We can’t talk about immigration
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 180 Comments
In fact, we’ll blame anything rather than confront the truth about what’s happening
Christopher Caldwell’s new book is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. And, if you don’t quite get the Burkean allusion, his subtitle spells out his real concerns: “Immigration, Islam and the West.” Given my own obsessions in recent years, you’d expect me to be favourably disposed to it. And I am, my enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the instant conventional wisdom that, if you’re only going to buy one Islamophobic Euro-doom-mongering diatribe this summer, Caldwell’s is the sober and respectable one, in striking contrast to certain others we could mention. “Unlike [Oriana] Fallaci and Mark Steyn, Caldwell does not rant or sneer,” writes Matt Carr of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations. Caldwell, says The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, is not a “Steynian hysteric.” Oh, dear. I think I prefer the droll Irish commentator “P O’Neill”: “Someone has to say it,” he smirked. “Caldwell is the thinking man’s Mark Steyn.”
But enough about me. On to the book . . . actually, hold on a minute. One more thing about me. Let us put Islam aside for the moment, as my views have been well aired in these pages, and consider the author’s other theme. As it happens, for all his non-ranting, non-hysterical sobriety, Mr. Caldwell is somewhat more “extreme” than I am on immigration. For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on. On the CBC last year, I was tap dancing around various socio-cultural generalities when the host, George Stroumboulopoulos, leaned in in that way he has and cut to the chase: “You mean [pause and knowing glance to camera] immigration?” Continue…
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Only the grubby may disagree
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 4:43 PM - 5 Comments
Mark Steyn on dressing for dissent over healthcare
Do you disagree with Barack Obama’s healthcare reform proposals? If so, Mark Steyn argues you’ve been identified by the White House as members of “a sick, deranged, un-American mob” that’s responsible for derailing the debate over the reforms. Even worse, Steyn suggests, the Obama administration plans to silence you at all costs, including encouraging citizens to report any “fishy” correspondences about healthcare straight to the White House. The height of the administration’s paranoia, as far as Steyn is concerned, came when Senator Barbara Boxer suggested opponents of the Obama plan were too “well-dressed” to be real. “Apparently, the health care debate now has a dress code,” Steyn writes. “Soon you won’t be able to get in unless you’re wearing Barack Obama mom-jeans, manufactured at a converted GM plant by an assembly line of retrained insurance salesmen.”
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Mark Steyn on why Henry Louis Gates was "plain stupid"
By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 12:28 PM - 12 Comments
Why Obama shouldn’t be defending the Harvard prof
Last week’s encounter between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and a Cambridge police officer called to Gates’s home over reports of a break-in remind Mark Steyn of his own run-in with a surly Vermont police officer. After being called a “liar” by the officer, Steyn considered his options: he could either “get hot under the collar” and end up in a violent confrontation, or he could write a letter to the cop’s boss complaining about the treatment he received. “I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial satisfaction,” he writes. But Gates went with the former, which according to Steyn “is just plain stupid” if one puts any sort of premium on one’s personal safety. And yet, Steyn fumes, in spite of the poor choices Gates made, several high-profile politicians have publicly sided with the professor. “A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the ‘post-racial America’ will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.”
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The feeble 'march' of Euro-fascism
By Paul Wells - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 128 Comments
Paul Wells rips Mark Steyn; corrects fascist hyperbole
Boo! Did I scare you? Good! We like scaring you here at Maclean’s. That’s why we like these rip-roaring cover stories: we hope that you’ll pick us up and read the calmer stuff inside too. That’s what we did last week with our cover photo of generic thugs in camouflage and berets, under the cover line THE RETURN OF FASCISM.The cover pointed to a column by our Mark Steyn. And Mark’s column—well, it’s a bit of a mess. Here’s why.
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Tamil questions that can't be asked
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 179 Comments
That’s because professional ethnic grievance mongers cry ‘Racist!’ at the drop of a turban
The other day, one of the least soft-headed of Canadian columnists, Lorrie Goldstein, wrote a piece in the Toronto Sun called “Protest backlash unearths racism”:“Let’s not pretend that much of the condemnation of Tamils in Canada for protesting the plight of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka isn’t racist.
“Any journalist who’s been around knows what’s going on and we have an obligation to speak up.”
I’ve been around. Well, okay, I’ve been nearby, as Mary Tyler Moore liked to say. And, insofar as I feel an obligation to speak up, it’s only to wonder at how far even the remarkably tensile concept of “racism” can be stretched.
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Monday, the President ate a burger
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 122 Comments
Maybe if they’d covered the love child instead of a fast food foray, papers wouldn’t be dying
John Edwards’ adultery was back in the news last week. Well, okay, “back” is probably not le mot juste, given that the former presidential candidate’s mistress cum campaign videographer wasn’t exactly front-page news even in the days when he was coming a strong second in the Iowa caucuses or being tipped as a possible vice-presidential nominee. Every editor knew the “rumours” (i.e., plausible scenario with mountains of circumstantial evidence), but, unlike, say, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s mother’s drug bust, this wasn’t one of those stories you need to drop everything for.Only when the hard-working lads at the National Enquirer doorstepped Senator Edwards in the basement stairwell of the Beverly Hilton after a post-midnight visit to his newborn love child and forced him to take cover in the men’s room did the Los Angeles Times swing into action. Alas, it was to instruct its writers to make no comment on a story happening right under their own sniffy noses. The editor Tony Pierce emailed as follows:
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Mitchel Raphael on a hill feeding frenzy
By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 1 Comment
Steyn’s Ezra quip and a very busy Mr. Oliphant
Those people on the Hill sure like free food
The Canadian Pork Council held a BBQ on the Hill (free pulled pork sandwiches!) to publicize the safety of their product in the midst of swine flu panic. It was the longest lineup Capital Diary had ever seen for a Hill reception. The final 30
people did not even get meat—some of them grabbed buns to soak up the leftover liquid in the serving pan. New Democrat Peter Stoffer was one of the few MPs who waited his turn in the endless line, even when organizers tried to pull him to the front for preferential treatment. The line went slower when cabinet ministers like Gerry Ritz (Agriculture) and Jean-Pierre Blackburn (National Revenue) took over from staff to do the serving. Everyone from Health Minister 
Leona Aglukkaq to Grit Leader Michael Ignatieff was chomping down. Conservative MP Shelly Glover noted she loves ham. “My kids live off of it,” says the mother of five, who was elected in the last election. (She is on leave from the Winnipeg Police Service, where she used to investigate crack houses and went undercover as a sex-trade worker.) Quipped deputy Speaker Andrew Scheer at the BBQ: “This is the good kind of pork on Parliament Hill.”
Who knew Justin had a tattoo?Last year, Nova Scotia Grit Mike Savage was the lone MP to take up the Canadian Paraplegic Association’s challenge to spend a day in a wheelchair. This year, several politicians participated, including Conservative MP Dona Cadman and senators such as Olympic skiing gold medallist Nancy Greene Raine. They experienced first-hand the challenges of being in a wheelchair—travelling over carpets or hitting inaccessible committee rooms on the Hill. The day ended with wheelchair races. When Justin Trudeau took on his Toronto Liberal colleague Martha Hall Findlay, he suggested she
remove her jacket. When she did and it was revealed she was sleeveless underneath, Trudeau, who was already without a jacket and tie, stripped down to his sleeveless undershirt. (A few people were surprised to see a small tattoo of the earth on his upper left arm.) He won for fastest male MP, but beat Hall Findlay only by a slim margin. It should be noted, however, that Hall Findlay had a “wardrobe malfunction.” Her bra straps slipped off her shoulders and she had to pause to push them back up. -
Superheroes are starting to bug me
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 118 Comments
All those Sharpie-bright spandex boys have helped Hollywood off an awkward hook
No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost . . . I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.
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Ezra Levant’s big beef and new book
By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 72 Comments
Ezra Levant held the Ottawa launch of his new book, Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights. Levant is the journalist and Conservative activist who was taken to the Alberta Human Rights Commission when he published the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Western Standard.
(Left to right) Ezra Levant, Liberal Senator Jerry Grafstein and Maclean’s columnist/keynote speaker Mark Steyn.
Transport Minister John Baird (right) and Tory staffer Chris Lawton.
Keynote speaker Mark Steyn.
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Iggy’s morally contemptible words
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM - 202 Comments
His version of what happened to ‘the sick little girls’ amounts to tasteless opportunism
The other day the National Post ran an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Love. Most of it was just the usual boilerplate hogwash apparently obligatory if one fancies oneself a member of the intellectual wing of the Canadian establishment. You know the sort of stuff:“Most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.”
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What Bono says and what he does
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 92 Comments
There’s a well-documented reason the do-gooder can’t put his money where his mouth is
After playing the Obama inauguration a couple of months back, the pop star Bono flew back home to a rare barrage of hostile headlines. As you know, the global do-gooder wants us to send more of our money to Africa. So why is he sending his money to the Netherlands? From the Irish Times:“Bono ‘Hurt’ By Criticism Of U2 Move To Netherlands To Cut Tax.”
U2 hasn’t, in fact, moved to the Netherlands. You won’t find them busking outside downtown Rotterdam mosques of a Friday night. But they did move some of their business interests from the Emerald Isle to the Low Countries. From the Times of London: “Bono Hits Back Over Tax Dodging Claims.”
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We’re in the fast lane to polygamy
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 266 Comments
Remember same-sex-marriage proponents rolling their eyes at talk of what might be next?
What’s my line on legalized polygamy? Oh, I pretty much said it all back in 2004, in a column for Ezra Levant’s Western Standard. Headline: “It’s Closer Than They Think.”Well, a mere half-decade down the slippery slope and here we are, with the marrying kind of Bountiful, B.C., headed for the Supreme Court of Canada. Five years ago, proponents of same-sex marriage went into full you-cannot-be-serious eye-rolling mode when naysayers warned that polygamy would be next. As I wrote in that Western Standard piece:
“Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.”
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The G20 and its "irrelevant scapegoats"
By macleans.ca - Monday, April 6, 2009 at 5:06 PM - 7 Comments
Mark Steyn laments the G20′s inability to focus on the real problems afflicting western economies: demographics and spending
After surveying the post-G20 summit landscape, Mark Steyn finds world leaders shirked their responsibility to use the economic crisis to “reverse the combination of unaffordable social programs and deathbed demographics that make a restoration of real GDP growth all but impossible in many European nations.” Instead, they focused their attention on “irrelevant scapegoats,” like shuttering tax havens and erecting a global regulatory regime that hampers economic growth. “A serious G-20 summit,” Steyn argues, “would have seen France commit to the liberalization of its economy; Germany to serious natalist incentives; Britain to a reduction of the near-Soviet size of state spending in Scotland and Northern Ireland; and the United States to allowing its citizens to keep more of their hard-earned money and thus reduce both the dependency on ludicrous asset inflation as the only route to socioeconomic improvement and the risk of a Euro-style decline in birth rate caused by the unaffordability of kids.”
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Knock-knock. It’s the gag police.
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 88 Comments
Banning homophobic jokes is a dangerous step. We all need to develop thicker skins.
Did you hear the one about the queer, the Muzzie and the pre-op tranny?No? Well, you’re unlikely to any time soon. The British government, fresh from recent proscriptions on religious and racial “hatred,” is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalize homophobic jokes.
I’ve been trying to recall the last time I heard a homophobic joke in a public forum. You have to go back a ways. At Vegas, Dean Martin used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would go, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dino would say, “Be nice to him.”
But these days, no matter how cordial you are, it’s never enough. Continue…
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The silence of the Canadian lambs
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 90 Comments
Maybe we have trouble telling our own stories because so many we try to tell are false
If you missed the CRTC hearings the other week, don’t worry. The exciting plans to annex the Internet to the cheerless wasteland of CanCon enforcement were justified under the usual refrain of Trudeaupian boosterism: we have to create space for Canadians to tell their own stories.Personally, whenever I hear that line, the only plot twist I’m in the mood for is: “And then I woke up, and it had all been a bad dream.” But, assuming you’re of a more indulgent bent, the question then arises: why do Canadians have such difficulty telling their own stories?
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The problem with not having kids
By Mark Steyn - Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 6:30 AM - 204 Comments
Saving the planet for the next generation by not having a next generation is a bad idea
Anything happen while I was gone?
Oh, yeah. The collapse of the global economy. Armageddon outta here. The ecopalypse is upon us. Down south, President Obama has abandoned the gaseous uplift of “the audacity of hope” and warns we’re on the brink of the abyss. In the old New Deal, FDR warned that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” For the new New Deal, President Hopeychangey says we have nothing but fear itself. Get used to it. In Russia, the nation’s wealthiest oligarchs have seen their net worth decline by two-thirds. They can’t steal it as fast as it depreciates. Even yard sales of Soviet nukes to chaps with Waziristani business cards won’t make it up.
The only thing booming is declinism. In Britain, the Baby Boomers are now “Baby Gloomers,” according to the Daily Telegraph’s Elizabeth Grice, who gives the impression she’s working it up into a book proposal for one of those slim volumes of contemporary manners one keeps in the guest “loo,” amusingly illustrated with line drawings of once prosperous middle-class couples reduced to trawling the supermarket shelves for bargain “wine boxes” and microwaveable “Italian-style” focaccia. In the U.S., Steven Kotler thinks this is no time to get hung up on details. The planet is going to hell. So what’s the big picture? The rooty-tootiest root cause of all?
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Macleans.ca Interview: Kenneth Whyte
By John Intini - Friday, January 9, 2009 at 2:49 PM - 13 Comments
Maclean’s Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Whyte, who was recently named The Canadian Journalism Project’s Newsperson of the Year, talks about the award, Human Rights Commissions and the future of print journalism
Q. Your nomination for this award cited your revitalization of Maclean’s, your new book on Hearst, and your battle with Human Rights Commissions–it must be gratifying to win?
A. It’s gratifying that some of my colleagues have recognized that Maclean’s is doing well and I want to congratulate everyone at the magazine on a great year but, really, we won this thing because of the Human Rights Commissions. We spent a good part of 2008 defending ourselves against a campaign by a handful of Muslim activists to have our journalism branded hateful and racist. We stood up to their complaints and defended ourselves—and, in particular, an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone—and in doing so we attracted the support of a lot of smart and energetic bloggers. These bloggers, long before the mainstream media, recognized the complaints as a politically-motivated threat to free expression and open journalistic inquiry. They threw their weight behind me in this poll and put me over the top and I want to return the favor by dedicating this honor to them.Q. To the blogosphere?
A. To that particular part of the blogosphere that got engaged in these human rights complaints. I can’t name them all but individuals like Ezra Levant, Jay Currie, Kathy Shaidle, among others, discovered and disseminated a lot of alarming information about the operations of human rights commissions and the decisions of their tribunals. The debate got pretty messy on both sides as it went along, but these people prodded the newspapers and the public to question the advisability of allowing unaccountable, politicized, and rather slipshod commissions to interfere with one of our most precious liberties. Along with Mark Steyn, who wrote a lot about the case, they did a great service to Canadian journalism in 2008. I’m deeply grateful for their support—it was shaping up as a lonely fight until the bloggers got involved. They’re the ones who really deserve this award so I consider myself to be accepting it on their behalf. Continue… -
Mark Steyn is the new Bing Crosby
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 8:00 AM - 15 Comments
Just in time for Christmas, the famous pundit sings (unironically) ‘It’s a Marshmallow World’
“I’m singing Marshmallow World for real,” says Mark Steyn. “I’m not part of the great swamp of irony into which pop culture is sinking.” Making fun of corny, happy Christmas songs is a cottage industry, as Stephen Colbert will prove on Nov. 23 when he does his musical Christmas-special parody A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All. But Steyn, during his recent brush with the Canadian Islamic Congress, took his mind off his troubles by teaming with British musical-comedy actress Jessica Martin (who has starred in such West End hits as Me And My Girl) for a self-produced recording of It’s a Marshmallow World, available in MP3 and CD from his website steynonline.com. Along with a self-published book called A Song For the Season, a survey of holiday-related songs, it’s his attempt to strike a blow for a proudly unironic approach to Christmas pop. If, as Steyn has argued in these pages, the future belongs to Islam, then the past belongs to songs with lyrics like, “it’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts.”
Marshmallow World, a cover of a 1949 song that Steyn calls “a second-tier, second-rank standard,” is accompanied by all the orchestral sounds that signify a merry musical Christmas: glockenspiels, sleigh bells, triangles, and inoffensive brass fanfares. The Anglo-Canadian-American Steyn sounds surprisingly Australian when he sings, but otherwise it’s a good approximation of the spirit of the holiday recordings of such anti-ironists as Bing Crosby. It’s the type of recording that’s still popular with audiences, but not so much with critics. “When I was at the Daily Telegraph in London,” Steyn notes, “they’d round up all the Christmas songs and give them to some miserable misanthropic rock critic to review.” One can imagine what those critics would have said about a single that not only takes Marshmallow World at face value, but even throws in some comedy banter (“Oh, Jessica, the world is our snowball!”) to put us in mind of those Crosby recordings where he and his guest stars would ad lib their way through the last verse.
You didn’t always need to go to a pundit’s self-made CD to find unambiguously jolly, irony-free Christmas music. In the golden age of North American Christmas pop, from the first appearance of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town in 1934 through a pre-murder-trial Phil Spector’s all-star Christmas album in 1963, American Christmas music portrayed a perfect world where snowmen come to life, reindeer are randomly added to Santa’s roster, and you meet some nice old man named Parson Brown or Farmer Grey. Holiday songs with some sense of melancholy or realism were revised to satisfy America’s appetite for Christmas cheer: at the request of Frank Sinatra, songwriter Hugh Martin rewrote the lyrics of his classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to turn it from a sad song to a happy one, while Irving Berlin deleted the introduction to White Christmas because it mentioned how depressing it is to celebrate Christmas in snow-deprived California.
In other parts of the world, it’s been acceptable to create Christmas music that mentions the less upbeat aspects of being caught in a snowstorm. In the Marshmallow recording, Steyn and Martin even tip their hat to British holiday non-cheer: they throw in a brief snippet of the English carol In the Bleak Midwinter, the story of how Christmas livened up some otherwise horrible weather. But in their heyday, American songwriters wouldn’t stand for that kind of talk, and Steyn likes that just fine: “The English Christmas is sort of bleak, grey, dour, whereas in the North American Christmas, the land is just a winter playground.” If you want confirmation that America is different from Europe, don’t look at politics, just compare Hark! The Herald Angels Sing to Jingle Bell Rock.
But even the unnaturally happy yuletide song is a relic of a bygone America; nearly all the most-recorded Christmas songs were written before the late 1960s, when American culture started to break apart. Today, recording this type of song is an act of cultural nostalgia, whether they’re recorded by Céline Dion or a Canadian pundit living in New Hampshire: “I feel like in a sort of fragmented culture,” Steyn explains, “they’re really the last songs we all share.” In a musical world of hip hop, I Kissed a Girl, and various people named Cyrus, maybe a traditional, un-cynical version of Marshmallow World is a blow for traditionalism. Or would be, if that song didn’t rhyme “girl” with “world.”
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Rockin' the Ahmadinejad vote
By Paul Wells - Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 9:22 AM - 47 Comments
“Well, I think he’s very thin-skinned. I think that is what was clear to me in 2000. I actually regard him as a very unpleasant man, and I don’t say that lightly. There’s a lot of politicians who are sort of angry and slightly deranged. Al Gore, for example, when you see him campaign, certainly the last couple of years, seems to have pretty much flown the coop. And when I saw Al Gore at close quarters campaigning, one could recognize the sort of human side to him. McCain, I think, is a very different kettle of fish. I think he is someone who is very thin-skinned, very vain, and has a sort of cavalier attitude to big questions, particularly Constitutional questions. So I think he is someone who in fact, the more you know him, the less you warm to the idea of having him…I said rather, I said at one point, you know, he’d be our version of President Ahmadinejad, the crazy guy with his finger on the nuclear button. And I think there’s actually quite a bit of truth in that.”
— Mark Steyn on John McCain, not recently.
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Megapundit: Tell another one, Uncle Gerry!
By selley - Monday, September 22, 2008 at 3:20 PM - 14 Comments
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: …Christie Blatchford on Gerry Ritz; Doug Saunders on the Eurabia hypothesis;WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on Gerry Ritz; Doug Saunders on the Eurabia hypothesis; David Olive on uniting the left; John Ivison in northern Ontario; Rosie DiManno and Peter Worthington on Afghanistan; Scott Taylor on Canada and the Caucasus; Konrad Yakabuski on Justin Trudeau; L. Ian MacDonald on what Jean Charest’s up to.
On the issues
Behold: all the things we’re not talking about!The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington is not impressed by the “tomb of silence” in which the Harperites have sealed all matters military: notably, committing to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 and replacing the outspoken Rick Hillier with Walter Natynczyk, who seems more shy about vocally “standing up for soldiers and reviving our combat character”—both of which, in Worthington’s view, seem to make the Prime Minister “nervous.” The army needs at least “an additional brigade,” he argues, and ideally to double in size, but recent events lead him to fear that “lethargy is again taking over before the military rebuilding job is done.”
“The yearning for peace in Afghanistan hasn’t dwindled,” the Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno assures us, but “there is growing disenchantment with NATO, which clearly can’t contend with a resurgent Taliban.” American troops redeployed from Iraq might be able to do the job, she argues, but “the whole point of NATO taking over responsibility of Afghanistan—besides justifying its existence post Cold War—was to put a multinational face, earnest and humanitarian, on the mission.” Due to many factors including the component nations’ inability or unwillingness to commit enough troops to combat duty, DiManno seems more or less ready to call that mission a failure.
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So what, did Kerry win the 2004 election and I missed it?
By Paul Wells - Friday, August 8, 2008 at 3:36 PM - 0 Comments
Mark Steyn column, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 24, 2004, just before the Bush-Kerry presidential election:
So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment’s cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec’s Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It’s a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene – by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don’t clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don’t bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That’s the official number. Unofficially, if you’re over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to “old age” or some such and then “lose” the relevant medical records. Quebec’s health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq’s.
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Megapundit: Climate change—like Y2K, only warmer
By selley - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments
Must-reads: Dan Gardner on Y2K+8; Colby Cosh on gun control.
On Americans, Canadians, and …Must-reads: Dan Gardner on Y2K+8; Colby Cosh on gun control.
On Americans, Canadians, and guns
Why we don’t have a well-armed militia, and why maybe we should.“We are fond of interpreting [Canada's and the United States'] different gun cultures as the product of their origins,” Colby Cosh writes in the National Post, but as recently as 100 years ago, the differences were few and far between: “a housebreaker or robber in Canada could then still expect to be greeted by the nose of a revolver,” and concerned homeowners could purchase their weapon of choice by mail order. The fact that US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s amazing defence of the handgun (e.g., as opposed to a rifle, “it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police”) now “seem[s] to float to us from some alternate universe very far away” is proof, says Cosh, of how “small social differences … can be exaggerated by means of policy within just a few generations.”
The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington, meanwhile, trots out all the usual statistics to show that gun control doesn’t work, including the fact that the murder rate in Washington, D.C. went up after the city instituted the handgun ban that was overturned by the Supreme Court last week. We wholeheartedly support Worthington’s campaign against Toronto mayor David Miller’s hopelessly facile anti-gun campaign, but as usual with these arguments, it’s really just a big mess of chicken and eggs. For example: is Arlington, Va.’s miniscule murder rate in comparison to Washington’s a byproduct of its relatively high rate of private gun ownership, or its relatively rich and well-educated populace? (Answer: it depends whether the gun control opponent is trying to argue that gun ownership reduces crime, or that criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, are the real and only problem.)
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Megapundit: What Julie Couillard has to do with Mikhail Gorbachev
By selley - Monday, June 16, 2008 at 2:02 PM - 0 Comments
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Scott Taylor on Afghan governance; Christie Blatchford, Rex Murphy and …DaphneWEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Scott Taylor on Afghan governance; Christie Blatchford, Rex Murphy and Daphne Bramham on the residential schools apology; Greg Weston on Oily the Splot; Don Martin on the Couillard affair.
What can we learn from Julie Couillard?
And other pressing federal questions…At this point in the Bernier-Couillard debacle—now that her “random dating pattern[s]” seem to have “jell[ed] into a potential purpose”—the Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin says “circumstances have evolved” far past the point where the opposition’s questions can be dismissed as “sordid little inquiries.” Unfortunately, he notes, the government’s position on the matter—stonewall at all costs, basically—is stuck in the Neanderthal era. This cannot last.
If this whole affair isn’t enough to spur reforms on background checks, security clearances and sensitive document management, L. Ian MacDonald, writing in the Montreal Gazette, hopes a 23-year-old anecdote of his own experiences as Brian Mulroney’s speechwriter will do the trick. It involves everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev to Nick Auf der Maur, and its connection to the topic at hand is tenuous at best.
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Film Reviews: 'The Happening,' 'Young People F——'
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 3:41 PM - 0 Comments
Once again, circumstances beyond my control have conspired to keep me from seeing the weekend’s designated blockbuster, The Incredible Hulk. So on that one, you’re on you’re own. But here’s my take on two other new releases, an unintentionally funny Hollywood thriller and a tame Canadian sex comedy, both of which have provoked some local controversy, and neither of which I can recommend.
The Happening
I’m afraid M. Night Shyamalan’s latest attempt to spook us out is a real clunker. At a Toronto press screening this week, the lame dialogue drew such howls of derisive laughter from one particular clump of critics, that a number of their colleagues made complaints to the publicist who hosted the screening for 20th Century Fox. As president of the Toronto Film Critics Association, I’ve already fielded some email complaints about unprofessional conduct by our members. The question: at what point does derisive laughter curdle into outright heckling, thus souring everyone’s view of the film without allowing critics to make up their own mind in the dark? A valid concern, to be sure. But I, too, found myself unable to resist the odd unsolicited guffaw. And if The Happening wasn’t so damn silly in the first place, critics wouldn’t be having a debate about the ethics of trying to contain their scorn. They were laughing at dialogue that was laughable. How do you expect to get an audience to believe in a a spectral force of nature that’s driving people to kill themselves, if you can’t portray a simple human interaction with a modicum of plausibility?Like his other work (The Sixth Sense, Signs), Shyamalan’s new thriller is designed to take us into a Twilight Zone limbo and chill our blood with an unfathomable mystery. It’s “I see dead people” all over again. Except the dead people aren’t ghosts or hallucinations. In The Happening‘s apocalyptic scenario, they’re real victims of a mysterious airborne toxin that is paralyzing people within seconds, turning them into zombies infected with an irresistible desire to commit suicide right on the spot. This pandemic, which begins in Manhattan’s Central Park, is soon afflicting much of the Northeastern U.S. And I’m not giving anything away to say that the toxin seems to have something to do with plants and wind—the idea crops up early in the story. In fact, it would be difficult to give away the plot , because unlike the director’s earlier films, The Happening one doesn’t have a brain-teasing plot twist. I kept waiting for it. But, in this case, the twist is that there is no twist.
Instead, Shyamalan has constructed a rather conventional thriller wrapped in a soft-headed morality tale about our overwrought eco-system. Like many a disaster flick, it’s the story of a makeshift family on the run. As everyone flees the unseen environmental scourge, the media first interprets it as a terrorist threat (of course). Cities are evacuated. Folks high-tail it to the countryside, where things just get worse. Horror is achieved through shock images of mass suicide. A man lying down in front of a large tractor lawnmower. Bunches of bodies hanging from trees, like victims of a viral lynching. The actors have little to do but react and ask each other dumb questions. I don’t know if this was intentional, but even those who are as yet unaffected by the scourge are zombie-like. Mark Wahlberg, who’s been impressive in recent outings, is unusually wooden.
Wahlberg stars as a high school science teacher who flees with his girlfriend (Zooey Deschanel) along with his friend (John Leguizamo) and their eight-year-old daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez). Looking for safe haven, they end up the farmlands of Pennsylvania, finally taking refuge in the house of an eccentric old recluse played by Broadway legend Betty Buckley. And she’s the scariest thing in the movie. Forget airborne pathogens. As Notorious and Psycho have taught us, there’s nothing more frightening than an old woman who’s a little off her rocker. And Shyamalan is still capable of giving us an electro-magnetic chill by cutting to a shot of an old woman you didn’t expect to be there, with a loud sound effect basically saying “Boo!” . But in this case, you just feel you’ve been conned by a cheap trick, and an old one at that.
Young People F——
Speaking of cons, this clever title, which has attracted so much controversy, is a masterpiece of false advertising. It gives quite the wrong impression of the film. If you spend money on YPF expecting something sexy, erotic, raw or even mildly provocative, I’ve got a dewy patch of unspoiled land in Florida that you might be interested in.YPF is nowhere near as dirty as its title. With no genital nudity, and a lot of light comic titillation, it’s no raunchier than an average episode of Sex and the City (the TV series, not movie). This ensemble piece weaves the unlinked escapades of four heterosexual couples and a threesome, following their parallel storylines through various sexual stations of the cross, from foreplay to post-coital reflection. It has a few moments of sweetness and mirth. Some of the actresses are strong, especially Kristin Booth and Sonja Bennett. And everyone is attractive and, uh, young. But the script, is no more than a series of sketches that don’t add up to much. Tracking each relationship on parallel time lines, with the prosaic logic of a self-help manual, it unfolds as a chapter-by-chapter evolution from foreplay to climax. The sexual politics are simplistic and lopsided (women are smarter than men, duh). And the situations seem so contrived that, despite the actors’ noble efforts, I had trouble believing a moment of it. A game ensemble cast and a devious title are not enough. In the end, this ostensibly groovy independent film about cutting-edge issues in the bedroom is less convincing and more square than a mainstream romantic comedy like Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
First-time director Martin Gero, who co-wrote the script with Aaron Abrams, has penned a lot of TV episodes of Stargate: Atlantis. And YPF‘s view of sexuality seems like another breed of science fiction. You have to admire the marketing, though. The filmmakers have milked the title for all it’s worth. Around the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, lofty American outlets took the bait: New York magazine headlined its TIFF coverage with a breathless report about the Toronto Star agonizing over whether to bleep the f-word in articles about the film. New York illustrated the item with a shot of sweet-faced Canadian actor Josh Dean grinning between a woman’s parted legs. Since then, various journalists—notably Mark Steyn in Maclean’s—have awarded the film more free publicity by fulminating about Bill C-10, and pointing to YPF as an example of the sort of smut we don’t want see publicly financed. The debate over Bill C-10 brought Young People F—— onto the floor in the august chambers of the Senate.
Bill-C10—in case you’ve been nodding off in cultural politics class—would allow Ottawa to revoke tax credits for Canadian movies that federal bureaucrats find offensive, after these movies are made. (Absurdly, tax credits to American movies shot in Canada would be exempt.) It’s astonishing that such an innocuous movie as YPF should be controversial in the first place. Although YPF has become a poster child in a rearguard battle against censorship, the only thing that’s offensive about this film is its smartly crafted, squeaky-clean mediocrity.
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Megapundit: When Irish eyes are darkening with rage
By selley - Friday, June 6, 2008 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments
Must reads: …Dan Gardner on Mark Steyn vs. the sock-puppets; Christie Blatchford and Thomas
Must reads: Dan Gardner on Mark Steyn vs. the sock-puppets; Christie Blatchford and Thomas Walkom on the Toronto 18 trial; Richard Gwyn on Obama.
Business as usual in Ottawa
Flaherty trips over Bernier, the Dippers flip-flop, John Baird is bad for the environment and John Robson is charmingly irascible. Move along, nothing to see here…Jim Flaherty’s tenuous grip on the finance portfolio is part of “an unstoppable chain reaction” that sometimes follows “the removal of a weak link,” says Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star—particularly when those weak links have stunning ex-girlfriends who used to run around with bikers. For one thing, Maxime Bernier’s disastrous leave-behind manoeuvre provides a good opportunity for Stephen Harper to put a more congenial presence in charge of the books. But the Liberals, knowing a shuffle is coming, are now demanding Flaherty resign over job losses in the auto sector—which would normally be “over the top,” says Hébert, even for Ottawa—in hopes he’ll either “dig in his heels” and look even more pugnacious, or be shuffled, which they can portray as a “demotion.”
The National Post‘s John Ivison looks at the NDP’s change-of-mind on whether Canada should attend the so-called “Durban 2″ conference on racism next year in Geneva—a sequel to 2001′s edition in South Africa, which quickly descended into bad anti-Israeli farce. First the NDP were agin it, Ivison notes, but now—based on the “assurances” of UN muckety-mucks that the Libyan, the Iranian, the Pakistani and the Cuban on the preparatory committee will keep things civil—they want Canada to “play a helpful role.” It sure “smells like politics,” as Ivison says. But as usual, the NDP’s position was never particularly convincing. NDP MP Bill Siksay was demanding we attend just four months ago.
