A Low View of Politics

Mark Steyn, one of the world's funniest and at the same time politically insightful Canadians, reports this little gem in his "Weiner's Twitter Tweak" column.

"According to Christopher Hitchens, politics is show business for ugly people."

It's not Aristotle, but there's something to it.

Kaganiana

Consider these gleanings.

David Brooks, "What It Takes." Kagan has been extraordinarily caution throughout her legal career. 

She has become a legal scholar without the interest scholars normally have in the contest of ideas. She’s shown relatively little interest in coming up with new theories or influencing public debate. Her publication record is scant and carefully nonideological. She has published five scholarly review articles, mostly on administrative law and the First Amendment. These articles were mostly on technical and procedural issues.

Kagan has no experience in actually judging. Of course, neither did Earl Warren, but that is no defense. Read James R. Copland at City Journal. ("Kagan Flunks Her Own Test.")

Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to succeed John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, published some thoughts on the judicial confirmation process in 1995. Reviewing Stephen Carter’s book The Confirmation Mess in The University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan asserted that prospective jurists should have demonstrated a talent for judging: “It is an embarrassment that the President and Senate do not always insist, as a threshold requirement, that a nominee’s previous accomplishments evidence an ability not merely to handle but to master the ‘craft’ aspects of being a judge.” While not in my view an “embarrassment,” Obama’s decision to nominate Kagan to the nation’s highest bench flunks her own test. If confirmed, Kagan would become the first justice in 38 years to join the Supreme Court without judicial experience.

Mark Steyn sees a stealth Canadian. ("The Canadianization of America, cont.")

For some of us, Elena Kagan is deja vu all over again. Whether or not she belongs on the Supreme Court of the United States, she'd be a shoo-in as successor to Jennifer Lynch, QC, Canada's Chief Censor. Ms Kagan's views on free speech could come straight from any Canadian "human rights" tribunal hearing: "Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs."

"Balancing" is the code word there. Canada's thought police are all about the "balancing".

Steyn points us to Mark Tapscott, "Kagan: Speech is free if government decides it has more value than 'societal costs'," and the defense by Jennifer Lynch, Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, of a good government's obligation to limit free speech in the interest of preventing expressions of hatred and contempt: "Hate speech: This debate is out of balance."

Zoo Animals Have Great Health Care Benefits

Mark Steyn points out that, sadly, the main argument against Obama's government health care takeover is pragmatic--it would cost too much. Rather, the argument should be a principled defense of liberty. Someone reminded me last night that the predominant theme of Reagan's speeches prior to becoming President was liberty, not prosperity. Prosperity is a natural and happy consequence of liberty, but it is not the noblest aspiration of the human heart. It is beneath contempt to choose comfortable slavery over precarious liberty.

Steyn draws from his Canadian experience of both government health insurance and doughnuts to make his point.

You can make the “controlling costs” argument about anything: After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America — and, given comparative girths, Canucks are clearly not getting as much bang for the buck. Why doesn’t Ottawa introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency? You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard — and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll. Under government regulation, eventually every doughnut would be all hole and no doughnut, and the problem would be solved. Even if the hole costs $1.6 trillion.

How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?

Read the whole article: "A Liberty Issue." (Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.)

Zoo animals have great health care benefits. Does that life look attractive? Are you having trouble? Trying singing "Born Free" once or twice through. Maybe that will help you with your freedom vs comfortable, government captivity decision?

Auto Bailouts and Sinking American Prospects

In the 1970s, my dad bought American cars on point of principle. He thought it was right to support the North American auto industry. Eventually, however, he found that American car manufacturers were doing him no favors in return. So since the late 1970s, he has bought Peugeot, Saab, Volvo, and Acura (which is Honda). I drive a Honda Odyssey.

As consumers, we direct our money to the companies we think will give us the best products. But recently, the so-called Big Three American automakers went to Washington asking for $15 billion of your money and mine to make up for the money we have not been spending on their cars. The trouble has been not only that many Americans have been preferring the products of other companies. But even when we have been buying GM, Ford and Chrysler, we have been paying only the market price, which is considerably less than what the companies need to make a profit. So having failed in the marketplace, they asked the government to take from us what we have freely chosen not to give them.

Congress refused. But on Friday, President Bush gave them, by executive decree, over $17 billion from the Congressionally established $700 billion slush fund (TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program) designated for stabilizing the financial markets.

George Will sees not just an unwise use of public funds, but a deterioration of our constitutional system of government.

The expansion of government entails an increasingly swollen executive branch and the steady enlargement of executive discretion. This inevitably means the eclipse of Congress and attenuation of the rule of law.

Mark Steyn tells us why these car companies are failing and will continue to fail.

General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has 3 times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red.

Steyn actually takes you on a jolly ride through several aspects of America's present decline: "See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of "We Three Kings Of Ol' Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar," and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan."

But he ends upbeat, wishing us all "a very Hopey Changemas."

Whoever said the era of Great Canadians would die with William Shatner haven't been reading Mark Steyn.

Armed, Polite, and Free

"An armed society is a polite society," as the saying goes. Of course, it's an American saying. Rasmussen tells us that after the Supreme Court upheld citizens' second amendment right to bear arms--hand guns in particular--that branch of government rose eight percentage points in popularity with the American people.

We continue to befuddle foreigners, even Canadians, our neighbors to the north who are becoming more foreign in their political culture all the time. Read Colby Cosh's description of Justice Scalia's defense of the right to own handguns--not just a reluctantly legal defense, but vigorously moral one--and how perplexing it is to Canadians ("In America, a Man's Home is Still His Castle").

While we're on the subject, it seems that love for individual liberty is doing very poorly in Great Britain, the land of its birth, so the Economist reports. Of course there are all those closed circuit cameras not only all over London but in many town centers.

Vast computerised collections of information have become popular too. Britain possesses one of the largest police DNA databases in the world, containing the records of over 4m of 60m citizens (including a third of the black men in the country). Records are kept for everyone who is arrested, meaning that many on the system have never actually been charged with any crime. The government's identity-card scheme, the first phase of which is due to start later this year, aims to record the fingerprints and biographical details of everyone in the land.

And of course parents cannot be trusted to govern and nurture their children.

Other big databases are justified on grounds of administrative convenience rather than crime-fighting and security. One such is a plan to centralise the records of all patients of the National Health Service. Another would allow social services to monitor every child in the country, including how parents spend their money and how many portions of fruit and vegetables they feed their offspring each day.

But if it saves even one child from escaping salad, isn't it worth it?

We can also learn from Canadian mistakes. My associate at Principalities and Powers, Harold Kildow, alerts us to Mark Steyn's recent difficulties with Canadian Star Chambers creeping into this country: "Beware my friends--there are many Democrats in Congress and abroad in the land who would like a way to threaten their opponents like the Canadians do--via kangaroo courts of various devisings. The imminent return, for example, of the "Fairness Doctrine", driven by Komissar Pelosi, is a step in that direction. But note well, it is only a first step. David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen ("The Resistance Must Continue") surveys the swamp Canadians have been force marched into--the one we will be looking at if we don't watch out."

Oh, by the way, happy Dominion Day up there!

The Shadow Descending Across Canada

In case any Canadian readers missed the little note of invitation that I added to the previous post as an afterthought, I reproduce it here. (You can follow up on the petition pictured above at steynian.wordpress.com.)

I said: Canadian readers, I want to hear from you. Let me know what you are reading on this, what you are hearing from the people around you (especially from the right thinking ones), and what you make of it yourself. Pass this along to a friend.

By the way, how much reflection is there upon the words of the national anthem in this context? What does "free" mean? Does it just mean "not American" and "no longer British?" What does it mean to "stand on guard?" Is it anything more than being ready to render service in the military if called upon to do so? Is vigilance over this violation of free speech recognized by anything more than a fringe minority as "true patriot love?"

If Steyn loses, then Canada is as "free" as East Germany was "democratic" and a "republic." The noble and free spirits north of the border will need to start advocating regional separation. Start in the west. If you remain stuck to Ontario, you'll be dragged into the darkness which Canadians seem philosophically and religiously helpless to oppose.

In 1965, George Grant published his Lament for a Nation. He didn't know the half of it.

Follow the "Mark Steyn" label beneath this post for other Steyn related posts.

Steyn's Thoughtcrime in Canada

For many years now, I have been telling Americans why I prefer to remain in the United States and breathe the atmosphere of freedom. In America, there is a battle raging between, on one side, the defenders of the Founders' understanding of liberty that is bequeathed to us in our Constitution and, on the other side, advocates of post-modern, progressive statism. But in Canada, there is only the political correctness of the left, and everything else is thoughtcrime.

We are seeing the truth of this claim played out in the Star Chambers of the British Columbia and Canadian Human Rights Commissions where columnist Mark Steyn is on trial for "hate crimes." Read Rich Lowry's "Mark Steyn: Enemy of the State?"

The Canadian Islamic Congress took offense at an excerpt in Maclean's magazine, the premiere Canadian news magazine, from Steyn's book America Alone. ("The Future Belongs to Islam.")

"Canada's Human Rights Act defines hate speech as speech 'likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.' The language is so capacious and vague that to be accused is tantamount to being found guilty." Truth is no defense.

"The national commission has never found anyone innocent in 31 years."

One of the principal investigators of the Canadian Human Rights Commission said, "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value."

Tony Blankley mentions the Steyn case in the course of discussing the Muslim assault on liberty in "Rising Euro-Muslim Tensions."

But radicalized Islam places little value on the individual, while holding up for supreme value the interests of the group, particularly their view of the group called Islam. And it is this aggressive, assertive insistence by radicalized Muslims in the West to subordinate our inherent rights to their collective demands that slowly and more or less quietly is forcing Westerners to take sides in the radicals' demands.

Americans are fighting and dying to establish liberty in the Middle East, and yet this sort of thing is going on in the country immediately to our north.

And on this side of the border, not all is well. In his column, "Political Viagra," Steyn reflects on what Barack Obama recently said are his hopes for America after he is elected. "My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it." Of course, if America is the greatest nation in the world, why would you change it? Never mind. Steyn's concern is this: "Speaking personally, I don't want to remake America. I'm an immigrant and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the western world remade itself along the lines Senator Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there's nowhere for me to go...."

As a fellow Canadian immigrant to this land of liberty, I share that position, and I lament for my nation.

P.S. - Canadian readers, I want to hear from you. Let me know what you are reading on this, what you are hearing from the people around you (especially from the right thinking ones), and what you make of it yourself. Pass this along to a friend.

Appendix:

"Hearings An Embarrassment for Democracy" by Paul Schneidereit (The Chronicle Herald, Nova Scotia): "...nearly six months after Steyn’s article appeared and after they had published 27 letters to the editor in response, many opposed to Steyn’s point of view, they still agreed to meet Awan (law school student Khurrum Awan) and his group to see if they could accommodate their demand for space for another rebuttal. That went nowhere, the magazine said, when the group demanded total control over the editorial content, cover art and a donation to an Islamic charity. (Awan told the hearing last week he had $10,000 in mind)."

"Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech," New York Times, June 12, 2008 - Of course, this article just takes the Steyn case as a jumping off point for Americans talking about themselves. Americans are NEVER interested in what's happening in Canada.

Canada Strong and Free only in Song

Americans generally have no clue what is happening north of the Canada-US border, and have only the vaguest sense of who is up there. For their own part, Canadians are always in existential angst over their identity (unless they are in French Canada or the Maritimes). Thus for both Canadians and Americans, Mark Steyn's Free Market Forum lecture on September 29, 2007 at Hillsdale College is helpful. The title, "Is Canada's Economy a Model for America?," sounds dull but the lecture insightfully identifies who these adjacent yet very different peoples are, their relationship to one another and the separate directions they are headed.

Rhetorically, the lecture is a gem. Consider his inviting introduction:

I was a bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What happened?” I wondered. “Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian economy cancel?” It is a Saturday night, and the Oak Ridge Boys are playing the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the President likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And if giving a talk on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t know what is.

Through the Canadian example, Steyn reflects on the relationship between liberty, big government, and government control of the economy and of the health care system in particular. He tells stories of a government funded anti-government riot, unionized panhandlers, a special immigration category for "exotic dancers" (strippers), and a ten month waiting list for the government run maternity ward.

What I found most alarming, not only from an ex-pat perspective, but also from the perspective of American national security, is the Canadian demographics that Steyn reports. Like Europe but unlike the United States, Canadians are not replacing themselves.

Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native Canadians—already only amounting to 25 percent of the country’s population growth—will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It’s like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but if it is, it won’t have much—if anything—to do with you.

That is not a racist concern. I am not concerned with the color or cuisine of 21st century Canadians. It is their view of liberty and of liberty's enemies abroad that concerns me and should concern my family, friends and countrymen north of the border.