 The whole point about homosexuality is that it was supposed to be wilder and crazier, and instead the leftist politicized gays have made homosexuality totally boring. . . . If Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter came back today they'd be straight.
Mark Steyn
ricochet.com
Government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
Mark Steyn
Obamacare worth the price to Democrats
What's happening in the developed world today isn't so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over.
Mark Steyn
face down in the ouzo
The difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets.
Mark Steyn
Getting our groupthink on
The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing," they can only conceive of the public — and indeed the world — as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show."
Mark Steyn
If 'Unsustainable' Is New Normal, Collapse Is Closer Than We Think
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don't go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state's whims happen to be that morning.
Mark Steyn
In Obama's America you'll all work for the government
It's not just the money. The notion that the IRS should be able to seize your assets if you don't arrange your health care to the approval of the federal government represents the de facto nationalization of your body, which is about as primal an assault on individual liberty as one could devise.
Mark Steyn
Can Obama hold Teddy's seat?
“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You float a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you.
Mark Steyn
Gullible eager-beaver planet savers
Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a "servant" to the head of state, would reply, "Get lost, creep." And, if they still taught history in American schools, he'd add, "Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776."
Mark Steyn
Obama 'Outreach' To School Kids Feels More Like Personality Cult
You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks.
Mark Steyn
Things only a Kennedy could get away with
Still, even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer set in a world divided into muff divers and duff donors.
Mark Steyn
Notice Anything Shriveling?
If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.
Mark Steyn
Untangling the Spaghetti
In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes and savings vanish, the downtrodden masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead, the Euro-left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a significant chunk of the electorate switched to the “far right” – the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican Party adopt it, but no doubt within a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement, and governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and the whole brand would go to hell.
Mark Steyn
The New Right, er, Left
Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets. Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility
Mark Steyn
The Ecopalypse
But what would happen if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible "to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations"? That moment has now arrived.
Mark Steyn
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631535597970609.html
You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.
Mark Steyn
Live Free or Die
In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel [at Churchill College, Cambridge], and Crick’s fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, Crick refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn’t were not obliged to enter it. [Crick] offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and, when that was rejected, he resigned.
Mark Steyn
Obituary of Sir Francis Crick
Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
Mark Steyn
"The Future Belongs to Islam," MacCleans, Oct. 20, 2006
It's the perfect solution to the "Middle East peace process": out of sight, out of mind. And given that Ahmadinejad's out of his mind, we're already halfway there.
Mark Steyn
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn11.html
Just for the record, WMD was never my rationale. As I've said on many occasions, when it comes to toppling dictators, there's no such thing as an "illegitimate" rationale. In his obstruction of U.N. weapons inspectors, Saddam certainly acted as if he had WMD and, in his "trade" missions to Niger (principal exports: uranium, goats, cowpeas, and onions), as if he were eager to acquire more. There's something to be said for taking a chap at his word.
Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/issue/steyn200511070904.asp
Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
Mark Steyn
"The Big Easy rocked, but didn't roll," The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/09/06/do0602.xml
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