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Mark Steyn: A GOP Win in November Doesn't Change Anything (+video)

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Photo Credit: nmhschoolCould Republican’s win big on Election Day and still be behind the ball in the grand scheme of things? Mark Steyn seems to think so.

According to the conservative columnist, even though conservatives and Republicans may do well on Nov. 4, liberals are winning the other 364 days throughout the year, or the “culture stakes,” with tremendous effect on our society.

“Election Day is one day a year, and the culture is the other 364 days a year,” said Steyn. “So if you’re not in there competing in the schools, competing in the pop culture, competing in the media, competing in the main-line churches, then the air we breathe becomes liberal.”

“That’s the default setting in society. Whoever gets elected on a Tuesday morning in November doesn’t actually make much difference. . .The reason candidates don’t get traction is when they’re trying to move toward the center. . . Effective conservative leaders, [Ronald] Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher, take the two most obvious examples, move the center towards them,” he said. “Mrs. Thatcher had a great line. Before you can win the election, you have to win the argument.”

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Detroit Surrenders As If It Had Been Invaded

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Photo Credit: Ann MillspaughBy the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40% of its street lamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 911 call; only a third of its ambulances are drivable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Gov. Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily.

Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself.

The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit is now a border between First World and Third World — or, if you prefer, developed world and post-developed world.

To any American time-transported from the mid-20th century, the city’s implosion would be incredible. Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the Arsenal of Democracy, and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land.

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Mark Steyn: The Legal Absurdities of the George Zimmerman Trial

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By Mark Steyn. Just when I thought the George Zimmerman “trial” couldn’t sink any lower, the prosecutorial limbo dancers of the State of Florida magnificently lowered their own bar in the final moments of their cable-news celebrity.

In real justice systems, the state decides what crime has been committed and charges somebody with it. In the Zimmerman trial, the state’s “theory of the case” is that it has no theory of the case: Might be murder, might be manslaughter, might be aggravated assault, might be a zillion other things, but it’s something. If you’re a juror, feel free to convict George Zimmerman of whatever floats your boat.

Nailing a guy on something, anything, is a time-honored American tradition: If you can’t get Al Capone on the Valentine’s Day massacre, get him on his taxes. Americans seem to have a sneaky admiration for this sort of thing, notwithstanding that, as we now know, the government is happy to get lots of other people on their taxes, too. Ever since the president of the United States (a man so cautious and deferential to legal niceties that he can’t tell you whether the Egyptian army removing the elected head of state counts as a military coup until his advisors have finished looking into the matter) breezily declared that if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon, ever since the U.S. Department of so-called Justice dispatched something called its “Community Relations Services” to Florida to help organize anti-Zimmerman rallies at taxpayer expense, ever since the politically savvy governor appointed a “special prosecutor” and the deplorably unsavvy Sanford Police Chief was eased out, the full panoply of state power has been deployed to nail Zimmerman on anything.

How difficult can that be in a country in which a Hispanic Obama voter can be instantly transformed into the poster boy for white racism? Who ya gonna believe – Al Sharpton or your lying eyes? As closing arguments began on Thursday, the prosecutors asked the judge to drop the aggravated assault charge and instruct the jury on felony murder committed in the course of child abuse. Felony murder is a murder that occurs during a felony, and, according to the prosecution’s theory du jour, the felony George Zimmerman was engaged in that night was “child abuse,” on the grounds that Trayvon Martin, when he began beating up Zimmerman, was 17-years-old. This will come as news to most casual observers of the case, who’ve only seen young Trayvon in that beatific photo of him as a 12-year-old.

In that one pitiful closing moment, the case achieved its sublime reductio ad absurdum: After a year’s labors, after spending a million bucks, after calling a legion of risible witnesses, even after the lead prosecutor dragged in a department store mannequin and personally straddled it on the floor of the court, the state is back to where it all began – the ancient snapshot of a smiling middle-schooler that so beguiled American news editors, Trayvon Martin apparently being the only teenager in America to have gone entirely unphotographed in the second decade of the 21st century. And, if Trayvon is a child, his malefactor is by logical extension a child abuser. Read more from this story HERE.

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‘Justice for Trayvon’: Audio released of DOJ member urging action against George Zimmerman

By Jessica Chasmar. The legal watchdog Judicial Watch released an audio recording Thursday of a Department of Justice staffer urging Sanford, Fla., city officials and the minority advocacy group Dream Defenders to seek justice for Trayvon Martin, because “if a community perceives that there’s something wrong in the black community, there’s something wrong”…

Mr. Thomas Battles [regional director of the DOJ’s Community Relations Service] then introduced a member of the Dream Defenders.

“When Trayvon happened, for many of us, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” the man said. “We had grown up in a state and environment where race is a way of life … We’re not from Sanford, but what Sanford represented to us was the very real problems going around this state and this country. We wanted to figure out how could we stand in solidarity, and how could we make this about not just justice for Trayvon, but using this moment and using the opportunity to honor his memory, to honor his spirit by working to bring down the various structures and the various systems that allow something like this to happen.” Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Steyn: We’re at a Point Where “Respectable Society Decays into Something Darker and Far More Sinister and Unattractive”

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photo credit: nmhschool

In a wide-ranging interview with Hugh Hewitt this week, Mark Steyn weighed in on everything from Holder and the IRS scandal to the disclosure of the federal government’s extensive surveillance of the American public:

Hugh Hewitt: Mark, I’d like to begin with a simple request. Please don’t call me at home, because if anybody’s being snooped, I’m sure you are.

Mark Steyn: Yeah, in the days before all this stuff broke, I had, I suddenly became terribly paranoid. I started thinking I heard clicks on the line. And my assistant sent me an email which mysteriously took 13 hours to arrive, and I though oh, yes, that’s gone via Eric Holder. And I think it actually makes sense for the default position to be that you just assume that somewhere, somehow, this is being recorded by some government operative somewhere or other.

…

Hugh Hewitt: You know, I was on Sean Hannity’s television show on Monday night with Joe Trippi, and not even Joe, there are no Democrats who will deny that Eric Holder misled Congress. Nobody believes he was telling the truth, Mark Steyn, and yet he’s still the attorney general.

Mark Steyn: Well, yeah, and this is the chief law officer of the United States. And he’s just gone on national television and said he was obligated to lie to the judge. I had to sign some rinky-dink, little affidavit for something or another the other day, and you know, you have to get it notarized and all the rest of it, and you’re not allowed, when the citizen has to file relatively routine bits of information, you’re not allowed to lie. In fact, the point of the law, you’re not allowed to lie to Eric Holder’s minions. You’re not allowed to lie to a federal agent. Martha Stewart went to jail for lying to an employee of the attorney general of the United States. Yet the Attorney General himself is allowed to lie to a judge. This isn’t small stuff, you know. It’s the point at which a respectable society decays into something darker and far more sinister and unattractive.

Mark Steyn: Michele Bachmann ‘Could Have Been America’s Mrs. Thatcher’

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Filling in Rush Limbaugh on his radio show Wednesday, National Review columnist Mark Steyn defended Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, who announced earlier in the day she will not seek re-election in 2014.

Steyn explained he would always have a soft spot in his heart for Bachmann because she touted his 2008 book “America Alone” in a speech. He also said she significantly contributed to race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

“I was saddened by this for a couple of reasons — one, I thought actually Michele Bachmann was a great addition to the presidential campaign and the debates above anything else got extremely boring once she was off the panels,” Steyn said. “But the other thing I like about her is she took a ton of — she’s like a lot of successful Republican women — she took a ton of heat about everything, because there’s something about successful Republican women that so-called liberal feminists seem to absolutely loathe, and they hammered Michele Bachmann. She was portrayed as crazy.”

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Steyn Warns of ‘Serious Secession Movements’ if Drift Toward Socialism Not Reversed (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerRadio host Dennis Miller and National Review columnist Mark Steyn considered Thursday the possible outcomes if the United States continues down the path of socialism.

If socialism became the prevailing governing philosophy, Miller speculated, escaping it wouldn’t require a move to the Australian outback. Instead he suggested heading for the state of Texas, because it would be the first place to push back against it.

“If I ever do flee, don’t think fleeing has to involve you going over to Alice Springs or something,” Miller said. “I’m going to Texas because that’ll be the first place that pushes back. They’re not going down the tubes with this country if this country decides to go down the tubes. I really think I’d head for Texas.”

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Steyn: There Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chechens

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As is now traditional in these stories, we’re now being told that the Brothers Tsarnaev are merely the latest card-carrying members of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. No broader pattern can be discerned, or should be discerned. All jihad is local. Nobody could have seen this coming:

Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appeared to lead normal lives

If by “normal lives”, you mean reported to the US Government by a major foreign power as possible terrorists, interviewed by the FBI, had your citizenship application put on hold, and cheerily posting a series of videos to YouTube as part of your “Terrorists” playlist. No doubt millions of people in America lead lives that “normal”.

The beatification of the pre-Marathon Tsarnaevs obscures a very disquieting pattern. As Michael Mukasey writes: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by [Fort Hood “workplace violence” facilitator] Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn’t count [Detroit’s incoming Pantybomber] Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.”

That’s quite a high failure rate, with quite a cumulative death count.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Steyn: Ted Olson ‘Lazy,’ Interracial Marriage Laws Irrelevant to Same-Sex Debate

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

On Hugh Hewitt’s Thursday night radio program, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said former Solicitor General Ted Olson is fundamentally wrong to cite the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia case — which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage — as evidence that gay marriage should be legal, because that case fundamentally understood marriage as the union of a man and a woman…

Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” said that unlike laws prohibiting same-sex marriage, restrictions on interracial marriage ran flatly contrary to that generations-old, traditional conception of marriage.

“Ted Olson said, well, you know, once upon a time, we banned interracial marriage, so this is exactly the same as Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that struck down interracial marriage,” Steyn said. ”Justice [Anthony] Kennedy said, … ’What are you on about?’ … Interracial marriage is basically an invention of 19th-century America that was at odds with existing common law marriage, as it had been for hundreds of years.”

Read more from this story HERE.

The Axis of Torpor: Against Waging War as an NGO.

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Photo Credit: National Review

I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming Finding Nemo 2 Marlin and Dory’s marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he’s not Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster — questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America — broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town — and those are just our “allies.” With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

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Mark Steyn: Acheive Ye This Goal – the Monarchical Urge Persists

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I’m also issuing a new goal for America,” declared President Obama at his State of the Union on Tuesday. We’ll come to the particular “goal” he “issued” momentarily, but before we do, consider that formulation: Did you know the president of the United States is now in the business of “issuing goals” for his subjects to live up to?

Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old. Many commentators have pointed out that the modern State of the Union is in fairly obvious mimicry of the Speech from the Throne that precedes a new legislative session in British Commonwealth countries and continental monarchies, but this is to miss the key difference. When the Queen or her viceroy reads a Throne Speech in Westminster, Ottawa, or Canberra, it’s usually the work of a government with a Parliamentary majority: In other words, the stuff she’s announcing is actually going to happen. That’s why, lest any enthusiasm for this or that legislative proposal be detected, the apolitical monarch overcompensates by reading everything in as flat and unexpressive a monotone as possible. Underneath the ancient rituals — the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod getting the door of the House of Commons slammed in his face three times — it’s actually a very workmanlike affair.

The State of the Union is the opposite. The president gives a performance, extremely animatedly, head swiveling from left-side prompter to right-side prompter, continually urging action now: “Let’s start right away. We can get this done. . . . We can fix this. . . . Now is the time to do it. Now is the time to get it done.” And at the end of the speech, nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed, and, after a few days’ shadowboxing between admirers and detractors willing to pretend it’s some sort of serious legislative agenda, every single word of it is forgotten until the next one.

In that sense, like Beyoncé lip-synching the National Anthem at the inauguration, the State of the Union embodies the decay of America’s political institutions into a simulacrum of responsible government rather than the real thing, and a simulacrum ever more divorced from the real issues facing the country. “Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion,” said the president. Really? Who knew? “Now we need to finish the job.” Just one more push is all it’ll take.

What’s he on about? The annual “deficit” has been over a trillion for every year of Obama’s presidency. The cumulative deficits have, in fact (to use a quaint expression), increased the national debt by $6 trillion. Yet Obama claims Washington has “reduced the deficit” by $2.5 trillion and all we need to do is “finish the job.” Presumably this is a reference to allegedly agreed deficit reductions over the next decade, or quarter-century, or whatever. In other words, Obama has saved $2.5 trillion of Magical Fairyland money, which happily frees him up to talk about the really critical issues like high-speed rail and green-energy solutions. These concepts, too, exist mainly in Magical Fairyland: If you think Obama-approved taxpayer-funded “high-speed rail” means you’ll be able to board a train that goes at French or Japanese speeds, I’ve a high-speed rail bridge to Brooklyn to sell you.

Read more from this story HERE.