The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Hewitt and Steyn discuss the increasing likelihood of a WMD attack--and I discuss posting in general
The original intent of this post is to highlight what was an excellent exchange (as usual) between Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt, thanks to Radioblogger's excellent work.
But before I get to the interview, I wanted to re-state something I have tried to articulate before: I often have mixed feelings whenever I choose to re-publish entire interviews (and other "whole" posts) here, because the people I typically link to are people for whom I have a great deal of respect, and my goal is decidedly not to steal traffic from their site. So for those who care about such things, I feel like I should attempt to explain my rationale when I do take this step.
Appearances aside, it is my sincere hope that by highlighting some of the better posts of people and sites that I truly admire, it will encourage readers of my blog to visit these sites themselves--especially oft-quoted sites like Radioblogger, Steyn Online, Hugh Hewitt, Captain's Quarters, Power Line, The American Thinker, Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers, Rick Moran, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and the great writers on National Review Online...just to name a few. There are many others. The sites listed above should be DAILY visits for an anyone interested in American politics, the war on Terror and Radical Islamists, and the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of ideas in what has now morphed into the Socialist-Workers-Democratic party.
The unfortunate fact of our fast-paced lives is: we are all pressed for time. My goal is to find a few interesting stories every day which I believe need to be read and to spread them to a wider audience. Simple as that. There are people who have time to surf around and those who don't. But for the few that come to my blog daily but don't have the time to surf around, it is important to me that they get the intended message. However, with that said my goal is not to prevent them from clicking on others' sites; in fact I try to go out of my way to encourage the readers of DT to visit all the linked sites.
Many of the man and women I link to are so articulate that it is almost impossible for me to improve on their points and/or how those points are presented. My mission here is the dissemenation of well-spoken ideas to the widest possible audience (emphasis on the "well spoken"...). In wartime, in my opinion, making sure that the appropriate message is understood (and being "well spoken" helps immensely in this...) might just be the difference between losing our way of life--and between life and death of millions of our citizens, and perhaps the lives of millions of other Western citizens in Europe and Israel--or saving Western Civilization as we know it. And in that regard, the mainstream media are not our Allies. As in the Revolutionary War, it is up to the patriots among the common people to get the word out when the official "organs" fail to do so. This is a much more important goal than is increasing my individual "hit count" or the possibility that I might offend someone whom I respect very much. For it is their highly skilled voices--not mine--who are likely to be most effective in getting through to the maximum number of people.
For example, with these Steyn/Hewitt interviews (or, indeed, with almost anything Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, or Ed Morrissey write) it often becomes difficult for me to really write anything else that will enhance the existing message...but I CAN help to spread it. Too, it is almost impossible sometimes to simply pick and choose only small snippets from many posts--becasue the arguments are typically so brillianly written and well put together, there is no improving upon them--they stand perfectly on their own...and often the feeling here is that they need to be read in their entireity--one paragraph builds on the next to construct the complete idea; in fact, to me it is almost taking a risk that by simply placing a link to another site and not including the "meat" of the text (at the very least) that the reader might not click on the link, and thus would miss the important message. And that is the point at which we ALL lose. So when these critical ideas are articulated as well as are the posts of many of these writers--for me anyway--getting those ideas to the widest possible audience trumps "good form" blogging etiquette. My personal bottom line is not blog fame--it is ensuring that these ideas need to be read and understood by as many people as possible.
We are at WAR, folks--we are fighting for our very way of life against mass murderers who want us all dead--and in war within a Democracy, to ensure that the widest audience of voters in our (and other) democracies gets the truth (in as convincing and articulate form as possible) can be the difference between victory and defeat. To me this basic goal trumps "good form" every time.
Anyway--back to the original subject, the Mark Steyn interview with Hugh Hewitt on Radioblogger--as readers of my blog are well aware, I always look forward to reading their weekly discussion, and I often post them. This week, as is usually the case, it is great stuff--the conversations turned to three topics I have been following pretty closely: the State of the Union speech, the Danish cartoon controversy, and--in my mind the most alarming issue of our day--the potential attack on a Western city by a WMD:
Mark Steyn on the seriousness needed to deal with a nuclear ambitious Iran.
02-02steyn.mp3
HH: I'm joined now by Mark Steyn, columnist to the world. You can read all of his work at Steynonline.com. Mark, I thought we'd start with the State of the Union, but overnight, the Muslim Mohammed cartoon fiasco scandal is exploding with seven European newspapers reprinting the cartoons judged offensive by many Muslims. And today, the editor, the publisher of one of those newspapers firing the editor of one of these newspapers. What is going on here?
MS: Well you know, this is a point I made in that very, very big piece that the Wall Street Journal website put up a couple of weeks ago, that there aren't a lot of good options when you have a very significant militant minority in your country that is determined, effectively, to demand that its own values be imposed on society at large. You only have to look at, for example, the difference...when a Broadway playwright writes a play about Jesus being gay, and having sex with Judas Iscariot, there are a couple of protests outside the theater, and people write letters. When you attempt to show a representation of Mohammed, you get people threatening to kill you, you get national boycotts, you get people burning down buildings. And at some point, Muslims living in Western Europe have to decide whether or not they're prepared to be offended, because that's what it involves in a free society. Every day of the week, you, I'm sure...every morning, I wake up to hate mail on the e-mail, and I shrug it off. And I'm sure you do, too.
HH: Yes, yes.
MS: And that's what Muslims have to learn to do in the Western world, if they're going to be citizens of the Western world.
HH: In fact, if you protest too much, there's a Will and Grace episode which has caught the attention of Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association. Evidently, they're viewing it as being very disrespectful to Christianity. And this stuff happens...and the Tommy Toles cartoon, which was very disgusting in the Washington Post, for which he's now apologized. But you know, you don't threaten to kill people over it.
MS: No, and in fact, Brokeback Mountain, for example, people said well, Brokeback Mountain, this film about these...this gay western, basically. They're two gay shepherds up on Brokeback Mountain having a gay old time. And people said well, this was supposed to be a controversial movie. Why is it a controversial movie? And a couple of websites started the view, this sort of conspiracy that in fact, the religious right had deliberately decided to kill the film by not making a fuss about it.
HH: I missed that. Oh, I see. Well, you can win from losing.
MS: And I think there's a lot of truth to that, that a few cartoons were published in a Danish newspaper, and the Muslims have decided to go on a worldwide jihad about it. Why not just...and I think they have essentially challenged every newspaper in the free world to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of speech now by publishing one of these cartoons. To the best of my knowledge, the only print publication in the United States to print them so far has been the New York Sun. But certainly, they're basically saying this is the choice. And I, in a sense, I sympathize with that owner of that French newspaper who fired his editor for publishing them, because he doesn't want those guys coming to his house and killing him.
HH: Yeah. Raymond Lakah.
MS: You know, you've got to draw the line. You've got to stand firm against that now. And if they are people who are going to kill you, then the sooner they learn that they can't kill you or you're going to kill them, the better.
HH: And that is Raymond Lakah. We'll find out later whether or not he reverses the firing of managing editor Jacques Lefranc. Mark Steyn, I want to switch now to the State of the Union, but via the front page of the New York Times today, which brings to our attention that the Pentagon has formed a team of nuclear experts to analyze the fallout from a terrorist nuclear attack on American soil, in order to identify the attackers. It's one of those...you have to read it two times to realize that the Pentagon is very, very, very concerned that they're going to have to figure out who blew up the big one in this country.
MS: Well, I hope it's a real...I mean, the Pentagon is not short of plans, Hugh. They had a big plan for invading...for a war with Britain in the 1920's. I mean, they made a plan...
HH: True enough.
MS: ...made plans for some pretty unlikely hypotheses over the last few years. But that aside, I hope this is a real plan. I said a couple of years ago that I think we'll be very lucky to make it through the next five or ten years without something like this happening in a major city. And it might not be an American city. It might be Rotterdam, it might be Vancouver, it might be Rome. But the fact of the matter is, that there's a lot of this stuff that's gone walkabout, and there's a lot of people who've been interested in disseminating a lot of this information throughout the world. And it surprises me. You know, we're both of the generation that kind of grew up with all the sort of nuclear armageddon hanging over us, big mushroom clouds on the front of movie posters, and novels, and TV films and all the rest of it. And that was when five relatively sane countries had nuclear weapons. Now, any guy whose got the right Pakistani phone number in his rolodex can get ahold of nukes, and the left, who've spent the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's raging hysterically about nuclear armageddon, couldn't care less about it.
HH: Well now, it seems to me that the only...that we're not going to really have to find a fingerprint, that if that happens, Pyongyang is gone. And if the mullahs have got it, Tehran is going to go under, too. Not maybe by nuke blast, but by assault. Because once it happens, it's never going to be allowed to happen again. Is that your assessment?
MS: Well, I would like to think so, but you know, what concerns me is that when you look at essentially how demoralized and defeatist much of the Western world has become in the last five years since September 11th, and you think to yourself, suppose there was a medium-sized dirty nuke. Let's not say a full nuclear explosion, but a dirty nuke in Dallas or Miami, or somewhere. You can imagine that there would be a huge, visceral rage in America after that. And if you could find Pyonyang's fingerprints on it, or Tehran's, that would be great. But if you can't, there's going to be this tremendous pressure, as before, to say oh, well we can't react, we've got to look at the root causes, we've got to go through the U.N., and all the other rubbish. You know, this is not...you look back sixty years, this country took a very cold-blooded decision to end the war, to end the second world war, by dropping the big one on two Japanese cities. And it's inconceivable in my mind to think of circumstances in which that kind of America would take that kind of decision today. There's an awful lot of institutional pressure to say no, no, no, no, no.
HH: Boy, I don't know, Mark. I would think that the anger would run so deep...hopefully, we never have to consult that bit of future, but who knows?
MS: Well, we have to for the very reason you say, that you know, if it happens to one city, people get used to terrorism, and to the upgrading of terror. And people might say well, you know, so a city gets nuked once in a while. Once it does happen, you have to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And that means killing an awful lot of Iranian or North Korean civilians, or whoever it happens to be.
HH: What makes me most alarmed is the prospect of having watched Hillary on the floor during Tuesday night's speech, of her being in the White House during such an event. She seems unserious in a very serious way.
MS: Yes, I think this is what's interesting to me. And you know, when people talk about Hillary Clinton's qualities, as they do in the Washington Post and the New York Times, what they mean is that she doesn't actually believe anything. She's not left, she's not right. Nobody knows what she is. I mean, when they talk about her skill in crafting a centrist position on the War On Terror, you think about how absurd that is. You think how ludicrous it would be if people were to talk about people crafting a centrist position on World War II, or World War I, or the Civil War, and it would be absurd. I mean, this is...what it means is that this woman doesn't actually have a position on the war that is not dictated by anything other than focus groups and internal polling. She's a completely empty shell in that respect.
HH: And she and her party sat on their hands when the president proposed that it was unremarkable that without a warrant, and quite clearly so, he would attempt to listen into Zawahiri talking to his agents in the United States. They sat on their hands, Mark Steyn.
MS: Yes, I know, and I think that's...we discussed this point before. I mean, it's become completely ridiculous. There's no...the idea that somehow a U.S. telephone number is proof that you're a U.S. citizen protected by the U.S. Constitution anyway is ridiculous. You know, I'm not a U.S. citizen, and I've got U.S. telephone numbers. And if the government wants to bug them, then I think it's entitled to. I don't think the fact that I have a New Hampshire phone number in and of itself confers the rights and protections of the U.S. Constitution. That phone number, a Verizon cell phone can be used anywhere on the planet.
HH: Right.
MS: It doesn't mean you're a U.S. citizen, or even that you're in the United States.
HH: I think they were glum, and we'll finish on this with about a minute left, because they had such a terrible week. They lost the Supreme Court this week, and the Ralph Neas profile in today's Washington Post lays it at his feet. It was a terrible week for them. Everything they built for forty years is...could be over, Mark Steyn.
MS: Well, I think so, and I think the lesson here is that essentially, they're wedded to a lot of unpopular 30, 40% policies. And if you're in that situation, it means essentially, you can only advance your agenda through the courts. And that's what the Democrats have kind of gotten used to. And now they're going to have to do things the old fashioned way, which is persuading the electorate to elect them to legislative office. And that's good for democracy.
HH: Quickly, any reaction to Boehner winning the election today?
MS: I think it's a kind of a little bit pregnant thing. They had three candidates. If they'd left you with the status quo, they would have been in trouble with the base. But they didn't want to go with candidate number three, because that would have been in a sense, admitting that the base was right. So he's Mr. Compromise, Mr. Little Bit Pregnant.
HH: All right. Thank you, Mark Steyn. Steynonline.com.
But before I get to the interview, I wanted to re-state something I have tried to articulate before: I often have mixed feelings whenever I choose to re-publish entire interviews (and other "whole" posts) here, because the people I typically link to are people for whom I have a great deal of respect, and my goal is decidedly not to steal traffic from their site. So for those who care about such things, I feel like I should attempt to explain my rationale when I do take this step.
Appearances aside, it is my sincere hope that by highlighting some of the better posts of people and sites that I truly admire, it will encourage readers of my blog to visit these sites themselves--especially oft-quoted sites like Radioblogger, Steyn Online, Hugh Hewitt, Captain's Quarters, Power Line, The American Thinker, Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers, Rick Moran, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and the great writers on National Review Online...just to name a few. There are many others. The sites listed above should be DAILY visits for an anyone interested in American politics, the war on Terror and Radical Islamists, and the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of ideas in what has now morphed into the Socialist-Workers-Democratic party.
The unfortunate fact of our fast-paced lives is: we are all pressed for time. My goal is to find a few interesting stories every day which I believe need to be read and to spread them to a wider audience. Simple as that. There are people who have time to surf around and those who don't. But for the few that come to my blog daily but don't have the time to surf around, it is important to me that they get the intended message. However, with that said my goal is not to prevent them from clicking on others' sites; in fact I try to go out of my way to encourage the readers of DT to visit all the linked sites.
Many of the man and women I link to are so articulate that it is almost impossible for me to improve on their points and/or how those points are presented. My mission here is the dissemenation of well-spoken ideas to the widest possible audience (emphasis on the "well spoken"...). In wartime, in my opinion, making sure that the appropriate message is understood (and being "well spoken" helps immensely in this...) might just be the difference between losing our way of life--and between life and death of millions of our citizens, and perhaps the lives of millions of other Western citizens in Europe and Israel--or saving Western Civilization as we know it. And in that regard, the mainstream media are not our Allies. As in the Revolutionary War, it is up to the patriots among the common people to get the word out when the official "organs" fail to do so. This is a much more important goal than is increasing my individual "hit count" or the possibility that I might offend someone whom I respect very much. For it is their highly skilled voices--not mine--who are likely to be most effective in getting through to the maximum number of people.
For example, with these Steyn/Hewitt interviews (or, indeed, with almost anything Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, or Ed Morrissey write) it often becomes difficult for me to really write anything else that will enhance the existing message...but I CAN help to spread it. Too, it is almost impossible sometimes to simply pick and choose only small snippets from many posts--becasue the arguments are typically so brillianly written and well put together, there is no improving upon them--they stand perfectly on their own...and often the feeling here is that they need to be read in their entireity--one paragraph builds on the next to construct the complete idea; in fact, to me it is almost taking a risk that by simply placing a link to another site and not including the "meat" of the text (at the very least) that the reader might not click on the link, and thus would miss the important message. And that is the point at which we ALL lose. So when these critical ideas are articulated as well as are the posts of many of these writers--for me anyway--getting those ideas to the widest possible audience trumps "good form" blogging etiquette. My personal bottom line is not blog fame--it is ensuring that these ideas need to be read and understood by as many people as possible.
We are at WAR, folks--we are fighting for our very way of life against mass murderers who want us all dead--and in war within a Democracy, to ensure that the widest audience of voters in our (and other) democracies gets the truth (in as convincing and articulate form as possible) can be the difference between victory and defeat. To me this basic goal trumps "good form" every time.
Anyway--back to the original subject, the Mark Steyn interview with Hugh Hewitt on Radioblogger--as readers of my blog are well aware, I always look forward to reading their weekly discussion, and I often post them. This week, as is usually the case, it is great stuff--the conversations turned to three topics I have been following pretty closely: the State of the Union speech, the Danish cartoon controversy, and--in my mind the most alarming issue of our day--the potential attack on a Western city by a WMD:
Mark Steyn on the seriousness needed to deal with a nuclear ambitious Iran.
02-02steyn.mp3
HH: I'm joined now by Mark Steyn, columnist to the world. You can read all of his work at Steynonline.com. Mark, I thought we'd start with the State of the Union, but overnight, the Muslim Mohammed cartoon fiasco scandal is exploding with seven European newspapers reprinting the cartoons judged offensive by many Muslims. And today, the editor, the publisher of one of those newspapers firing the editor of one of these newspapers. What is going on here?
MS: Well you know, this is a point I made in that very, very big piece that the Wall Street Journal website put up a couple of weeks ago, that there aren't a lot of good options when you have a very significant militant minority in your country that is determined, effectively, to demand that its own values be imposed on society at large. You only have to look at, for example, the difference...when a Broadway playwright writes a play about Jesus being gay, and having sex with Judas Iscariot, there are a couple of protests outside the theater, and people write letters. When you attempt to show a representation of Mohammed, you get people threatening to kill you, you get national boycotts, you get people burning down buildings. And at some point, Muslims living in Western Europe have to decide whether or not they're prepared to be offended, because that's what it involves in a free society. Every day of the week, you, I'm sure...every morning, I wake up to hate mail on the e-mail, and I shrug it off. And I'm sure you do, too.
HH: Yes, yes.
MS: And that's what Muslims have to learn to do in the Western world, if they're going to be citizens of the Western world.
HH: In fact, if you protest too much, there's a Will and Grace episode which has caught the attention of Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association. Evidently, they're viewing it as being very disrespectful to Christianity. And this stuff happens...and the Tommy Toles cartoon, which was very disgusting in the Washington Post, for which he's now apologized. But you know, you don't threaten to kill people over it.
MS: No, and in fact, Brokeback Mountain, for example, people said well, Brokeback Mountain, this film about these...this gay western, basically. They're two gay shepherds up on Brokeback Mountain having a gay old time. And people said well, this was supposed to be a controversial movie. Why is it a controversial movie? And a couple of websites started the view, this sort of conspiracy that in fact, the religious right had deliberately decided to kill the film by not making a fuss about it.
HH: I missed that. Oh, I see. Well, you can win from losing.
MS: And I think there's a lot of truth to that, that a few cartoons were published in a Danish newspaper, and the Muslims have decided to go on a worldwide jihad about it. Why not just...and I think they have essentially challenged every newspaper in the free world to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of speech now by publishing one of these cartoons. To the best of my knowledge, the only print publication in the United States to print them so far has been the New York Sun. But certainly, they're basically saying this is the choice. And I, in a sense, I sympathize with that owner of that French newspaper who fired his editor for publishing them, because he doesn't want those guys coming to his house and killing him.
HH: Yeah. Raymond Lakah.
MS: You know, you've got to draw the line. You've got to stand firm against that now. And if they are people who are going to kill you, then the sooner they learn that they can't kill you or you're going to kill them, the better.
HH: And that is Raymond Lakah. We'll find out later whether or not he reverses the firing of managing editor Jacques Lefranc. Mark Steyn, I want to switch now to the State of the Union, but via the front page of the New York Times today, which brings to our attention that the Pentagon has formed a team of nuclear experts to analyze the fallout from a terrorist nuclear attack on American soil, in order to identify the attackers. It's one of those...you have to read it two times to realize that the Pentagon is very, very, very concerned that they're going to have to figure out who blew up the big one in this country.
MS: Well, I hope it's a real...I mean, the Pentagon is not short of plans, Hugh. They had a big plan for invading...for a war with Britain in the 1920's. I mean, they made a plan...
HH: True enough.
MS: ...made plans for some pretty unlikely hypotheses over the last few years. But that aside, I hope this is a real plan. I said a couple of years ago that I think we'll be very lucky to make it through the next five or ten years without something like this happening in a major city. And it might not be an American city. It might be Rotterdam, it might be Vancouver, it might be Rome. But the fact of the matter is, that there's a lot of this stuff that's gone walkabout, and there's a lot of people who've been interested in disseminating a lot of this information throughout the world. And it surprises me. You know, we're both of the generation that kind of grew up with all the sort of nuclear armageddon hanging over us, big mushroom clouds on the front of movie posters, and novels, and TV films and all the rest of it. And that was when five relatively sane countries had nuclear weapons. Now, any guy whose got the right Pakistani phone number in his rolodex can get ahold of nukes, and the left, who've spent the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's raging hysterically about nuclear armageddon, couldn't care less about it.
HH: Well now, it seems to me that the only...that we're not going to really have to find a fingerprint, that if that happens, Pyongyang is gone. And if the mullahs have got it, Tehran is going to go under, too. Not maybe by nuke blast, but by assault. Because once it happens, it's never going to be allowed to happen again. Is that your assessment?
MS: Well, I would like to think so, but you know, what concerns me is that when you look at essentially how demoralized and defeatist much of the Western world has become in the last five years since September 11th, and you think to yourself, suppose there was a medium-sized dirty nuke. Let's not say a full nuclear explosion, but a dirty nuke in Dallas or Miami, or somewhere. You can imagine that there would be a huge, visceral rage in America after that. And if you could find Pyonyang's fingerprints on it, or Tehran's, that would be great. But if you can't, there's going to be this tremendous pressure, as before, to say oh, well we can't react, we've got to look at the root causes, we've got to go through the U.N., and all the other rubbish. You know, this is not...you look back sixty years, this country took a very cold-blooded decision to end the war, to end the second world war, by dropping the big one on two Japanese cities. And it's inconceivable in my mind to think of circumstances in which that kind of America would take that kind of decision today. There's an awful lot of institutional pressure to say no, no, no, no, no.
HH: Boy, I don't know, Mark. I would think that the anger would run so deep...hopefully, we never have to consult that bit of future, but who knows?
MS: Well, we have to for the very reason you say, that you know, if it happens to one city, people get used to terrorism, and to the upgrading of terror. And people might say well, you know, so a city gets nuked once in a while. Once it does happen, you have to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And that means killing an awful lot of Iranian or North Korean civilians, or whoever it happens to be.
HH: What makes me most alarmed is the prospect of having watched Hillary on the floor during Tuesday night's speech, of her being in the White House during such an event. She seems unserious in a very serious way.
MS: Yes, I think this is what's interesting to me. And you know, when people talk about Hillary Clinton's qualities, as they do in the Washington Post and the New York Times, what they mean is that she doesn't actually believe anything. She's not left, she's not right. Nobody knows what she is. I mean, when they talk about her skill in crafting a centrist position on the War On Terror, you think about how absurd that is. You think how ludicrous it would be if people were to talk about people crafting a centrist position on World War II, or World War I, or the Civil War, and it would be absurd. I mean, this is...what it means is that this woman doesn't actually have a position on the war that is not dictated by anything other than focus groups and internal polling. She's a completely empty shell in that respect.
HH: And she and her party sat on their hands when the president proposed that it was unremarkable that without a warrant, and quite clearly so, he would attempt to listen into Zawahiri talking to his agents in the United States. They sat on their hands, Mark Steyn.
MS: Yes, I know, and I think that's...we discussed this point before. I mean, it's become completely ridiculous. There's no...the idea that somehow a U.S. telephone number is proof that you're a U.S. citizen protected by the U.S. Constitution anyway is ridiculous. You know, I'm not a U.S. citizen, and I've got U.S. telephone numbers. And if the government wants to bug them, then I think it's entitled to. I don't think the fact that I have a New Hampshire phone number in and of itself confers the rights and protections of the U.S. Constitution. That phone number, a Verizon cell phone can be used anywhere on the planet.
HH: Right.
MS: It doesn't mean you're a U.S. citizen, or even that you're in the United States.
HH: I think they were glum, and we'll finish on this with about a minute left, because they had such a terrible week. They lost the Supreme Court this week, and the Ralph Neas profile in today's Washington Post lays it at his feet. It was a terrible week for them. Everything they built for forty years is...could be over, Mark Steyn.
MS: Well, I think so, and I think the lesson here is that essentially, they're wedded to a lot of unpopular 30, 40% policies. And if you're in that situation, it means essentially, you can only advance your agenda through the courts. And that's what the Democrats have kind of gotten used to. And now they're going to have to do things the old fashioned way, which is persuading the electorate to elect them to legislative office. And that's good for democracy.
HH: Quickly, any reaction to Boehner winning the election today?
MS: I think it's a kind of a little bit pregnant thing. They had three candidates. If they'd left you with the status quo, they would have been in trouble with the base. But they didn't want to go with candidate number three, because that would have been in a sense, admitting that the base was right. So he's Mr. Compromise, Mr. Little Bit Pregnant.
HH: All right. Thank you, Mark Steyn. Steynonline.com.
