Happy Magna Carta Day!

Mark Steyn: The Field Where Liberty Was Sown -- "I liked it better the old way. Real rights are like Magna Carta: restraints on state power. Too many people today understand the word "rights" to mean baubles and trinkets a gracious sovereign bestows on his subjects - "free" health care, "free" community college, "safe spaces" from anyone saying anything beastly - all of which require a massive, coercive state regulatory regime to enforce."

You *knew* it was gonna be

Mark Steyn: In related news -- "~In related news: The guy who put up "white people only" stickers all over Austin, Texas turns out to be "social justice warrior" Adam Reposa - just "raising awareness" of your racism, you racey-race racist you."

Contrast and compare

Mark Steyn: Holiday Memories You'll Cherish Forever -- The Republic is dying: it is, in fact, being murdered by the leftists (appointed and elected) in government.

The Man Who Wasn't There

Mark Steyn: The Man Who Wasn't There (cont)

'Liberal' race-card distraction to protect statism

Bob Parks: Update: Deceptive-Edit Of The Day

Bob Parks: Video Of The Day

Bob Parks: Deceptive-Edit Of The Day



Mark Steyn: How Now White Cowman?


Truth Revolt: Unedited Tape of Bundy Emerges, Sheds Light on 'Racist' Remarks -- "As always, there's more to the story than what the New York Times says."

Look, leftists are liars, *all* leftists are liars (for leftism itself is a murderous lie): even if what they say is narrowly true, they're using it to lie.

Better than chocolate

Mark Steyn: A Man Alone -- [warning: language alert] --

A few years back, I wrote about how The Joke, Milan Kundera's great novel of the pitfalls of ideologically unsound gags in Communist Eastern Europe, now applied far more to those of us in the western world. So, for Valentine's Day, a reminder to the menfolk out there never to fall for that old favorite from the small ads and dating agencies - the woman looking for a man with a "good sense of humor":

In 2011, Surgery News, the official journal of the American College of Surgeons, published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Lazar Greenfield, examining research into the benefits to women of . . . well, let Dr. Greenfield explain it:

They found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and, of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.

As this was the Valentine's issue, Dr. Greenfield concluded on a "light-hearted" note:

Now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Oh, my. When the complaints started rolling in from lady doctors, Surgery News withdrew the entire issue. All of it. Gone. Then Dr. Greenfield apologized. Then he resigned as editor. Then he apologized some more. Then he resigned as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The New York Times solemnly reported that Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, declared she was "glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned." But Dr. Colleen Brophy, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, said "the resignation would not end the controversy."

Dr. Greenfield was one of the most eminent men - whoops, persons - in his profession, and, when it comes to vascularized vaginas, he had the facts on his side. But, like Ludvik, the protagonist of Kundera's novel, he made an ideologically unsound joke, and so his career had to be ended. No apology would cut it, so the thought police were obliged to act: To modify the old line, the operation was a complete success, and the surgeon died. ...

You know, men, perhaps, just maybe, one very important reason that Western women, almost all of them, are so hateful (and so miserable in their "freedom") and so gleeful to see a man, any man, destroyed, is because *you* have been using women as sterile cum-dumps -- you have embraced-and-acted-upon the lies of the "Sexual Revolution", knowing them to be lies. You have willfully, indeed gleefully, made of yourself nothing more than a hard-on, and have turned women, all women, including the one you finally married, and your daughters, into nothing more than cunts. Fucking a sheet of rubber, even it there is a cunt wrapped around it, is not the same as making love to the wife with whom you have mutually committed your lives.

To put it another way, perhaps one very important reason that Western women, almost all of them, are willingly voting with their lives and actions (and votes in the voting booth) to destroy Western civilization is because *you* did so first, when you choose to use women as things, rather than to treat then as persons ... and as women.

That's a more competitive title than you might think.

Mark Steyn, concerning the anti-Constitutional 'lawfare' being waged against him over his mockery of the very mockable warm-monger "scientist" Michael Mann -- "I Stand By Everything I Wrote"

I wanted especially to share the ending quip:

Yet amidst an avalanche of commentary in recent days perhaps the most penetrating legal analysis comes from Kevin Robbins:

Mark Steyn is probably the most dickish bastard to ever come out of Canada.

That's a more competitive title than you might think.

It is, indeed. I've known, or at least met, three Canadians in person, and two were 'dicks'. And, at the moment, I can't even recall who the third one was ... so, it's entirely possible that I've known or met only two and that they both were 'dicks'.

An amazing (and amusing) juxtaposition

Canceled health care plans to get one years extension, president says --

WASHINGTON (AP/WJLA) - Admitting that his administration “fumbled” the healthcare rollout, President Obama made steps on Thursday in order to fix the beleaguered Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Obama said that Americans whose insurance would terminate at the end of 2013 will now be able to stay on their current plans for another year.
...

Even if he really were legally the President of the United States, we doesn't *have* the authority to suspend any part of "his signature legislation" ... not that any such legal niceties have every bothered him or his supporters.


White House: Obama would veto Republican healthcare bill --

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama would veto a bill sponsored by a Republican congressman that would allow insurers to offer healthcare plans slated to be canceled because they do not meet the new U.S. healthcare law's standards, the White House said on Thursday.

The veto threat came hours after Obama, under fire for the botched roll-out of his signature domestic policy achievement, said health insurers could extend by at least one year policies that were due to be canceled because they do not comply with new minimum requirements.
...

Meanwhile, Congress does have the authority to amend or suspend any portion of this illegal (*) so-called law, or to scrap the whole damned mess.

Open your eyes, Americans: this alien interloper thinks he’s an Absolute Monarch. This is how republics die, this is how tyrranies are born.

Mark Steyn:

Hewitt ... pointed out to Steyn that today’s move could postpone the worst of Obamacare to just before next year’s midterm elections.

“I think that’s true. I mean, he keeps using this line, oh he’s ‘only inflicting catastrophe on fewer than 5 percent of the population,” Steyn said. “That’s because he unilaterally decided to suspend the employer mandate for a year. Otherwise, a lot of spouses and children, for example just to take the most obvious thing, would be getting kicked off employer-based plans round about now. Now obviously this is unbecoming to a republic, to any kind of theory of responsible government. One of the indictments of George III that you excitable revolutionary colonials made was that he was arbitrarily suspending laws that had been passed and refusing to implement them according to his regal whims. Obama, having wrecked people’s lives by forcing insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. I don’t even think that’s doable, but if it were doable then this would no longer be a free society.”

(*) It's unConstitutional, and thus illegal, no matter what those fools on the supreme Court have decreed.

News from home

Richland Source: Best-selling author Mark Steyn addresses audience at theatre -- The Ashbrook Center is located at Ashland University, in Ashland (city), Ahsland County, Ohio ... the county next door to where I live. I wasn't there, I was in Stark County.

The Unmourned

Mark Steyn (in NRO's 'The Corner'): The Unmourned

...
Instead of my Arizona comparison, what about Sandy Hook? One solitary act of mass infanticide by a mentally-ill loner calls into question the constitutional right to guns, but a sustained conveyor belt of infanticide by an entire cadre of cold-blooded killers apparently has no implications for the constitutional right to abortion. As one commentator wondered two years ago:

Does 30 years of calling babies “blobs of tissue” have no effect on the culture?

For the answer, consider the testimony of “Nurse” Moton - and the clarification by AP writer Maryclaire Dale:

She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, “At first I didn’t.”

Abortions are typically performed in utero.

“Typically.” So, finding oneself called on to “abort” a “viable fetus” in a toilet with a pair of scissors, who wouldn’t be confused as to whether it’s “wrong” or merely marginally atypical?

What difference does it make?

Mark Steyn: Hillary lip-synced more than Beyoncé



No matter what the venue or subject matter, when someone begins to pose to himself "rhetorical questions", as Clinton does at the beginning of this clip, you can be sure, with a high degree of confidence, that that person is about to deliver himself up a steaming load of bullshit.

The perfect 'Perfect Christmas' book

Mark Steyn: The perfect "Perfect Christmas" book

Mark Steyn: Let Them Go Hungry

I dislike first ladies — as a concept, I mean, not as dinner dates. I think of the first lady as an individual who happens to be married to the guy with the job, rather than as a job in its own right with a huge staff and bloated budget. But I seem to be in a minority, and most Americans appear to be comfortable with the neo-monarchical inflating of the president's wife into a full-blown Queen Consort. So, to give all those staffers the pretense of something to do, it's necessary to identify a "cause" for the first lady to "champion." The Arab Spring? Whoa, steady on. By "cause," we mean something kinda non-political, more like good works, but with the force of federal power behind it.

So it was decided that Michelle Obama would go to war on childhood obesity....

The first lady was on hand for the launch of the new federally mandated lunch limits. The stench of failure and risibility has not yet attached to this initiative as it has to so many other Obama-era bureaucratic excesses. But, through September, returning schoolchildren complained about their new, insufficient lunches. Teachers and parents who took up their cause did so in statist terms, beseeching the commissars to raise the mandated calorie limits. Very few did so on first-principle grounds — which is to say the argument that a system in which a centralized bureaucracy attempts to impose a uniform menu on a nation of 300 million people is nuts, and cannot survive. In theory, education is the responsibility of local school districts in sovereign states. Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.

Where do you go to vote out the Commissar of School Lunches? Even if Romney wins in November, I doubt this will be anybody's big priority. Statists well understand that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. Sometimes your team has to take a time-out for a couple of years, but, even when they do, all the departments and agencies and bureaus are still in place, hyper-regulating away. I mean, how often does the party of small government actually abolish anything? ...

Ever since I was a kid, and began to understand such matters, I have despised the concept of 'First Lady', for just the reason Steyn mentions: I am, and have always been, a republican.

The Paramilitarized Bureaucracies

Mark Steyn: The Paramilitarized Bureaucracies -- I don't have the time to fish out any of the gems, but as always, it's well worth reading the whole thing.

The cliff is real

Mark Steyn: Cliff Notes-- "... If the media-Democrat alliance want a clifftop election, bring it on. If the Dems are determined to make Ryan own the plummeting granny, make them own the cliff. Unlike the plummeting granny, the cliff is real."

I would go further

Mark Steyn: The Committee on Un-Chicagoan Activities -- "If you’re gay and you think opportunist thugs like Menino and Emanuel are really there for you, you’re a sap."

I would go further and say that if you’re "gay" and you are not outraged at all the thuggery in the name of "gay rights" currently being committed against the spirit of the US Constitution and against the freedoms and rights of all Americans, then you deserve what's going to happen to you in a few years when this leftist gambit all plays out.

This is why he's paid the big bucks

Mark Steyn: Dissent is the Highest Form of …no, wait -- "... I hate to bring up other “mid-century notions” but intellectual diversity on the left is increasingly indistinguishable from Tupperware night with the Stepford Wives."

Missing the Big Picture

Missing the Big Picture

Via Bob Parks, I encountered this audio segment of Mark Steyn (standing in for Rush Limbaugh) ... and I have to say, Steyn really missed the boat on this one. He shows himself here to be Not Serious -- not serious about respecting and enforcing the US Constitution, and thus not serious about preserving either the United States or America (the two are not *exactly* the same thing, thus the "or").

As Steyn rightly says, Obama is not the disease, he's but a symptom of the disease. But, likewise, and contrary to what Steyn says, the fact that "53% of your fellow Americans voted to put him in office" is also a symptom of the disease, and not the disease itself.

Furthermore, in contrast to the assertion he makes here in apparently rebuking a caller to the program, Steyn does not know that Obama was born in a Hawaiian hospital (*). At most, he assumes it ... and, clearly, he's totally incurious about actually knowing the truth of the matter.

Hell! We don't know that Obama even *is* a US citizen, much less that he meets the Constitutional requirement to occupy the presidency.

(*) And, whether Obama was or was not born in Hawaii maters only because his father was not a US citizen, and his mother was apparently a minor. Had both his parents been adult US citizens, he could have been born on Mars and he'd still be a "natural born" US citizen.


The Big Picture
The disease that is destroying the United States is not simply that 53% of the voters are willing to vote for whichever scumbag politician will promise them that in exchange for their votes he will enable them magically to live off the work and effort of other citizens. Socialism, too, is just a symptom of the disease.

The disease is that most of us -- including most, if not all, of the so-called conservative punditry -- refuses to understand the US Constitution, much less to honor it. One cannot actually be a conservative if one will not free oneself from the "liberal," which is to say, leftist, assumptions which control both "acceptable" public discourse and the very thoughts one allows oneself to think.

The disease destroying America is not economic, and it's not political; it's spiritual. The disease is that we are faithless: just as we are not keeping faith with the God of our Fathers, so too, we are not keeping faith with our Fathers.

To paraphrase what Someone said 2000 years ago: "If you will not honor the least points of the law, you will not honor the greater."

Steyn -- Musical Mullahs!

This post is an amusing example of Mark Steyn's wit and humor (in the face of some very un-funny trends in the world) that I wish to share with Gentle Reader; from Mark's Mailbox

Michael Young writes (see the header 'Hello, Dhimmi!'):

Mark, I’m sure you don’t read the New York Times, and thus probably missed their effusion about a revival of Nunsense and its jolly sendup of quaint Christian practices. I could not forbear to imagine the concomitant Islam-based musicals that will doubtless overtake Broadway and the West End in a similar spirit: My Fair Mullah, Clam Chador, Meet Me at the Minbar, Mahmoud, The Hijabi Game, West Side Sharia, maybe even a revival of The Desert Song.

I’m sure you could think of better ones, and have the connections to get them actually into production.

Steyn replies:

MARK SAYS: Well, first, I think you're confusing West Side Sharia with Best Eid Story. But on my European travels this month, I serenaded one audience with my instant guide to post-von Trapp Austrian demographic trends: "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sharia?" So this subject has been on my mind. There are so many wonderful Islamic musicals to choose from. Who could forget Angela Lansbury's star turn in Jerry Herman's toe-tapping show about the Saudi justice system, Maim? Or the all-time great jihadist musical Gentlemen Prefer Bombs, with its fabulous Act Two showstopper when the entire chorus self-detonates and stops the show, at least until the dead can be removed from the orchestra pit and union-accredited subs brought in. It's one of the most memorable numbers I've seen since Mary Martin sang Cole Porter's dazzlingly rhymed honor-killing charm song, "My Head Belongs To Daddy". I certainly enjoyed the recent film version of that wonderful show about the deflowering of Aisha, Nine, and the recent revival of Show Goat, Jerome Kern's epic tale of the descent into a life of depravity of the winner of Saudi Arabia's Most Beautiful Goat competition. But, that said, my personal favorite remains Andrew Lloyd Webber's record-breaking clitoridectomy musical, Cuts.

Not just for women anymore

The Hyacinth Girl: Hysterics: not just for women anymore:

What an hysterical ninny. Ah, the age of the gelded man, for whom independent thought is as scary as a non-hybrid car. Though Mark Steyn is a bit taller than you’d expect, he’s hardly scary. I suppose that it’s the aforementioned independent thought that freaks this Tweeter out.

Sad.

I wanted especially to draw Gentle Reader's attention to April's excellent summary of the present age -- "Ah, the age of the gelded man, for whom independent thought is as scary as a non-hybrid car."

One of the things I long ago noticed about “liberals” (and, naturally enough, mock) is that they imagine to shriek that this or that is “frightening” or “chilling” is to make a decisive and utterly compelling argument.

Five-year old girls are more manly, and more rational, than the typical “liberal.” Seven-year olds, tops.


edit (where are my manners?); this is what April is talking about:

Mark Steyn is a truly scary man. Pseudo-intellectual thug who sounds good while saying bad things.