than
F**kin’ Perfect.
Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs. Christopher Hitchens
Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living, and it tells us something truly important about Barack Obama. His ignorance is as broad as it is deep. Not that you couldn't deduce that on your own from his performance on the job. Scott Johnson
Seriously, the future of the nation hangs in the balance and some morons want to saddle up with a rich, self-promoting, rodeo clown? Please just turn in your voter registration, or join the idiots on the progressive side, now. That's precisely who you would be helping with this nonsense. Dan Riehl
Sinatra sounded as if he’d actually had some very good years. When the Kingston Trio did it in their usual upbeat jingle style, they sounded like eunuchs who wouldn’t know a good year if it fell on their heads. As for "Michael, Row The Boat Ashore", my advice is jump ship in the first verse. Mark Steyn
If [Itzhak Perlman] was thirteen years old today he'd probably play X-Box instead, be systematically starved and hounded because he's "obese," and be drugged into oblivion because he won't pay attention to drivel in class. Gregory Sullivan
There’s something sad about a man so carelessly revealing himself as entirely inadequate to the moment. Government spending is an existential threat to the United States. Whether or not anyone at the White House knows this, the viziers decided to shove the sultan out on stage with a pitifully unserious speech retreating to all his lamest tropes – the usual whiny, petty and unpresidential partisan snippiness, and the ponderous demolition of straw men even he barely bothered to pretend he believed in: Mark Steyn
That’s the problem, and whichever hack speechwriter put those ridiculous words in the President’s mouth surely knew it. As did the President. We spend more than anyone but the Swiss on education, and by any rational measure at least half of it is entirely wasted: That model is why this country is dying, and the President just went on TV and bragged to the world he has no plans to change it.
The whole speech was like that, a litany of brain-dead slapdash rhetorical questions that for sentient beings are no longer rhetorical: My fellow Americans, do we want an America where our most lethargic and mediocre youth are denied a leisurely half-decade acquiring a fraudulent six-figure credential in some worthless pseudo-discipline simply because we can’t afford it?
Well, it’d be a start. Mark Steyn
At some point, you have to close a cabinet department just to show you’re serious. Instead, the governing class is sending the message that the political institutions of the United States are so diseased they do not permit meaningful course correction. Mark Steyn
As was revealed yesterday re the sham budget “cuts”, the government class’s response to its fiscal fraud is to obscure it via political fraud, a sleight of hand that demonstrates utter contempt for the citizenry. If this is the best they can do, they’re ensuring that everything is going to get worse. Real worse, real poor, real fast.
The entire Western world is institutionally committed to living beyond its means in perpetuity. The expiry date on “perpetuity” is looming. Mark Steyn
“It makes it tough to win the future when you haven’t passed the budget from last year.” Barack Obama
“We did everything that was asked of us,” the aide said, referring to the president’s proposals on health care, bank regulations and, in the House, global-warming legislation.
A hyper-sexualized society becomes, paradoxically, sexless, and certainly joyless. [. . .]
I was aware, as I was talking to Milt, that I sounded like Mister Squaresville, and so be it. Because, getting on for half-a-century in, there's not a lot of cool left in the Sexual Revolution. In fact, there's not a lot of anything left other than wreckage. Mark Steyn
The collapse of the Entitlement State is not going to be pretty. Mark Steyn
Breaking News: President Obama to visit the United States of America this week and is expected to be here for several days nugy
Go ahead, Mr. President, play golf. But you should never take it for granted that you’re a president playing golf, not a golfer playing president. Jonah Goldberg
Of course our armed forces will again perform brilliantly, and Qaddafi and his repellent mafia clan will be hanging from piano wire in no time. But everyone knows we’ll end up staying to pacify the country, trying in vain to reconcile one gang of cretinous barbarians with the neighboring gang of cretinous barbarians. Mark Krikorian
The strange shrunken spectator who serves as president of the United States
Mark Steyn
I don’t mind the union bruisers, Marxist social engineers and lockstep zombies of the Democrat identity-group plantations voting for Obama: They knew what they wanted, and they got it. But I find it harder to understand the preening metrosexual nincompoop ObamaCons besotted with fantasies about his “temperament” (mentioning no names). His “temperament” would seem to be one of his more obvious failings. Mark Steyn
Sell icky some place else Newt, we're not buying. Patrick Archbold
But Kim Kardashian’s positions makes more sense, I guess. After all, what have Muslims ever done to Armenians? Daniel Foster
There are so many of these "lone wolves" and "isolated extremists" you may occasionally wonder whether they've all gotten together and joined Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves and Isolated Extremists, but don't worry about it: As any Homeland Security official can tell you, "Allahu akbar" is Arabic for "Nothing to see here." Mark Steyn
Good rule of thumb in politics: Find out what side of the issue feminists are on, and get on the other side. (If feminists ever bothered to denounce Islam’s brutal oppression of women, I might have to consider joining the Taliban. But feminists are too busy whining about “pay equity” to notice that Muslims are still stoning women to death under sharia law and forcing girls into arranged marriages.) Stacy McCain
Now there is a question you’ll never see in a New York Times poll: “Do you favor forcing all state employees to join a union and empowering government unions to take union dues directly from employee paychecks?” Conn Carroll
When you're pregnant, especially for the first time, there are a lot of amazed and awed moments in between the heartburn and insomnia. But is motherhood really a greater role than being secretary of state or a justice on the Supreme Court? Is reproduction automatically the greatest thing Natalie Portman will do with her life? Mary Elizabeth Williams
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. GKC
That's what "collective bargaining" is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government. Mark Steyn
This administration enjoys breathtaking latitude to respond to foreign-policy issues with defensive triangulation. One of its principal allies is the modern public’s unfamiliarity with history; another is the sense of the post-post-colonial era that, while everything may still be the West’s fault, nothing is now its problem. Opinion media and the public know instinctively that something is missing, but they can’t quite name what they expect to be different.
What’s missing is leadership. Having a plausible explanation for everything is the opposite of leadership; it’s defensive navigation through situations shaped by others. [. . .]
But it’s increasingly clear that regardless of what Team Obama fails to do in foreign policy, it won’t be because of principle or priorities; it will be because of the ravenous, homework-eating dog that prowls the State Department. JE Dyer
This is like watching your parents do the Macarena: It’s embarrassing and it’s dated. Mark Steyn
This is like watching your parents do the Macarena: It’s embarrassing and it’s dated. Mark Steyn
One of the most disturbing features of the protests in Madison is the involvement of President Obama. He may have dithered, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of political calculation when Egypt exploded, but when his own political fortunes are at stake he is Mr. Decisiveness. Roger Kimball
. . . you just have to have the spine to say I'm gonna take the risk. But I think that's what we elect leaders for. Hence the name. Right? Like if you're waiting midway back in the pack and call yourself a leader it seems to me that that isn't consistent. So you wanna be a leader, lead. I'm not saying it doesn't involve some measure of risk. Everything does that's worth something. Gov. Chris Christie
This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale - and it barely makes the papers. Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn:
The back alley is back, and supersized: The above New Jersey clinic performs 10,000 abortions a year. When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d'un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, a woman's "right to choose" means that, day in, day out, the blessings of this "right" fall disproportionately on all the identity groups the upscale liberals profess to care about - poor women, black women, Hispanic women, undocumented women, and other denizens of Big Government's back alley.
A government back alley, licensed and supposedly regulated, is worse than the old kind, because it implies the approval of the state, and of society. That's what Gosnell thought he had, when he murdered those babies and mutilated those teenage girls. That's what Planned Parenthood think they have, when they facilitate the sexual exploitation of Third World children. And, given the silence of the PC media, maybe they're right. Aside from the intrinsic evil of not only Gosnell but a state that knowingly colludes with him, these "little" abortion stories reveal an almost totalitarian mindset in the "pro-choice" movement's determination to brook no intrusion of reality upon the official myths. You may be one of those wealthy suburban "feminists" or "new men" indifferent to the fate of eight-pound "blobs of tissue" or 14-year old "women", but the gulf between propaganda and truth, between the fatuous feelgood bumper stickers and the rusty crochet hooks, is profound - and, in a world where statists and social engineers serve as ruthless enforcers for the prevailing ideology, its deep moral corruption will eventually swallow you, too. America should be at the very minimum deeply disquieted by these revelations. That it is not - that it is dismissed as a "little thing" - is even more disquieting. Mark Steyn
To begin with, the aggression on social issues today emanates mostly from the left, whose preferred vehicle is a willing judge inflicting his private social preferences on the law. Anyone who believes that a Republican call for a truce will end this is living in dreamland. William McGurn
Only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding their own destiny, in benefiting from their own risks, do societies prosper, grow, and remain free. Ronald Reagan
We have an alarm clock. It's around here somewhere. It might still be in a cardboard box from last March. I work almost all the time I'm awake, and my wife does, too. But we don't need two sinks in the bathroom to allow us to leave for cubicleville on identical schedules. Our kids aren't rousted like vagrants and put on buses before the sunrise because it suits the public school teachers.
We go to bed when we're tired, and we sleep until the sunlight wakes us up. Our kids sleep until they're not tired anymore, then their mother starts school. Ambien for dinner and Paxil for breakfast makes you an extra in a zombie movie. Gregory Sullivan
The point Ezra misses -- by a country mile -- is that the threat to liberty, if any, comes not so much from the individual mandate itself, but from the other things Congress might do if it gets away with claiming authority for this measure under the commerce clause. Charles Lane
After the media acclaim dies down, I think history will record that Obama’s State of the Union was abjectly derelict. With another $1 trillion–plus deficit on the horizon, he offered no meaningful way to reduce the debt but instead many ways to add to it.
His mind is set in concrete. Richard Epstein
Seriously, does 30 years of calling babies “blobs of tissue” have no effect on the culture? Matthew Archbold
[Kermit Gosnell's] actions perfect the logic of the mainstream of the pro-choice movement. He has followed premises shared by the president and by four Supreme Court justices to their unavoidable conclusion. National Review
Stop and pray for this man. I fear he will go to hell. Fr. Z
Or maybe Hulse and Zernike are old hacks in the pocket of certain political interests that feel threatened by populism. A member of the populace—however deranged—has shot a liberal—albeit one who is independent and selective in her liberalism. Even this most pathetic of excuses will serve. Ordinary Americans skeptical about the powers, prerogatives, and expense of certain political interests shall be execrated. PJ O'Rourke
But liberalism, as personified by the New York Times, became a dotty old aunt sometime during the Johnson administration. She’s provincial, eccentric, and holds dull, peculiar views about the world. Still, she has our fond regard, and we visit her regularly in her nursing home otherwise known as Arts and Leisure and the Book Review. Or we did until Sunday, January 9, when she began spouting obscenities and exposing herself. PJ O'Rourke
The solution isn’t to “tone it down” and turn the other cheek, but to confront them forcefully with the facts — and to fight back unapologetically against insidious efforts to diminish the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech and activism of the Right in the name of repressive “civility.” Michelle Malkin
The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's? Charles Krauthammer
The Statue of Liberty should be the symbol of this city, not the grim reaper. Archbishop Dolan
There is a lesson here both about modern liberalism and for Republicans who will soon have more power in Congress. For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not. Sooner or later, they figure, the anger will subside and Americans will come to like the cozy confines of the cradle-to-grave welfare state. WSJ editorial
In August 2009, Vice President Joe Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel suggested that they turn away from health care to spare the party a political disaster. Obama refused, telling some of his aides, “I feel lucky.” A month later, according to David Paul Kuhn of Real Clear Politics, Virginia Senator James Webb visited President Obama in the White House and “told him this was going to be a disaster.” As Webb described it, Obama somewhat blithely “believed it was all going to work out.” In retrospect, the preternaturally calm-in-a-crisis Obama celebrated in best-selling books like Game Change seemed less calm than bizarrely oblivious. Tevi Troy
Darling pjHusband this morning: What do you want to do to ring in the New Year?
Tired Mom of sick toddler: I don’t care as long as it doesn’t involve vomit. Fever-free would be grand, too.
Dare to dream. PoliticalJunkie Mom
Of Obama's 712 days in office, just 45 days have passed without a presidential public appearance or statement of some sort, according to Knoller. Byron York
Quoteworthy 2012
Quoteworthy 2010
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2011 in review, via Mark Steyn
A feast for Steyn fans: some choice excerpts from his posts and columns which, among them, I think, touch on all his main themes: cultural degeneration, life-stunting monster government, demographic suicide, et cetera. Enjoy!
Big Government's Back Alley
This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale - and it barely makes the papers. Had he plunged his scissors into the spinal cord of a Democrat politician in Arizona, then The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and everyone else would be linking it to Sarah Palin's uncivil call for dramatic cuts in government spending. But "Doctor" Kermit Gosnell's mound of corpses is apparently entirely unconnected to the broader culture. [. . .]
You may be one of those wealthy suburban "feminists" or "new men" indifferent to the fate of eight-pound "blobs of tissue" or 14-year old "women", but the gulf between propaganda and truth, between the fatuous feelgood bumper stickers and the rusty crochet hooks, is profound - and, in a world where statists and social engineers serve as ruthless enforcers for the prevailing ideology, its deep moral corruption will eventually swallow you, too.
In the first hour or two on Friday, I was just about the only guy on air pouring cold water on the approved hopeychangey narrative about young "freedom-loving" "democrats", and was reprimanded by "progressives" for pointing out correctly that there were very few women and even fewer uncovered women protesting on the streets of Cairo - even as the most famous uncovered woman in Tahrir Square was being set upon by a pack of savages. No such complicating factors were allowed to intrude on the delirious narcissism of the AP headline "Egypt Coverage Creates Unforgettable Daytime TV". But how can you keep shoveling that stuff out when your own reporter is a bruised, battered, bedbound rebuke to it? Even as America's laughably parochial media tried to make the story all about them or all about Obama (which boils down to the same thing), the one part of the story that actually was about one of them got buried. Would it have been different if it had been the A-list anchorettes - Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer? Or would even they have been subordinated to the politically correct narrative?
I don’t mind the union bruisers, Marxist social engineers and lockstep zombies of the Democrat identity-group plantations voting for Obama: They knew what they wanted, and they got it. But I find it harder to understand the preening metrosexual nincompoop ObamaCons besotted with fantasies about his “temperament” (mentioning no names). His “temperament” would seem to be one of his more obvious failings.
Pushing Deviancy Up
A hyper-sexualized society becomes, paradoxically, sexless, and certainly joyless. Listening in recent weeks to young women in both New York and London complain that the men they meet would rather look at pictures of them naked on the Internet than actually see them naked in the same room reminded me of The Children Of Men, in which P D James' characters, liberated from human fertility, find sex too much trouble. Eight-year olds with fake breasts are almost too obvious a satirist's fancy for a last desperate transgression of the terminally jaded. On WGN the other night, Milt Rosenberg and I were talking about popular music and the University of Chicago's approval of "hook-up" culture, and I made the not terribly original observation that a song such as "It Had To Be You" or "The Very Thought Of You" pre-supposes certain courtship rituals. If you no longer have those, it's not surprising that you no longer have songs to embody them: A love ballad, after all, is a kind of aspiration. So, if the fundamental things no longer apply as time goes by, who needs a song about them?(See also: A Tale of Two Declines and the excellent interview with Milt Rosenberg linked above. Highly recommended.)
I was aware, as I was talking to Milt, that I sounded like Mister Squaresville, and so be it. Because, getting on for half-a-century in, there's not a lot of cool left in the Sexual Revolution. In fact, there's not a lot of anything left other than wreckage.
Weiner's Twitter Tweaks
“Flirting”? Why, yes: I’m assured by correspondents more au courant in “social media” that there’s nothing unusual about tweeting your nether regions to people you’ve never met in distant time zones. Get with the beat, daddy-o, it’s a widely accepted courtship ritual of the 21st century: The flower of American maidenhood wants to see a prospective swain straining his BVDs at what I believe the lads at the TSA call Code Orange alert before they’ll agree to meet him for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. [. . .]
For the sake of argument, let us take it as read that American men are e-mailing their genitals across the fruited plain all day long, and that in the nature of these things one or two attachments go awry and wind up in the inbox of the elderly spinster who runs the quilting bee and you have to make a rather sheepish apology. Congressmen are among the few in this land who, in such a situation, can breezily say, as Weiner did to CNN’s Dana Bash, “You have statements that my office has put out.” Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an “office” with “staffers” to “put out” “statements” on the subject.
When Weiners have staffers, it’s very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an “office” to issue “statements” about your tweets, it’s hardly surprising you’re indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.
There is a term for regimes that submit law-abiding wheelchair-bound dying nonagenarians to public humiliations without probable cause and it isn’t “republic of limited government.” Given everybody’s touchiness over Kathryn’s North Korean comparisons, I’ll say only this: George III wouldn’t have done this to you.
Amy Alkon posts a response from a bureaucratic bozo to her own experience at the airport. Caution for sensitive types: The word “labia” is included. But that’s because in 21st century America the anatomical feature “labia” are included in a trip to the airport – and that’s what should concern you. As the crack TSA agent informs Miss Alkon, “We go thru sensitive areas with back of hand.”
That’s great news! Somewhere on page 273 of the handbook, there’s a graphic detailing the precise point on the upper thigh where the licensed state groper is obliged to invert his paw.
The New Britannia
This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. From page 204:
“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.
I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:
“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”
The World They Made
I think they will have difficulty “saving themselves.” I have many in-laws and friends in delightful corners of village England, where as the sun rises on ancient hedgerows and thatched cottages it is easy to believe the paralytic chavs and incendiary imams and all the rest are somewhere far away and always will be. As leftie columnists in their Hampstead redoubts began (privately) to calculate as the rioters moved in from the less fashionable arrondissements, on a small island the mob doesn’t stay beyond the horizon for long.
Mad Debt
But in the early 21st century foreign and domestic debt is a threat to liberty. As the Brokest Nation in History drowns in its profligacy, its commissars will grow ever more rapacious and desperate. If you think Obama’s dreary attempt to blame America’s woes on corporate-jet owners is unbecoming to the chief of state, wait till he’s reduced to complaining about two-car families. By the way, if you’re reading this out on the runway at O’Hare, what’s the difference between a corporate jet landing and Obama flying in? With Air Force One, even when they switch the engines off, all you can hear is the whining.
No author writes a dystopian apocalyptic doomsday book because he wants it to happen: Apart from anything else, the collapse of the banking system makes it hard to cash the royalty check. You write a doomsday book in hopes you can stop it happening. But time is running short. If you think we’ve got until 2050 or 2025, you’re part of the problem.
Imperial Presidency
Did no one in the smartest administration in history think this might be the time for the president to share in some of the “bad luck” and forgo an ostentatious vacation in the exclusive playground of the rich? When you’re the presiding genius of the Brokest Nation in History, enjoying the lifestyle of the super-rich while allegedly in “public service” sends a strikingly Latin American message. Underlining the point, the president then decided to pass among his suffering people by touring small town Minnesota in an armored Canadian bus accompanied by a 40-car motorcade. In some of these one-stoplight burgs, the president’s escort had more vehicles than the municipality he was graciously blessing with his presence.
American Autumn
Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. [. . .]
Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for.
Adult Babies
An able-bodied man paid by the government of the United States to lie in a giant crib, wetting his diaper week in week out, is almost too poignant an emblem of the republic at twilight. But, as Hillaire Belloc wrote, “Always keep a hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse.” Only last week, ABC News reported:
At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.Oh, no! The horror!
“Self-reliance” is now a pejorative? Nice to have that clarified. And San Francisco, a city that registers more dogs than it has kids enrolled in its schools and in which adults are perforce the children they never bothered having, seems as good a place as any to make it official. In less enlightened times, “self-reliance” was the great animating principle of the American experiment. By the standards of the day, George III was one of the most benign, caring rulers on earth: You were his mewling charges, and he was the regal babysitter. Then a bunch of settlers in small towns clinging to wilderness and thousands of miles from His Majesty the Nanny decided they didn’t need him and they could stand on their own. What’s the word for that? Oh, yeah: self-reliance.
Is it too late for a Self-Reliance Awareness Day? No, there’s no ribbons. Make your own damn ribbon. If that’s too much to hope for, how about a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Debt Awareness Day? The ribbon starts out black but turns deeper and deeper red. How about a We’ve Spent All the Money Including the Money for an Awareness-Raising Ribbon Day? An Impending Societal Collapse Awareness Day?
Corporate Collaborators
It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al., but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three and a half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with “If I Had a Hammer.” As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they’re not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.
No Man's Land
Here surely is an almost too perfect snapshot of a culture that simultaneously destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood. The “child” in this vignette ought to be the ten-year-old boy, “hands up against the wall,” but instead the “man” appropriates the child role for himself: Why, the graduate assistant is so “distraught” that he has to leave and telephone his father. He is pushing 30, an age when previous generations would have had little boys of their own. But today, confronted by a grade-schooler being sodomized before his eyes, the poor distraught child-man approaching early middle-age seeks out some fatherly advice, like one of Fred MacMurray’s “My Three Sons” might have done had he seen the boy next door swiping a can of soda pop from the lunch counter. [. . .]
You could hardly ask for a more poignant emblem of the hollow braggadocio of the West at twilight than the big, beefy, bulked-up shoulder pads and helmets of Penn State football, and the small stunted figures inside.
The Terrorists Have Won
US airport “security” serves no serious purpose except to accustom free-born peoples to behaving like a compliant bovine herd. America is now a land where 85-year old grannies are strip-searched without probable cause. You’re extremely naive if you think that, once government acquires a taste for that, it will remain confined to the airport.
Zero Tolerance, Zero Proportion
If officials of the Boston public-schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year-old kicks another seven-year-old in the crotch that that is an act of “sexual harassment,” then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city’s children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.
Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive.
The Gingrich Gestalt
On the eve of Iowa it seems the Republican base’s dream candidate is a Clinton-era retread who proclaims himself a third Roosevelt, with Taft’s waistline and twice as many ex-wives as the first 44 presidents combined; a lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg; a self-help guru crossed with a K Street lobbyist, which means he’s helped himself on a scale few of us could dream of. For this the Tea Party spent three years organizing and agitating?
Elisabeth's Barrenness and Our Own
The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for your country . . . A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words at the dawn of the “Me Decade,” “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.”
Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.
If you believe in God, the utilitarian argument for religion will seem insufficient and reductive: “These are useful narratives we tell ourselves,” as I once heard a wimpy Congregational pastor explain her position on the Bible. But, if Christianity is merely a “useful” story, it’s a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth. The hyper-rationalists ought at least to be able to understand that post-Christian “rationalism” has delivered much of Christendom to an utterly irrational business model: a pyramid scheme built on an upside-down pyramid. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have seen where that leads. Like the song says, Merry Christmas, baby.
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Steyn: Arab Spring to American Autumn:
I was idly considering compiling a big ol’ year-end round-up of my take on 2011, but the Pundette has put together such a grand anthology of Steyn bits from the last 12 months I don’t think I can improve on it. Some of it I’d clean forgotten I’d written.It was my pleasure. You may call me a shameless fangurrl and I won't deny it. But nobody comes close to Steyn on the culture, and yeah, it trumps economics and everything else.
The Obama stuff’s in there and the spending, and the Weiners and Sanduskys, but I like the way the selection focuses on the broader themes underlying the freaky news items. As I always say, in the end culture trumps economics. The real problem in Greece isn’t the Greek finances so much as the Greek people. That’s a good general rule.
So Happy New Year – and let’s get real in 2012.
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Linked by Marathon Pundit -- thanks and HNY!
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Related: Most memorable quotes of 2011 (only about 15% Steyn).
Also: Same deal for 2010.
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December 30, 2011
If Santorum is surging, so is Perry
Today's NBC/Marist poll finds that Santorum has risen 6 points, from 9 to 15%. Perry has risen 4 points, from 10 to 14%. The Washington Post is fairly typical in its coverage, calling the Santorum rise a "surge" but Perry's "a slight boost." The margin of error is 4.8%.
Yesterday's Rasmussen survey put Santorum at 16%, Perry at 13%, and Gingrich at 13%. The margin of error is +/- 4.
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Memorable quotes from 2011
Way too long and yet not finished. Oh well. I'm tired of looking at it and you probably will be, too, before you get to the end (though I've saved some of the best for last). But anyway, here goes:
I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. Barack Obama
Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living, and it tells us something truly important about Barack Obama. His ignorance is as broad as it is deep. Not that you couldn't deduce that on your own from his performance on the job. Scott Johnson
His mind is set in concrete. Richard Epstein
Well, now, here’s my point. If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon — (laughter) — you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then. (Laughter.) . . . So, like I said, if you’re getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. Barack Obama
America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. Mark Steyn
In fact, this weekend was such a tense time in the White House that Obama only got in nine holes of golf. But he still managed to deliver his joke script to the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner Saturday evening. Sunday was, Brennan revealed to his eager audience, "probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of times in the lives of the people assembled here." Poor poor bureaucrats. Extra Tums all around. Did someone order dinner? Andrew Malcolm
Go ahead, Mr. President, play golf. But you should never take it for granted that you’re a president playing golf, not a golfer playing president. Jonah Goldberg
And Milbank notes that it wasn't only Republicans who made a mockery of Obama's travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham of a speech to a joint session of Congress. James Taranto
We don’t estimate speeches. Douglas Elmendorf
He’s like a new car: First it’s really awesome, and then you realize it’s a lot like the other cars. Jerome Lincolns
Charm is no substitute for substance. And they aren’t that charming. Jennifer Rubin
Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.” Unnamed official
Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable. Joe Biden
Friedman’s gut is a terrifying thing. Jonah Goldberg
A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. Mark Steyn
June 29 was the day that Wisconsin was to be no more. The streets were going to be deluged with sewage. Children would begin pouring bleach into their cereal, as they would cease to learn otherwise in school. The state would devolve into a fiery Mad Max–style wasteland, where people feast on squirrels and barter their pelts. For it was the day that Governor Scott Walker’s plan to scale back public union collective bargaining took effect. Christian Schneider
I, for one, am trying to determine which of my children to love less in order to make more room in my heart to love Paul Ryan more. Christian Schneider
They need her. She doesn’t need newspaper or TV producers to drive her story. She drives them. Crazy. Michelle Malkin
Seriously, the future of the nation hangs in the balance and some morons want to saddle up with a rich, self-promoting, rodeo clown? Dan Riehl
Sell icky some place else Newt, we're not buying. Patrick Archbold
I will work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your lives as I can. Rick Perry
When they ask me, "Who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?" I’m going to say, "You know, I don’t know. Do you know?" Herman Cain
President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Qaddafi - just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing before I say yes I agree, or no I didn't agree. I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason - nope, that's a different one. [pause] I gotta go back and see - um, I got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Herman Cain
Yet for the first time in decades I feel a sudden craving for nicotine, possibly while making non-sexual gestures of an uncomfortable nature. Mark Steyn
I’ll tell you what, ten thousand bucks. Ten-thousand dollar bet? Mitt Romney
Go ahead, GOP. Nominate this health-care regulating, pro-abortion, flip-flopping, liberal, phony, RINO stiff. But believe me when I say that I will NEVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER vote for him. Jay Anderson
Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. George Will
We should all envy Newt Gingrich’s vitality that he has been capable of such youthful indiscretions in his mid to late 60s. Rich Lowry
Oops. Rick Perry
So this is my choice now? Newt or Mitt? Wow, life sucks. Patrick Archbold
I don’t have to convince myself that he’s a changed man in order to feel good about my choice. Damn Dirty Rino
That’s great news! Somewhere on page 273 of the handbook, there’s a graphic detailing the precise point on the upper thigh where the licensed state groper is obliged to invert his paw. Mark Steyn
You get real smart after they come to your house and arrest you and make you feel like Charles Manson. Wade Martin
An able-bodied man paid by the government of the United States to lie in a giant crib, wetting his diaper week in week out, is almost too poignant an emblem of the republic at twilight. Mark Steyn
Back at the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, it’s a hygienic disaster area: greasy hair, stained shirts, crusted trousers—and that’s just the journalists. Matt Labash
We don’t know where it comes from. It just appears, and we eat it. OWSer Tom Hintze
Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. Mark Steyn
First, as an historian with a passion for medieval history, I have often wondered what odors would assail the senses if one was among a large group of individuals who had only a passing acquaintance with concepts of hygiene. I no longer have to wonder. Jim Lacey
It’s like Walmart for rats. Wayne Yon
The sperm meets the egg, the kid's born and off to school he goes and you might see him on weekends, but you're not gonna be expected to feed him. Rush Limbaugh
Moreover, a nation of children who get dropped off each morning as they kick and scream for their mommies can hardly be described as a net positive. Suzanne Venker
Our kids aren't rousted like vagrants and put on buses before the sunrise because it suits the public school teachers. We go to bed when we're tired, and we sleep until the sunlight wakes us up. Our kids sleep until they're not tired anymore, then their mother starts school. Ambien for dinner and Paxil for breakfast makes you an extra in a zombie movie. Gregory Sullivan
It’s not true that kids grow up fast. What is true is that it seems fast if you’re paying too much attention to other stuff. Joel Achenbach
Big Government programs “for the children” are never about the children. Michelle Malkin
When you are home schooled, you automaticly loose the whole social experience of school. In the real world you need to be social. Otherwise you’re going to get know where. Anonymous public school student
Among much of America’s hideous educrat monopoly, the Golden Rule is that regulatory compliance is always the right thing to do, no matter how stupid and wicked it is. Mark Steyn
If [Itzhak Perlman] was thirteen years old today he'd probably play X-Box instead, be systematically starved and hounded because he's "obese," and be drugged into oblivion because he won't pay attention to drivel in class. Gregory Sullivan
When citizens are taking pictures of couples with children because it is so rare to see such a sight you know the country has failed. Amy Owen
Good rule of thumb in politics: Find out what side of the issue feminists are on, and get on the other side. (If feminists ever bothered to denounce Islam’s brutal oppression of women, I might have to consider joining the Taliban. But feminists are too busy whining about “pay equity” to notice that Muslims are still stoning women to death under sharia law and forcing girls into arranged marriages.) Stacy McCain
What the hell is wrong with Weiner and everyone? The guy deserves a rap in the mouth for that, doesn't he? Where are the feminists? Matthew Archbold
Cut him some slack. Hey look, Rep. Weiner’s a busy guy. Who can possibly expect him to keep track of every picture of his own crotch he’s ever taken? Jonah Goldberg
No - the real outrage is that Anthony Weiner has a cushy athletic club, paid for by us, as a backdrop for his stupid photos. I pay money every month to work out on weight machines at our local gym while these do-nothing gas bags in Washington hang out in their very own taxpayer funded gym. Now, that's outrageous. Adrienne
“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date.” Let’s translate that Jon Corzine quote into Latin, engrave it in stone, and make it the official motto of Congress. Kevin Williamson
The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's? Charles Krauthammer
If you haven't already read America Alone, you simply must. It will make you want to have kids and buy guns. Dr. Milton Wolf
After finishing reading the book I wasn't sure whether to get pregnant or kill myself. Wendy Sullivan
I was aware, as I was talking to Milt, that I sounded like Mister Squaresville, and so be it. Because, getting on for half-a-century in, there's not a lot of cool left in the Sexual Revolution. In fact, there's not a lot of anything left other than wreckage. Mark Steyn
Self-indulgence is the common thread that runs through most culture war issues. From marriage to divorce to cohabitation to abortion, the desperate desire to satisfy the longings of our heart collides with a Judeo-Christian moral tradition that calls for children to be raised in faithful, married mother-father households. And so we make endless accommodations to our desires — protecting as a legal right the quest to satisfy every personal whim — and our culture cracks and crumbles. David French
This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale - and it barely makes the papers. Mark Steyn
The Statue of Liberty should be the symbol of this city, not the grim reaper. Archbishop Dolan
Seriously, does 30 years of calling babies “blobs of tissue” have no effect on the culture? Matthew Archbold
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Last year's quotes here.
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