Ein Steyn.

Mark Steyn’s easy clarity regards Barry on Hannity.

Steyn on Coren Pt 1.







Now here’s the thing. It was P.J O’Rourke and his columns and fabulous books from Eat the Rich, All the Trouble in the World, Give War a Chance, and everything else he has ever done, that got me into the true freedom of conservative principals via his empirical, satirical, deflating, ironic and profoundly moral humour.

And that’s not the phony yuks of the unread PC limits of the average stand-up comedian, too often based on acceptable mass drone paradigms of bullshit. P.J O'Rourke deals largely in the actually shocking and entirely laughable facts. There's nothing funnier than the juxtaposition of the misery of Utopian leftard dreams of existence and the joy of proven capitalist democratic bounty. That's the one without the socialist government theft by interference and parasitism.

The only er, "flaw" in capitalism is that unproductive fakes won't leave it alone.

To paraphrase P.J O'Rourke: Ferrari, Hollywood style swimming pools in the homes of working-class people, the music of Marvin Gaye and modern dentistry alone, prove the superiority of the free West.

Yep, facts exist whether we know of them or not. The same with humour.

P.J O’Rourke’s massive take down of Obama stem cell logical fallacy.

P.J is one of the natural wonders of the world. An enormous talent who slices and dices the moral vanity fantasy’s of the left liberal and radical twerp. Or as O’Rourke has called them “the return of son of the son of sixties rabble”.

The caveat is that P.J ain’t always such an obvious online presence. Especially in far away and generally dull Australia. And sometimes the Peej is a little laid back around many an elite moonbats, but then he’s a nice guy and he’s done enough already. And what do I know?

In fact all my own problems come down to not becoming a conservative soon enough! No, really.

This brings me to Mark Steyn who is an affable guy, my favourite conservative, [after me] invariably deals with fools with a wonderfully effective and wicked economy. And this is not just a shabby ploy to be reader of the day again, [though what a great idea?!] but because if it wasn’t for P.J O'Rourke but especially regular addictive Steyn boosts, I for one would feel a little more like Chuck, as he’s making his pre-big sleep through space speech in Planet Of The Apes:

“One more thing, if anybody is listening, that is. Nothing scientific, it’s purely personal. But seen from out here, everything seems different.

Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely.”

It was pretty much Steyn who led me onto much of everyone and everything else per se. Onto incisive, researched, empirical, passionate, energetic, rational, inspiring [and footnoted!] conservative to libertarian adults like Jonah Goldberg, David Horowitz, Roger Kimball, Robert Spencer, John Stossel, Norman Podhoretz, Machosauce, Lt Colonel Allen B. West, Michelle Malkin, Humberto Fontova, Brigitte Gabriel, the great though flawed Christopher Hitchens, Wafa Sultan, Melanie Philips, Phyllis Chessler, many, many great bloggers and hell, plenty more.

Hey, notice how in the conservative libertarian world they not only have all the best selling worthwhile empirical books, but just as many great gals as guys? Interestin’ innit? The left talk, while conservatives walk.

The thing about Mark is that he has charm and balls. He’s always, always fun and a damn good laugh. I can read an entire Saturday edition of The Age and find it back to back mirthless. Unless one counts...no, The Age is a fucking drag.

He rarely lets even a slice of baloney pass without a surgical and naturally witty analysis, whether it’s the ever metastasising industrial park of cancerous Kabana of the MSM, government, academia, celebrity or the indoctrinated, incurious and ripped-off public.

We occasionally saddened souls of the lost art of reason find in Steyn the truth of things often laid embarrassingly bare. In fact, Mark is so consistently on the money that he’s invariably countered by the average Che the child killer fan, by ignoring everything Steyn writes and what they have just read and going straight for the meaningless and relentlessly codified ad hominem. Or not reading Steyn at all, which qualifies for a Marxist as being a Steyn analyst. Or is that just an anal list? Or a lisp?

The unsophisticated or too sophisticated, the mundane and the professionally glum often laughably misunderstand the wonderful purposeful and playful tangents that Steyn takes. Why does he and a few sainted others do it? Cos they can, cos why not and it's a laugh. It's also the naturally imaginative and talented at work, illuminating a point and a road often less taken by say, the MSM, governmental, celebrity and academic chicken farms.

When I first stumbled upon Steyn in er, The Age, I couldn’t believe it. “This is bloody great!” said I.

Now when I stumble across The Age I STILL can’t believe it. But in Steyn we trust. Here’s a an almost scientific formula that never seems to fail: as the number of Mark Steyn’s columns diminish in a newspaper, it’s in inverse proportion to how censorious, phony, dull and unreadable it becomes. And once it reaches the stage of say The Age, which now never prints any Marcus, it’s a useless pile of sheet. Or a sheet of useless piles. Either way. And it’s a fail safe indicator of how much PC social engineering global warming pro-Islamist Jew hating Marxist tripe they do print.

No Mark Steyn means a rhetoric and sly lies free edition of The Age, The Guardian or The New York Times et al, could be printed on a postage stamp. No, really. Or a piece of confetti. A small piece. Or the head of a pinhead. Or Andrew Jaspin.


In post No: 455,002, Steyn rounds up the spineless posturing of as Frank Zappa called it “tinsel town rebellion.” Via New Mexico Republicans:


“George Clooney’s triple Oscar nominations for acting, writing and directing are said to be a significant moment in the life of the nation, and not just by George Clooney, though his effusions on his own “bravery” certainly set a high mark. “We jumped in on our own,” he said, discussing Good Night, and Good Luck with Entertainment Weekly. “And there was no reason to think it was going to get any easier. But people in Hollywood do seem to be getting more comfortable with making these sorts of movies now. People are becoming braver.”

Wow. He was brave enough to make a movie about Islam’s treatment of women? Oh, no, wait. That was the Dutch director Theo van Gogh: He had his throat cut and half-a-dozen bullets pumped into him by an enraged Muslim who left an explanatory note pinned to the dagger he stuck in his chest. At last year’s Oscars, the Hollywood crowd were too busy championing the “right to dissent” in the Bushitler tyranny to find room even to name-check Mr. van Gogh in the montage of the deceased.

No, Mr. Clooney was the fellow “brave” enough to make a movie about – cue drumroll as I open the envelope for Most Predictable Direction – the McCarthy era!

Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go Back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the touch issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension...” That might have been “bold”, “courageous” move-making half-a-century ago. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation.

Hollywood “controversy” seems more an evasion of controversy. If you want it in a single word, it’s the difference between the title of George Jonas’s original book – Vengeance – and the title of the film Steven Spielberg made of it – Munich. Vengeance is a point of view, Munich is a round of self-applause for the point of view that having no point of view is the most sophisticated point of view of all.

In the meantime, Danish cartoonists are in hiding for their lives but George Clooney will be televised around the world picking up an award for his bravery.”

Colonel Neville: The closest we have to such ballsy, delicious and fluid Hendrixian riffing in Oz is Tim Blair and the well, less funny bt great value too of Andy Bolt.

Bolt is also judged as Dennis Miller noted of Fox, in absentia. Should I say balls and delicious so close together? Why not? My Japanese wife does.

Tim Blair bleeds The Age.



Speaking of enormous canasta's, Steyn clearly has the hip intellectual moral wit and analytical trouser tackle to well, tackle any subject and head on and is also a brilliant out-flanker.

Many times I’ve thought “of course!" The revealing block, side-step and counter punch and yet, still always done with a hearty laugh. Or the straight KAPOW!! to the rhetorical nose.

It’s no coincidence that he has a rather unique insight and interest in the layering of song and music and that his other vast aspects of recall inform what he does, dig? It used to be normal to have such an eclectic range of interests and pursuits. Not so many now though it appears. Ah, but that was when journalists were various different kinds of people, or as Mark said “people whose lives had gone terribly wrong!”

But obviously not for some. And the man flows. Hail Prolificus! Scribe to common man and the worthy King alike. Sure he has faults, but they may be mine. He said recently that a little of The Goon Show is enough. I was so disappointed I removed an orange from my Steyn shrine. And he kicks puppies. Or is that me? Oddly, like Peter and O’Toole, Mark and Steyn are words for the same thing and that’s how I like it. Once such a writer is in the soul, I’m not afraid to say that it’s Steyn Alone, sports. We just need more of ‘im.

Steyn link to something else.

Edit of Steyn on the PC neutering, [or newt ring?] of the less and less free men and women of the less and less free West.

“Mr. Li was able to pull his arm back into the bus, and returned to the rear of the bus, where he defiled the body of Tim McLean.”

There were over three dozen passengers on the bus, including in the seats around Li and McLean. The attacker “did not pay any attention to the other passengers” and at one point was stabbing his victim “as he lay on the floor.”

...there is no suggestion in the “agreed statement” that anyone attempted to disarm the “oblivious” Mr Li. I wonder if, in Tim McLean’s last conscious moments, he was aware that his fellow passengers had “vacated” the bus and barricaded him in with his murderer.

...the Mounties...sat outside the bus for 4½ hours even though Mr. Li was already waving Mr. McLean’s head around, and it was clear there was no one alive in the bus except the killer. Nevertheless, the RCMP passed the rest of the night watching Mr. Li slice up the body, and eat the bits that took his fancy...

...Had Mr. Li not got bored in the early hours of the morning and decided to leave the bus, they’d have sat there the rest of the week. Tim McLean’s parents are now suing the RCMP.

All the CRTC regulations and all the Cinedole Canada funding in the world can’t make that into a story Canadians want to tell themselves. But reporters are obliged to attempt it, and, when they do, you can’t help noticing a curious incuriosity—all the sly elisions, all the questions that go unasked in the rote calls for financial compensation and more nanny-state protection.

...Another lone nut and dozens of bystanders. Another Canadian story with no hero. No villain, either: Mr. Li has been declared not responsible for his actions, and that’s the club pretty much everyone else wants to get into. The Greyhound driver is said to have gone into shock. The passengers are suing the bus company for the mental trauma they’ve suffered from having to stand around on the highway watching Mr. Li decapitate their fellow passenger.

...these untypical Canadian stories are telling us something about typical Canadians—about what happens in the vacuum of abandoned social norms. Do you know the name Liviu Librescu? You should. He was a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who was teaching a class at Virginia Tech one Monday morning in 2007 when gunshots were heard. He reacted immediately. He threw himself against the door and told his students to climb out the windows. He used his body as a barricade as long as he could, and was shot dead when the killer finally broke through.

Professor Librescu had lived under fascism and Communism, and perhaps was not so removed from the primal impulses as so many Westerners seem to be. But what about Lee Gordon-Brown, shot when the nut du jour stormed his classroom at Monash University in Melbourne with five loaded handguns? At the killer’s first pause, the wounded professor Gordon-Brown grabbed his hand. A student pitched in.

Two other men charged into the room, and, as the professor collapsed of his wounds, helped hold down the crazy guy until the cops arrived. This story is the precise inversion of the École Polytechnique: Instead of fleeing the scene, the men run into it, and toward their fate.

The “Canadian story” Canadians have told themselves for 40 years is a self-aggrandizing narrative of pacifism and social solidarity. There’s a lot of the former, not so much of the latter.”

Mark Steyn on Obama’s fascist socialist economic control freakery.

“In their first two months, Obama and Geithner have done nothing but vaporize your wealth, and your children's future.

Ahead of this week's G20 summit in London, Timothy Geithner, America's beloved Toxic Asset, called for "global regulation." "Our hope," said Toxic Tim, "is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight."


“President Barack Obama fell back on one of his favourite rhetorical tics: "But I also know," he wrote, "that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people."

Really? For the moment, it's a "false choice" mainly in the sense that he's not offering it: "a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is not on the menu, which leaves "an oppressive government-run economy" as pretty much the only game in town.

This year federal government spending will rise to 28.5 percent of GDP, the highest level ever, with the exception of the peak of the Second World War. The 44th president is proposing to add more to the national debt than the first 43 presidents combined, doubling it in the next six years, and tripling it within the decade.

It's not about bookkeeping, it's about government annexation of the economy, and thus of life: government supervision, government regulation, government control. No matter how small your small business is – plumbing, hairdressing, maple-sugaring – the state will be burdening you with more permits, more paperwork, more bureaucracy.

Bono, the global do-gooder who was last in Washington to play at the Obama inauguration, recently moved much of his business from Ireland to the Netherlands, in order to pay less tax. And good for him. To be sure, he's always calling on governments to give more money to Africa and whatnot, but it's heartening to know that, when it comes to his wallet as opposed to yours, Bono, like Secretary Geithner, has no desire to toss any more of his money into the great sucking maw of the government treasury than the absolute minimum he can get away with.”

Steyn on the Europianisation of America.

Steyn on how mealy mouthed PC boobs go gee, too far.

Steyn on the decay and Islamisation of Russia.

Steyn on that crazy Obama math.


Mark Steyn on Hugh Hewitt and how Barry can yap and yap and yap and yap and then do something insane: “...what is becoming clear is that he likes talking. He had some thing today, some cockamamie, you know, pseudo-town meeting, cyber town meeting on the internet. We know he can do that. He did it for a couple of years before last November. We know he can talk.

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal said it’s a time for leadership, not talkership, and that’s what we’re getting from him. Basically, he’s talked and talked and talked, meanwhile all his administration has done is vaporize American wealth now for two months. It’s destroying American wealth, it’s destroying American jobs, it’s destroying the global economy, and all he does is talk, talk, talk.

...And the way to think about Obama, I’ve concluded, is that essentially he’s not, he doesn’t have a political philosophy or a geopolitical vision. He’s a social engineer. And so his priority is always to grow government at the expense of any rival sources of legitimacy, and that’s what this charitable deduction thing does for him. ”


The magnificent, surgical, witty, fun and entirely correct Mark Steyn fillets another mediocre Leftard. Finds no guts, brains or bone structure in Liberal sardine.

“Mimicking the hollow boosterism of sonorous media baloney requires some skill, but if you’re in the business of “violent unseating,” it’s utterly inadequate to the task. And, after what feels like a somewhat dutiful slog through Juvenal, Swift, and Pope, you would expect Denby at least to be aware of the limitations imposed by the shriveled range of cultural reference within which the contemporary media “ironist” must operate.

It’s fun to riff off the conventions of cable news or American Idol, but it’s limiting. Observational humor requires folks to stick around long enough to observe.

Back in the 90’s, David Letterman did a Top Ten list about a Clinton/Yeltsin summit. It wasn’t going down so well, so, midway through, the host stopped to explain it to the audience: “The one guy eats, the other guy drinks. That’s all you need to know.”

Indeed. Denby’s “layer of knowingness” is really a wafer-thin veneer—knowingness for the unknowing. Bush? Dumb. McCain? Old. Palin? Hang on: Also dumb. When Denby bemoans “the feebleness of snark” by citing Maureen Dowd’s arthritic walker-dependent “running jokes” about “Poppy” Bush and “Babysitter” Cheney, he is, almost, on to something: This is sophisticated cynicism for the gullibly naïve.

Nevertheless, it is surely ironic that a writer who coos at every opportunity his appreciation of irony (“the most powerful of satiric weapons”) seems to lack the vital precondition for irony—the ability to imagine the other. Why is Bush so obviously a buffoon and Gore so profoundly a “serious man”? Well, because Denby voted for one and despises the other. Say what you will about the creators of the British magazine Private Eye, to whom he devotes considerable space, but they’re equal-opportunity jeerers.

In American terms, Richard Ingrams, Private Eye’s founder, would be reviled as a homophobe, a racist, and an anti-Semite. When co-owner Peter Cook’s comedy partner Dudley Moore went off to California in the late 1970’s to romance Bo Derek in 10, Cook was sympathetic: “I suppose if you’re a lower-middle-class midget from Dagenham with a club foot, being a Hollywood star must seem quite a good deal...

For my own part, I find the divide between Colbertian “irony” and Dowd-esque “snark” less of a chasm than Denby imagines: Both are part of a self-referential present-tense culture bobbing around in circles on the surface, and it’s foolish to argue degrees of precedence between flotsam and jetsam.”


Steyn on Obamanomicus.

“...when Barack Obama is accused of creating his Six-Trillion-Dollar Man “because I believe in bigger government” he denies it: “I don’t,” he says flatly. This is like Clark Kent telling Lois Lane he’s not Superman: They just look a bit similar when he removes his glasses...

Likewise, any connection between Obama and a Big Government behemoth swallowing everything in sight is entirely coincidental. .. Last week, the president redefined the relationship between the citizen and the state, in ways that make America closer to Europe. If you’ve still got the Webster’s to hand, “closer to Europe” is a sociopolitical colloquialism meaning “much worse..."

Is the new all-powerful Statezilla vulnerable to anything? Unfortunately, yes. He loses all his superpowers when he comes into contact with something called Reality.

But happily, Reality is nowhere in sight. There are believed to be some small surviving shards somewhere on the planet — maybe on an uninhabited atoll somewhere in the Pacific — but that’s just a rumor, and Barack Obama isn’t planning on running into Reality any time soon.”