Thursday, December 14, 2017
Thought of the Day
Strzok to Miss Page, August 15th 2016:
"He" is Trump. "Andy's office" is believed to be that of the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, who was in charge of the Trump investigation - then just a few weeks old. The conversation appears to be a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil servants from engaging in political activity while on duty and in a government office.I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office that there's no way he gets elected — but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40...
But what does "I'm afraid we can't take that risk" (of Trump winning) actually mean?
Does it mean, for example, that "I'm going to dress up this dodgy Christopher Steele dossier Hillary and Fusion GPS passed along to us into something a bit more credible-seeming and take it to the FISA court to get authorization to tap everyone around Trump round the clock until we hit paydirt"?
9) The above text explains why Mueller hired the same-old-same-old Hillary crowd for his supposed "independent" investigation into Trump: The same people had to run both investigations because otherwise the new investigators would discover the shenanigans of the old investigators.Putting Strzok and Page on the team was the FBI's way of protecting itself.
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Thought of the Day
President Obama has added six-and-a-half trillion bucks to the national
debt, and has nothing to show for it. As Churchill would say, had his
bust not been bounced from the Oval Office, never in the field of human
spending has so much been owed by so many for so little.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, April 06, 2013
Thought of the Day
The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent; the diversity celebrators demand a ruthless homogeneity.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thought of the Day
Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers. The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s prime minister has already pointed out that they’ll sell it to the Chinese, whose Politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism, and indeed seems increasingly amused by it. Pace the ecopalyptics, the planet will be just fine: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or state, or municipality?
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Thought of the Day
America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet curiously the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged “revolutionary” movement itself. It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. 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.
Mark Steyn on Occupy Oakland specifically and the decline of the West generally
Mark Steyn on Occupy Oakland specifically and the decline of the West generally
Labels: Mark Steyn quote, Occupy Oakland
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Thought of the Day
...Tom MacMaster... took an actual, live, mass popular uprising and made an entirely unrepresentative and, indeed, nonexistent person its poster “girl.” 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 Number 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.
Mark Steyn, relentlessly skewering the alternate reality to which the left often retreats, including the fake lesbian bloggers recently revealed.
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 Number 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.
Mark Steyn, relentlessly skewering the alternate reality to which the left often retreats, including the fake lesbian bloggers recently revealed.
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Thought of the Day
So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we’re also happy to serve as the Qaddafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it’s rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist he’s willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn’t exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we’ve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Friday, October 08, 2010
Thought of the Day
I think at this stage, it’s very hard to rally Democrats, because I think a lot of them recognize, I think a lot of them are actually ashamed of what happened in 2008. it’s fascinating to me, I was driving earlier today through a little liberal enclave of New Hampshire. And I do not recall in any electoral cycle seeing so few Democratic Party signs. I mean normally, the Democrats in that particular town outnumber the Republican candidate signs very considerably. The Democrat signs are conspicuous by their absence. And I think people understand that they were taken for a ride in 2008. I saw this ridiculous video on the internet earlier today of some nude students protesting don’t take away our coverage, meaning you know, Obamacare covers them until the age of 26, supposedly. And I was rather touched by it, because these must be the last twelve people, twelve young people still singing the starry-eyed, hopeychangey balderdash from 2008. This is a tremendous fall, and comprehensive fall, in almost record time. I mean, this is beyond Carter. Carter was not a messiah. And what has happened to Obama is remarkable.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Thought of the Day
Multiculturalism trumps feminism, and so the media accept a two-tier sisterhood in which Muslim girls are run over, stabbed, strangled, drowned and decapitated for wanting to live like the women they read about in The New York Times and The Washington Post. No matter how novel or arresting the details of a story are, the PC blinkers go on immediately. As Miss Chesler adds:
In 2009, the gruesome beheading of Aasiya Z. Hassan was covered only five days later by the New York Times—and then mainly to explain that Islam had nothing to do with it and that anyone who believes to the contrary is misguided or prejudiced.
The media's attitude to "honor killings" is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it's also part of the reason why America's newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Friday, April 09, 2010
Thought of the Day
But most of the diversity-peddling faculty are old enough to have some residual acquaintanceship with the inheritance they affect to revile. Whatever bollocks they spout in class, they have no wish to live anywhere other than an advanced Western society: for one thing, it’s the only place you can make a living selling fatuous pap about diversity; in that and many other ways, multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon. In some deep unacknowledged sense, they understand they’re engaged in a pantomime.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Thought of the Day
In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:
“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush
Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.
Mark Steyn
“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush
Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Thought of the Day
Barack Obama has spent the last year doing bigtime Islamoschmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmo’s closure and his investigation of Bush officials to his bow before the Saudi King and a speech in Cairo to “the Muslim world” with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it, the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we’re still gonna kill you.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Thought of the Day
There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause.
Mark Steyn, with a spot on parody of President Obama in Oslo, or anywhere else overseas for that matter.
Mark Steyn, with a spot on parody of President Obama in Oslo, or anywhere else overseas for that matter.
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Thought of the Day
It is interesting to contrast the administration's "wise" diplomacy abroad with its willingness to go nuclear at home. If you go to a "town hall" meeting and express misgivings about the effectiveness of the stimulus, you're a "racist" "angry" "Nazi" "evilmonger" "right-wing domestic terrorist." It's perhaps no surprise that that doesn't leave a lot left over in the rhetorical arsenal for Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad. But you've got to figure that by now the world's strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington. Diplomacy used to be, as Canada's Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way. Today, it's more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you. The Europeans "negotiate" with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Thought of the Day
As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: "Like all figures in history -- and like those in the Bible, for that matter -- Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?
Mark Steyn
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Thought of the Day
When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”
Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
Mark Steyn
Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Thought of the Day
Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Thought of the Day
And I certainly sympathize with the general proposition that not all encounters with the constabulary go as agreeably as one might wish. Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state trooper, and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a "liar." I considered my options:
Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission and possibly shot while "resisting arrest";
Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.
I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial satisfaction and explaining that the trooper would be receiving "supervisory performance-related issue-counseling," which, with any luck, is even more ghastly than it sounds and hopefully is still ongoing.
Professor Gates chose option a), which is just plain stupid.
Mark Steyn
Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission and possibly shot while "resisting arrest";
Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.
I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial satisfaction and explaining that the trooper would be receiving "supervisory performance-related issue-counseling," which, with any luck, is even more ghastly than it sounds and hopefully is still ongoing.
Professor Gates chose option a), which is just plain stupid.
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Thought of the Day
So what’s to blame for this eternally looming rendezvous with the iceberg of apocalypse? As the British newspaper the Independent reported:
He then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.
Mark Steyn
UPDATE: Steyn uses the term 'warm-mongers' to refer to Warmie true believers. Wow, that's pretty good.
Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned. . . . And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.
He then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.
Mark Steyn
UPDATE: Steyn uses the term 'warm-mongers' to refer to Warmie true believers. Wow, that's pretty good.
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Thought of the Day
A week ago, the House of Representatives passed some gargantuan "cap-and-trade" bill designed to "save" "the environment." Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, accused those Neanderthals who voted against the bill of committing "treason against the planet." By that standard, most of the planet is guilty of treason against the planet. I don't mean just in the sense that China, already the world's No. 1 CO2 emitter, and India and other rising economic powers have absolutely no intention of doing what the Democrats have done, no way, no how – because they don't see why they should stay poor just because New York Times columnists think it's good for them.
Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn
Labels: Mark Steyn quote
