Mark Steyn Is A Genius, Editions VII & VIII
British mag The Spectator carries Mark Steyn's columns but recently instituted a subscription policy, so I feared having to pay to get my fix. Well, it's free for now, and it's marvelous: "Bush will not be mocked"One of the unsettling aspects of the post-9/11 world is that, while my columns in US newspapers merely have to heap scorn and derision upon Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand, in the United Kingdom I find myself principally in disagreement with Lord Hurd, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Sir Max Hastings, Sir Simon Jenkins, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Mr Matthew Parris and (according to what side of bed he’s gotten out of) Mr Michael Howard. Even The Spectator most weeks. This crowd are all supposedly, to one degree or another, conservatives. So am I. Clearly, one of us has got the wrong end of the stick.Meanwhile, his regular Chicago Sun-Times column looks at three somewhat small stories and wonders about their larger implications: "On culture front, we're losing war"
The obvious difference between my kind of conservatives and, say, Sir Peregrine’s is that mine are in power and his aren’t, a distinction likely to endure for the foreseeable future . . . As a result, the Tory party looks a lot more like the Democratic party and the Australian Labor party than its nominal ideological soulmates.
Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:
1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalized brothel.
2) A British court has ruled that a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained in custody because jail causes him to suffer a "depressive illness."
3) Seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Eden of Charlestown, R.I., has been awarded an A by his teacher and the "Silver Key" in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled "Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself."
A trio of itsy-bitsy little stories from the foot of page 27 of your daily paper, if they made it at all. But they're as revealing about the course of the war as anything going on in Iraq . . .
I'm not worried about Iraq. As they demonstrated on Jan. 30, they'll be just fine. The western front is the important one in this war, the point of intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.
posted by Marsh @ 2:31 PM
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