Bloodthirsty Liberal

Mark Steyn updates us on Arab Spring II—which is going about as well as Recovery Summer IV (thanks to Aggie for keeping count):

So how’s that old Arab Spring going? You remember — the “Facebook Revolution.” As I write, they’re counting the votes in Egypt’s presidential election, so by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed somewhat. But currently in first place is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi, who in an inspiring stump speech before the students of Cairo University the other night told them, “Death in the name of Allah is our goal.”

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In second place is the military’s man Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and a man who in a recent television interview said that “unfortunately the revolution succeeded.”

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In third place is moderate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, a 9/11 Truther endorsed by the terrorist organization al-Gama’a al-Islamiya. He’s a “moderate” because he thinks Egyptian Christians should be allowed to run for the presidency, although they shouldn’t be allowed to win.

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As I said, this thrilling race is by no means over, and one would not rule out an eventual third-place finish by a rival beacon of progress such as Amr Moussa, the longtime Arab League flack and former Mubarak foreign minister. So what happened to all those candidates embodying the spirit of Egypt’s modern progressive democratic youth movement that all those Western media rubes were cooing over in Tahrir Square a year ago? How are they doing in Egypt’s first free presidential election?

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As ever, how can we top that?

UPDATE
Well, we can’t, but others can try:

The following are excerpts from a rally which aired on the Internet on May 20, 2012.

Crowd: “Obama, Obama, we are all Osama…” (continuous cheer, the slogan rhymes in Arabic obama, obama, kuluna osama) [...]

Speaker: “Some Tunisians and some Muslims are afraid of the jihadists
We must ask, How come?
Because the enemies have distorted the image of the jihadists, presenting them as the enemies of the Muslims.
We say: no! Every Muslim is a jihadist
Every Muslim is a jihadist [...]
The enemies of Islam want us to be like sheep, to act like women.
They want to deprive us of our will.
They plundered Palestine and other lands and holy places.
They want the jihadists behind bars
Why? So that the holy places will not be liberated?
We are all jihadists, supporting Jerusalem, and elevating the word of Allah. [...]
Let us all cry ‘Allah akbar’ together, so that Obama the ape can hear us. All together now!
Say ‘Allah Akbar!’”

Crowd: “Allah Akbar”

Speaker: “Say ‘Allah Akbar!’”

Crowd: “Allah Akbar” [And so on, ad nauseam.]

I stand with my president against these racist Islamofascists: we are all apes now.

Ditto:

To get the obvious out of the way: I loathe John Edwards. I loathe him as a slick ambulance-chasing trial lawyer, as a preening poseur of a presidential candidate, as a multi-bazillionaire “advocate” for “the poor,” as a third-rate sob sister peddling faux-Dickensian guff about entirely mythical “coatless girls” lying in their beds shivering at night because their father was laid off at the mill. I loathe everything about him except his angled nape, which I must concede, having been pressed up against it in a campaign crush in New Hampshire, is a thing of beauty, and well worth every penny of whatever Rachel Mellon paid for it.

And that’s before we get to the affair, and the denial, followed by the admission of adultery but only while his wife’s cancer was in remission, and then the admission of non-remission adultery but certainly not leading to any love child, and finally the admission of a non-remission adulterous love child, and the realization that the sainted, stricken Elizabeth was less the victim than a co-strategist in the massive Edwardsian fraud that was his 2008 presidential campaign, and a full participating partner in an even creepier political marriage than the Clintons’.

Oh, and while we’re at it, I loathe the American media, whose peculiarly contemptible combination of partisanship, snobbery, and self-neutering of any basic journalistic instinct might easily have led (were it not for the candidacy of Barack Obama) to this preening metrosexual slug’s becoming president of the United States.

All that said, his trial is a disgrace.

…

Edwards now faces 30 years in jail, for the crime of getting a couple of pals to pay for his baby’s diapers.

…

As bad as Edwards’s behavior is, the Justice Department’s is worse. The urge to ensnare in legalisms every aspect of human existence — including John Edwards’s rutting — will consume American liberty.

‘Nuff said.

When America is buried, they’ll need to use Mt. Rushmore as its headstone.

Helpfully, Mark Steyn has already written the inscription:

Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the last decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later.

I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still — from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen and a half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the treasury secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

Ha-ha, very funny. Let’s see if you’re still laughing after this:

At this point, it’s traditional for pundits to warn that if we don’t change course we’re going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although it’s worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland, and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America’s current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece’s, although it’s worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.

But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent — or getting on for twice as much as the second-most-insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.

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“We are headed for the most predictable economic crisis in history,” says Paul Ryan. And he’s right. But precisely because it’s so predictable the political class has already discounted it. Which is why a plan for pie now and spinach later, maybe even two decades later, is the only real menu on the table. There’s a famous exchange in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Someone asks Mike Campbell, “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” We’ve been going through the gradual phase so long, we’re kinda used to it. But it’s coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second way: sudden, and very bad.

And in case you didn’t get the point: “Suddenly” is about to show up.

My personal Mount Rushmore has four faces, too: Robert Benchley, Caroline Glick, Pedro Martinez…and Mark Steyn. If I don’t quote Steyn every day, it’s only because I don’t want to dilute his power.

A few brief excerpts from his eulogy for America’s presence in Afghanistan:

Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:

“Die, die, foreigners!”

And foreigners do die.

…

A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine in the coffee. As Navy Captain John Kirby explained, “We don’t know if it was deliberate or something in the cleaning process.”

Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of expeditionary forces over the centuries: “Afghanistan. It’s something in the cleaning process.”

…

The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on September 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.

They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs — the vast impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pashtun mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Koran your pals had already defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United States issues a groveling and characteristically clueless apology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best.

The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call in unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the world for decades. But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad, aimless, bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed. The United States is an historical anomaly: the non-imperial superpower. Colonialism is not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it, and in other ways, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators and opportunists, it does not. But even nations of an unimperialist bent have roused themselves to great transformative “cleaning processes” within living memory: The Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren wrote this week that he had “conferred the benefit of the doubt” on “the grand bureaucratic project of ‘nation building’ . . . predicated on post-War successes in Germany and Japan.”

It wasn’t that long ago, was it? Except that, as Warren says, the times are “so utterly changed.”

I’ll stop there, but you should read the whole thing.

I especially agree with the part I highlighted. We came to Afghanistan with a clear military purpose to destroy Al Qaeda’s safe haven. We did that, and we could have left it at that, with just enough military presence to see that Al Qaeda couldn’t reconstitute itself. But since we suck at colonialism, we just thought the Afghans would adopt our free-spirited ways. Who doesn’t love sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll? (Or sex, drugs, and chamber music?) Our attempt at nation-building has been a failure. A noble failure, but a certifiable, grade-A cluster[bleep]. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying—though it might mean that, not sure—but enough is enough.

As long as they’re not plotting to bring down the Sears Tower, they can blow up all the Buddhas and slice up all the women they want. Let the Buddhists and the women deal with them if it’s so bad. They did bugger-all to help us, maybe they’ll help themselves.

Leave it to Mark Steyn to wrap up the Left’s diseased hatred in a pretty rhetorical bow:

The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

That’s it.

Oh, you want more? Very well… glutton:

There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers — Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death — or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

President Empathy once said he wouldn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby”, remember.

You want more? What is your problem?

Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

Never mind the dead kid, he has six living kids. How crazy freaky weird is that?

This crazy freaky weird: All those self-evidently ludicrous risible surplus members of the Santorum litter are going to be paying the Social Security and Medicare of all you normal well-adjusted Boomer yuppies who had one designer kid at 39. So, if it helps make it easier to “empathize,” look on them as sacrificial virgins to hurl into the bottomless pit of Big Government debt.

You asked for it:

Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

Albeit less dramatically than “Doctor” Gosnell, much of the developed world has ruptured the compact between past, present, and future. A spendthrift life of self-gratification is one thing. A spendthrift life paid for by burdening insufficient numbers of children and grandchildren with crippling debt they can never pay off is utterly contemptible. And to too many of America’s politico-media establishment it’s not in the least bit “weird.”

Steyn can toss this off seemingly at the drop of a hat. But he feels it. He “empathizes”. This is why (and this is how) I’m a conservative.

It’s understood that you should read Mark Steyn’s every written scrap. You guys get that, right? To do lists, shopping reminders, lottery numbers—you can’t miss a thing.

Because you’ll miss everything:

At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical.

That’s Steyn’s take on the (il-)logic behind the Occupy Oakland riots of the last week—just a wee nugget in a rich vein of such ore.

Here’s another:

When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support”, they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported:

“A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.”

There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.

“The experience was surreal, the man said. ‘They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.’”

No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy.

For so it was.

First they came for the organic produce, but I did not speak because I was buying the cheaper kind…

In the past, Aggie and I have commented that policy, both foreign and domestic, is like parenting. The immature and the infantile—be they the Occupying squatters or Palestinian “activists”—push boundaries and challenge authority because that’s what the immature and the infantile do. They are looking for the borders of safety, the outlines of acceptable behavior. We, the mature (well, some of you), are supposed to patrol the perimeter and guide the children (chronologically, emotionally, or both) back within the lines. We are not supposed to pat them on the head, hand them a brick or a Kalashnikov, and send them on their nihilistic way.

But that’s exactly what Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Naomi Wolf, and all the other progressive panderers are doing. Fine, I say. Keep it up. Steyn agrees:

I’m all for their “occupation” continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes.

PS: One last bit of Steyn, because it’s just too good:

It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with “If I Had A Hammer.” As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they’re not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.

In checking in at Mark Steyn’s site today, I noted this comment:

Mark’s new book inches up the New York Times bestseller list from Big Hit Sound Five to Number Four. It’s the highest-ranking book on the Times list entirely unreviewed by either the daily paper or Sunday Book Review.

What must the Times’ editors think? (Don’t answer that.) There’s a book on their precious bestseller list that they wouldn’t touch with hazmat gloves. What on earth is the matter with the reading public?

I’m sure it’s just an oversight. If they received Regnery Publishing’s fall list at all, they probably shredded it before the scent of glossy paper wafted through their ivory tower. I recently cited someone’s subscription to the Times as proof of their ignorance of world events. How right I was.

What book are we talking about, you ask? Where you been?

Mark Steyn “celebrates” the verdict in favor of Geert Wilders:

Geert Wilders has been acquitted of all charges at his show trial in Amsterdam:

The court ruled that some of Wilders’ statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptibility, but that they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society.

“On the edge of legal acceptability”, eh? As for the latter part – “the broad context of a political and social debate” – the genius “jurists” are effectively conceding what I said when this racket got going – that the Dutch state was attempting to criminalize the political platform of a popular opposition party. That’s the sort of thing free societies should leave to Mubarak & Co, and even then, you can only get away with it for a while before people draw the obvious conclusion.

Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did – and the British Government’s refusal to permit a Dutch Member of Parliament to land at Heathrow testifies to how easily the craven squishes of the broader political culture fall into line.

And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.

That’s the Netherlands, 2011. Shameful. As for the Islamic imperialists, they’re taking their case to the logical venue. As Reuters reports:

Minorities groups said they would now take the case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

“The acquittal means that the right of minorities to remain free of hate speech has been breached. We are going to claim our rights at the U.N.,” said Mohamed Rabbae of the National Council for Moroccans.

The genteel evasions of the eunuch prose (“minorities groups”) are a big part of the problem here.

The UN Human Rights Committee (Council, actually). Wonder what kind of reception they’ll get there?

On Friday at 6 p.m. the Obama administration promise to fix the disreputable UN Human Rights Council by becoming a member died a predictable death at the UN General Assembly. Knowing they were headed for certain defeat, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Esther Brimmer, spoke to a Washington institute on Wednesday touting the President’s “reform” accomplishments from inside the UN’s top human rights body. And her whitewash was supplemented at the end of the week by a barrage of statements and press releases from the State Department.

…

From the day it began, the council has proved to be even worse than its predecessor. Sitting in judgment on human rights violations worldwide are such luminaries as China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. Member Libya had no difficulty being elected, and its suspension didn’t occur until March of this year, when the numbers of dead finally proved too embarrassing. But throwing women in jail for driving, outlawing freedom of religion, rendering homosexuality a capital offense and periodically cutting off heads haven’t made a dent in Saudi membership.

But you know all this: we cover it ad nauseam here. Watch out, Wilders, the long arm of the UN’s law is coming to get you. If Omar Bashir or Ratko Mladic are any example, you’ve got only about 20-25 years of liberty left to you.

You’d think the epidemic of middle-aged white guys cyber-dressing up as hot young lesbians (and for once I’m not talking about Anthony Weiner—unless I am) would be fertile ground for Mark Steyn.

And you’d be right.

But between the puns and double entendres, he makes a point—one of the most important points in today’s world that we need to get if we get anything at all:

From CNN to The Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why?

Because they wanted to. It would be nice if “Amina Arraf” existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction – a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at No. 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other’s diversity. They will proffer cheery greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the other’s attractive buttock-hugging leather shorts for that day’s Gay Pride parade as he prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic.

…

In 2007 in The Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, announced that, never mind his policies, Barack Obama’s visage alone would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.” As he explained:

“It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man – Barack Hussein Obama – is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. … If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

For crying out loud. The assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Lahore or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the most feeble kind of projection even by the standards of Western liberal navel-gazing. If doting progressives stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” for just a moment, they might notice that in Benghazi “democracy activists” have been rounding up Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. In Bahrain “democracy activists” have attacked hundreds of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, ripping the tongue out of one muezzin and leaving him brain damaged. What’s so “multicultural” about the pampered middle-aged narcissists of the West’s leisurely “activist” varsity pretending that the entire planet is just like them?

You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. “Amina Arraf” was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the liberal worldview is a fiction.

The liberal worldview is a fiction. He could have just been done with it after those six words, but he had contractual space to fill. And if we were to explore the how and why of that fiction, we need look no further than these five words he also wrote: It would be nice if…

That’s what liberal philosophy boils down to: wouldn’t it be nice. Isn’t that the message in Bobby Kennedy’s tarted up line “Some men see things as they are and ask why I dream things that never were and ask why not.” (Of course, like any good Kennedy, he was quoting another man’s words.)

That’s why many of us were liberals in our youth, but got tired of waiting for the world to be nice, and finished with living a fiction in a non-fiction world.

Just one example: who can believe in a United Nations given what it is united against and what it is united for? And who can believe in a Human Rights Council (or a Commission or a Panel or whatever the name is changed to in order to whitewash its past) that not only ignores human rights violations, but employs some of the worst violators to define human rights as ethnic and religious hatred and bigotry?

A surprising number of people believe that actually. Their “fiction” is very dangerous in the real world.

If you were to ask me why we continue to report on Obama’s ruinous economic policies, I would answer we do so for the same reason a person beats his head against the wall: it feels good when we stop.

Mark Steyn (as if you couldn’t tell):

Default, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

June 11, 2011 12:03 P.M.
By Mark Steyn

…but in ourselves. Chancellor Williamson noted this one yesterday afternoon in the Exchequer. While Little Timmy Geithner has been running around bleating that failing to raise the debt ceiling would risk default, the Chinese have concluded that we’re already defaulting:

A Chinese ratings house has accused the United States of defaulting on its massive debt, state media said Friday, a day after Beijing urged Washington to put its fiscal house in order.

“In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting,” Guan Jianzhong, president of Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. Ltd., the only Chinese agency that gives sovereign ratings, was quoted by the Global Times saying.

Washington had already defaulted on its loans by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies — eroding the wealth of creditors including China, Guan said.

Geithner and Bernanke can protest all they want that debauching the currency and the left hand buying the right hand’s debt and quantitively easing yourself all day long like Congressman Weiner is so totally not like defaulting. But, if the dwindling ranks of buyers of Treasury debt around the world come to see it like that, that’s what counts.

Imagine what a man who’d been cryogenically frozen circa 1963 would make of the above wire story. Communist China has a debt rating agency? And it’s urging fiscal restraint on the US Government?

America has a looming rendezvous with destiny. You can’t tax your way out of it, you can’t inflate your way out of it, you can’t quantitively ease your way out of it. The only door that leads anywhere is the one marked “Massive Government Cuts”. There is not enough money on the planet for what the Permanent Governing Class is doing. If Americans decline to grasp that central truth, this country will die.

China is not making a petulant accusation; they are describing deliberate government policy. We are doing exactly what they say we are, on purpose, and for exactly the reasons they say.

And I leave it to the individual how to handle Steyn’s jeremiad “If Americans decline to grasp that central truth, this country will die.” I don’t make it a habit to best against him. He’s been wrong, but the big stuff he gets right.