Mark Steyn: Sharia’s Protector

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Photo Credit: Steyn Online

Photo Credit: Steyn Online

Rohullah Qarizada is one of those Afghans you used to see a lot on American TV in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s fall. Trimly bearded, dapper in Western suit and tie, he heads the Afghan Independent Bar Association in Kabul. Did you know Kabul had a bar association? A few years back, I ran into one of the U.S. prosecutors who helped set it up, with a grant from the Swedish foreign ministry. Mr. Qarizada currently sits on a committee charged with making revisions to the Afghan legal code. What kind of revisions? Well, for example: “Men and women who commit adultery shall be punished based on the circumstances by one of the following punishments: lashing, stoning.”

As in stoning to death. That’s the proposed improvement to Article 21. Article 23 specifies that said punishment shall be performed in public. Mr. Qarizada gave an interview to Reuters, explaining that the reintroduction of stoning was really no big deal: You’d have to have witnesses, and they’d better be consistent. “The judge asks each witness many questions,” he said, “and if one answer differs from other witnesses then the court will reject the claim.” So that’s all right then.

Stoning is making something of a comeback in the world’s legal codes — in October the Sultan of Brunei announced plans to put it on his books. Nevertheless, Kabul has the unique distinction of proposing to introduce the practice on America’s watch. Afghanistan is an American protectorate; its kleptocrat president is an American client, kept alive these last twelve years only by American arms. The Afghan campaign is this nation’s longest war — and our longest un-won war: That’s to say, nowadays we can’t even lose in under a decade. I used to say that, 24 hours after the last Western soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. But it’s already as if we were never there: The last Christian church in the country was razed to the ground in 2010.

At this point, Americans sigh wearily and shrug, “Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire,” or sneer, “If they want to live in a seventh-century s***hole, f*** ’em.” But neither assertion is true. Do five minutes’ googling, and you’ll find images from the Sixties and early Seventies of women in skirts above the knee listening to the latest Beatles releases in Kabul record stores. True, a stone’s throw (so to speak) from the capital, King Zahir’s relatively benign reign was not always in evidence. But, even so, if it’s too much to undo the barbarism of centuries, why could the supposed superpower not even return the country to the fitful civilization of the disco era? The American imperium has lasted over twice as long as the Taliban’s rule — and yet, unlike them, we left no trace.

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We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn

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Photo Credit: James Sarmiento

Photo Credit: James Sarmiento

The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.

The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools” and “The Five Year Party.” To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.

The problems stem from two attitudes. Social preoccupations trump the academic part of residential education, which occupies precious little of students’ time or emotions. Second, students’ view of education is strictly instrumental and credentialist. They regard the entire enterprise as a series of hoops they must jump through to obtain their 120 credits, which they blindly view as an automatic licensure for adulthood and a good job, an increasingly problematic belief.

Education thus has degenerated into a game of “trap the rat,” whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.

The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don’t even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.

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Coercing Conformity; Subjugating the First Amendment

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

In “protecting the rights of all people to worship the way they choose,” then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton vowed “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

Mrs. Clinton required translation into the language of truth, as she generally does when her lips are moving. By the “rights” of “all people” to “worship” as “they choose,” she meant the sharia-based desire of Muslim supremacists to foreclose critical examination of Islam. Madame Secretary, you see, was speechifying before her friends at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — the bloc of 56 Muslim countries plus the Palestinian territories.

At that very moment in July 2011, Christians were under siege in Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and Iran — being gradually purged from those Islamic countries just as they’d been purged from Turkey, which hosted Mrs. Clinton’s speech. As Christians from the Middle East to West Monroe, La., can tell you, the Left and its Obama vanguard are not remotely interested in their “rights . . . to worship the way they choose.”

What they choose, after all, is to honor Christian tenets about sexuality, freedom of conscience, and the sanctity of life. Those tenets, just like honest criticism of Islam, are consigned to the category Clinton calls “what we abhor.” And if progressives abhor something, it somehow always becomes everyone’s duty to make certain that those who embrace that something “don’t feel that they have . . . support.”

Of course, they do have support . . . at least on paper. The First Amendment protects all of us against government suppression of speech. But the amendment is just a parchment promise if the government against which it is a safeguard actively undermines it. That is today’s United States government: rendering free expression an illusory right by inciting the mob, by extortionate lawfare tactics that exhaust the resources and energy of the citizen.

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Do Democrats Really Need to Promote Religious Persecution?

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey

Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey

Democrat politicians do not want respectful disagreement between evangelicals and gays. War between homosexuals and evangelicals is important for them. The Democratic Party, in order to raise money from gays and lock in millennial votes, is attacking freedom of thought, speech and religion. This is a basic community organizing tactic: encourage grievance, divide the community, fan the flames of conflict, and inject government power into social problems. By putting their own political interests before every other value, Democrats have pushed our country into a culture clash that is becoming unresolvable.

It is time to take a deep breath and reaffirm the principles we all love. Phil Robertson, imperfect human being, master of the duck call, has given us a wake up call.

Gays have civil rights in our society — along with all the rest of us. When gay rights are made absolute, they threaten everyone’s fundamental civil rights. Homosexual wants and desires for universal acceptance are not civil rights.

These are our civil rights: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from involuntary servitude, the right to vote, the right to equality in public places, the right to due process of law, the right to equal protection under the law. That’s it.

Our constitutional civil rights are inalienable, meaning God-given rights, based ultimately on the teachings of the Bible. These are rights of individuals, not groups.

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In Distress: The Battle Within the Democratic Party

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Photo Credit: Mike Theiler/Reuters

Photo Credit: Mike Theiler/Reuters

Things are not going well for Democrats. Riding high just weeks ago after Republicans shut down the government, the party now finds itself in a swoon: President Obama’s ratings have hit an all-time low. The implementation of healthcare reform remains a mess. Vulnerable Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from the White House, and the party is on track to lose seats in the House and Senate next year.

Parties in distress tend to fall to bickering, and today’s Democrats are no exception. On one side, liberals calling for a muscular agenda of government expansion and progressive taxation; on the other, centrists who believe restraint is necessary in both policy and politics. Progressives have been emboldened by liberal victories like that of the new mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio. Centrists fear that liberals will drive the party out of the American mainstream with their talk of income redistribution and political correctness.

In the post-Obama era and without an incumbent on the ticket, “Where does the party go?” Jon Cowan, president of the centrist think tank Third Way, asked me. “I think that is going to be an incredibly heated debate.”

No one is saying Democrats are tipping into the kind of civil war that has riven the GOP. But the split is likely to worsen as the party confronts its future, complicating Democratic prospects in the 2014 midterm elections and coming to the fore in the 2016 primaries.

“When we focus on economic mobility, that’s a conversation that unites us,” Jack Markell, the popular two-term Delaware governor and a self-styled centrist, told me. “If it’s about inequality, it’s a conversation that has the potential of dividing us.” Markell says that middle-class voters hear in the crusade against “inequality” a desire to equalize people rather than make everyone better off.

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Steve Stockman Can’t Lose: The Political Genius of the Texas Firebrand

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Photo Credit: Politico

Photo Credit: Politico

John Cornyn saw it coming. Even with no real competition on the horizon, the senior senator from Texas had been hiring staff, building his network and choking his state’s Internet bandwidth with ads that hinted darkly at Texas’s political future without him. Cornyn, an 11-year veteran of the Senate, may have been named the body’s second most conservative member by National Journal, but after criticizing Tea Party hero Sen. Ted Cruz during the prelude to the government shutdown this fall, he had good reason to fear a threat from his party’s far-right fringe. As chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Cornyn had told sitting senators to be prepared for primary challenges—and he took his own advice.

There were rumblings of a challenge from several corners. Tea Party leaders had tried to draft Rep. Louie Gohmert, and evangelical historian David Barton had flirted with running. When conservative activists in Texas spoke privately, other names cropped up—like Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. So when a challenger came—even if he came, like an undergraduate with a term paper, less than half an hour before the filing deadline—Cornyn’s team was prepared.

But still, Steve Stockman?

Yes, that Stockman, the Republican congressman most famous outside Texas for his bombastic use of social media (his Twitter account is legendary, thanks to declarations like “Obamacare is less popular than Chlamydia” ) and outrageous proclamations (like his now-infamous “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted” bumper sticker). For the most part, other Republicans here in Texas seem merely to tolerate him—or, at best, appreciate his ability to fire up the grassroots while maintaining their distance. (One long-time Republican strategist told me the Texas congressional delegation had adopted what he termed the “rabid dog approach” to handling Stockman.) Edward Chen, former vice chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, once summed up Stockman’s place in the GOP for Texas Monthly thus: “He’s a Republican. As a Republican, he’s on our ballot. And that’s about the situation.”

Just to be clear: Nobody in Texas thinks Stockman has a snowball’s chance of winning against Cornyn, and they’re probably right. “This is going to be an irritant,” says Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based Republican strategist. “But it’s only an irritant.” Some argue that a failed primary challenge from Stockman will help burnish Cornyn’s credentials and distance him from his party’s far right. That may be true—and it may be true, as well, that Stockman’s campaign will help break the populist fever afflicting the state’s GOP.

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Craige McMillan: America, We’re in a Death Spiral

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Much of the national conversation now seems to be carried on by children under the age of 5, with 2 being the most common age.

The nation’s press corps, having seen the nation’s political discourse dumbed down to the point where they can now understand and report on it, eagerly encourage the resultant “debate.”

The vast majority of politicians – who understand that the nation’s memory, despite its young age, has reached the point of advanced Alzheimer’s – eagerly indulge them. After all, why try to explain what you are really doing when a pithy soundbite is what carries your re-election?

And that’s just the Republicans.

Make no mistake, folks; America is in the final stages of empireitis. I think in the aviation world it is referred to as a graveyard spiral or a death spiral. Everyone on board thinks things are fine, but the pilot has lost control of the airplane. While the Republicans and Democrats yell, scream and grandstand, arguing about who is going to spend the money on their pet projects, the ship of state is getting ready to crater.

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Slouching Toward Bankruptcy

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Photo Credit: Tax Credits

Photo Credit: Tax Credits

In November 2004, President George W. Bush was re-elected after campaigning on personal accounts for Social Security. It was unfair, he argued at the time, to make a generation of young people pay into a system that’s going broke. Bush’s plan promised to make the program solvent, allow younger workers the option to earn a better return by investing part of their Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts, while maintaining the status quo for current retirees.

Republicans held substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, including 55 senators. Yet there would be no Social Security reform.

Opinions vary about why that was. Writing in Forbes in 2011, Peter Ferrara, one of the strongest advocates for Social Security privatization, argued that the proposal failed because “Bush’s White House staff in charge of the Social Security reform effort never understood the politics or policy of personal accounts, and proved ineducable on the subject.” On the other side of the issue, William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in 2007 that “President Bush overestimated the amount of political capital he had banked.”

In his memoir Decision Points, Bush blames the failure on the “rigid Democratic opposition” and the lack of “strong Republican backing to get a Social Security bill through Congress.” He also recognizes that he bears some responsibility himself. Bush suggests, for instance, that he might have made some progress with centrist Democrats had he not personally campaigned against Democratic incumbents in 2002 and 2004. He also thinks that if in 2005 he had started with immigration reform rather than Social Security, he could have passed both and the country would be a better place for it.

Since the Bush debacle, Republicans have not had the courage to rally behind a plan to reform Social Security. But while the political will may not exist, the 77-year-old system remains in serious need of a makeover.

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Let’s Be Honest: Establishment GOP Broke Trust with Military Retirees

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Photo Credit: RedState

Photo Credit: RedState

Republicans in the Senate want to restore veterans benefits to the Paul Ryan – Patty Murray Budget plan.

Harry Reid is blocking the amendment so Republicans are blaming Harry Reid for cutting veterans benefits.

That is intellectually dishonest of the GOP.

Paul Ryan, a Republican, drafted the plan with Patty Murray, a Democrat.

House Republicans overwhelming approved the plan before it even made it to Harry Reid for a vote. The Republicans could have restored the cuts themselves in the House. Instead, they voted for the plan with the cuts to veterans benefits and went home.

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ObamaCare’s Troubles Are Only Beginning

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Photo Credit: Bloomberg News

Photo Credit: Bloomberg News

The White House is claiming that the Healthcare.gov website is mostly fixed, that the millions of Americans whose health plans were canceled thanks to government rules may be able to keep them for another year, and that in any event these people will get better plans through ObamaCare exchanges. Whatever the truth of these assertions, those who expect better days ahead for the Affordable Care Act are in for a rude awakening. The shocks—economic and political—will get much worse next year and beyond. Here’s why:

The “sticker shock” that many buyers of new, ACA-compliant health plans have experienced—with premiums 30% higher, or more, than their previous coverage—has only begun. The costs borne by individuals will be even more obvious next year as more people start having to pay higher deductibles and copays.

If, as many predict, too few healthy young people sign up for insurance that is overpriced in order to subsidize older, sicker people, the insurance market will unravel in a “death spiral” of ever-higher premiums and fewer signups. The government, through taxpayer-funded “risk corridors,” is on the hook for billions of dollars of potential insurance-company losses. This will be about as politically popular as bank bailouts.

The “I can’t keep my doctor” shock will also hit more and more people in coming months. To keep prices to consumers as low as possible—given cost pressures generated by the government’s rules, controls and coverage mandates—insurance companies in many cases are offering plans that have very restrictive networks, with lower-cost providers that exclude some of the best physicians and hospitals.

Next year, millions must choose among unfamiliar physicians and hospitals, or paying more for preferred providers who are not part of their insurance network. Some health outcomes will deteriorate from a less familiar doctor-patient relationship.

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