Thursday, June 30, 2005
Mark Steyn being Mark Steyn
This has been linked all over the right-of-center blogosphere already, I know. But it's still possible that neither of my regular readers have seen it, so here you go.
In the words of a famous American president, it's a crackjack. It's an online (i.e. e-mail) interview with Mr. Steyn, consisting almost entirely of killer quotes, and thus is hard to excerpt; I'd really want to just quote the whole darn thing.
Okay, maybe just one or two:
I haven't spent a lot of time in "Palestine," but, when I have, I've never seen any sign anywhere in Gaza or the West Bank of anything remotely resembling a "nationalist" movement. There's plenty of evidence of widespread Jew-hatred and the veneration of death-cult "martyrdom," but not that anybody's seriously interested in building a nation for the "Palestinian people." So if you leave it to the Palestinians there's never going to be a state, only decade after decade of suicide bombings. One can advance reasons for this - it's no coincidence that the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth are the ones who have been wholly entrusted to the formal care of the UN for three generations now. But the fact is what Israel is doing is the only thing that will force the Palestinians to get up off their allegedly occupied butts and run a state: the Israelis are walling off what they feel they need, or what they can get away with, and it will be up to the gangsters of Arafatistan to see if they now feel like dropping the jihad and getting on with less glamorous activities like running highway departments and schools.(emphasis mine)
Or how about this:
The era of the state church has been replaced by an age in which the state itself is the church. European progressives still don't get this: they think the idea of a religion telling you how to live your life is primitive, but the government regulating every aspect of it is somehow advanced and enlightened.Or this:
The utopian welfarism of Europe has so corroded the basic impulses necessary for societal survival - ie, breeding - that I doubt anything can be done. But if the US seriously wanted to help it would accelerate the closure of all Continental bases. Even if that didn't persuade them to get real, it would still be worth doing, as when the European powder keg goes up America will want to be well clear. On the basic problem of their deathbed demographics, a reader of mine, Jim Ellinthorpe, thinks President Bush should give speeches mocking the virility of European men. I'm all in favor of this, though mainly on entertainment grounds. A Berlin airlift of cheap generic Viagra might also be useful.See what I mean? You start counting killer quotes, and you quickly run out of fingers. By all means, go read the whole thing, if you haven't already!
