Why Mark Steyn Is No Longer with National Review

Mark Steyn remarked this week en passant,

In 2013 I bust up with National Review, for various reasons, some of which I’m not at liberty to disclose but all of which fall broadly under the banner of free speech. I’m very big on that. It’s my core issue.

It’s as perhaps as explicit an acknowledgement as we’re likely to get (from any of the parties involved) that the split was partly over litigation strategy, and partly over the fruit cordial.

English Translation of Mark Steyn’s Interview with Bonjour le Chat

Mark Steyn writes, “A couple of days ago France’s leading feline forum, Bonjour Le Chat, interviewed me about Marvin. For non-francophones, I’ll provide a few anglo snippets once this Senate testimony’s behind me.”

Mark Steyn on Benghazi

Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material.  I recommend his last three weekly columns, about Benghazi and what has happened since.

Did you know that since Benghazi, the Islamists have also destroyed six of our Harrier jets and killed two of our Marines?  (More.)  Neither does anyone else.  See also pro-Obama media bias.

Steyn:

• September 15th
  Disgrace in Benghazi
  And a dying superpower’s blundering response.
  (National Review Online, Orange County Register)

‘The Lazy Cobwebbed Assumptions of Myopic Narcissism’

Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material:

And when America slides off the cliff it lands with a much bigger thud than Greece or Iceland. I’m not certain that the Republicans will be able to prevent that happening. But I know that the Democrats can’t. America owes more money than anybody has ever owed anyone in the history of the planet. But millions of Americans don’t see it, and millions of those who do see it don’t see it as a problem.

. . . Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”

“He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another.”

Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material:

So, in his “you didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge.  “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”

‘One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of “conventional wisdom”’

Great line from Mark Steyn:

One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of “conventional wisdom” on everything from unsustainable welfare programs to climate change to Islam. Yet, at precisely the moment when we need to be broadening the bounds of public discourse, in Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere the same ideologically insecure political class that got us into this mess is growing ever more comfortable in regulating what the citizenry is allowed to say, read, listen to — and, indeed, think. I say nuts to that.

Steyn on Fluke, America

Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material:

Nor is the core issue that, whatever the merits of government contraception, America is the Brokest Nation in History — although the Fluke story is a useful reminder that the distinction between fiscal and social conservatism is generally false. . . . When even casual sex requires a state welfare program, you’re pretty much done for.

But They Leave a Bad Taste in Your Mouth

Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material:

Commissar Sebelius isn’t the only one interested in “striking the appropriate balance” between individual liberty and state compulsion. Everyone talks like that these days. For Canada’s Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, freedom of expression is just one menu item in the great all-you-can-eat salad bar of rights, so don’t be surprised if we’re occasionally out of stock. Instead, why not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour?

Supply and Demand

Glenn Beck this morning: “All I want for Christmas: Edison’s light bulb.”

It’s true, it will be illegal to sell 100-watt incandescent bulbs in the United States starting in 2012—i.e., two weeks from now.  You will be able to get them only at great expense, if at all.  (Hoard them while you can, if you like.)

I suppose the coming blackout is fitting accompaniment to the coming of the new dark ages.

National Interest

As usual, Mark Steyn is must-read material.

People Sell Lemonade at Capitol, Are Arrested

I don’t know whether they’ve ever heard of Mark Steyn, but this past weekend a group of people answered his call for lemonade-stand civil disobedience, albeit on the Capitol lawn, not on their own lawns, and with the stand operated entirely by adults—though perhaps civil disobedience had better be done by adults, actually.  Three people were arrested and taken to jail. 

Mark & Mark!

(Via Steyn Online, whence the title of this entry.)

Mark Steyn had a great line in an interview with Mark Levin about Steyn’s new book:

What I think is the difference when you talk about the divide in America is I think most conservatives exist in a kind of oppositional world.  They know every time they go and see a Hollywood movie, every time they switch on a sitcom and hear a certain kind of cheap joke, every time they happen to be stuck at the airport and they’re watching some drone on CNN—they understand the other guy’s point of view, they’re exposed to it relentlessly. 

Austerity in Europe, Delusional Washington

Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material:

As Obama made plain in his threat to Gran’ma last week that the August checks might not go out, funding nonproductivity is now the principal purpose of the modern state.

Legitimacy Does Not Come from the State

You heard it here first:  On Rush Limbaugh today, Mark Steyn joked that he will soon have a new imminently soon-to-be-imminently-released book.  It will be all about the over-burdening of America with regulations, such as in the case of the lemonade stand shut down by police in Georgia, or the banning of homemade goods at bake sales in Pennsylvania.  (As the Wall Street Journal article’s subtitle puts it, “Inspector Nabs Homemade Desserts At St. Cecilia Church’s Lenten Fish Fry.”  The tag and URL on the first story put it very succinctly: “strange” and “bizarre”.) 

Not Inevitable

In the July 4th issue of National Review (page 18), Kevin D. Williamson has a piece that’s informative and also pretty funny (perhaps he hopes to be the next Mark Steyn?), describing how Canada overindulged in deficit spending for decades, but then sobered up in response to fiscal crisis in the ’90s, and has kept deficit spending under control ever since. 

Contraceptives

Apparently the Pill makes men and women like each other less.  Also, apparently, condoms make women more depressed.

Sometimes I wonder whether the Catholic Church hasn’t been right about contraceptives all along.

Incidentally, political correctness makes it difficult even to talk about such questions.  The Wall Street Journal writer, at that first link, feels compelled to assure readers,

Multiculturalism

I have fond childhood memories of John Cleese in Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Disney’s non-cartoon The Jungle Book.  So I was interested to learn (via Five Feet of Fury) that Cleese (“a generous donor to the Liberal Democrats who . . . has appeared in several party political broadcasts”) seems to have joined what may be an emerging consensus that multiculturalism, the West’s great experiment, has failed:

Of Cabbages and Kings

If you’re a fan of President Obama, you should probably just skip this one. 

Postscript on Civility

Two months ago, someone shot a lot of people at an event in Tucson, Arizona, including Congressman Gabrielle Giffords.  Six of those people died; many others were injured.  Liberals argued that conservatives (e.g., radio-talk-show hosts) participate in the great national debate a little bit too boisterously, and that eruptions of such violence are a natural result of that debate (i.e., a natural result of what I think Mark Steyn has called the rough and tumble of a free society).  Liberals talked about the need for “civility” in the national discourse, ambiguously attempting to deligitimize debate.

On Debt Spirals and Denial

Just after arguing with a reader about the national debt, I find myself reading a good piece by Mark Steyn (redundant? “a piece by Mark Steyn”?), which includes this excellent and topical paragraph:

[Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] and too many other Americans seem to be living their version of the old line: If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. America owes the world $14 trillion, so the world has a problem.