No one says it like Steyn !
Pinging the Mark Steyn Ping List.
On or off, FReepmail or Ping me.
Cheers,
knewshound
knewshounds blog
Posted on 12/16/2008 6:03:47 AM PST by Rummyfan
If September 11th 2001 was “the day everything changed”, November 4th 2008 was the day everything changed back – at least as far as the rest of the world is concerned. The “global war on terror” was a Bush concept and will expire with his presidency, long past its sell-by date, as far as the “international community” is concerned: Weary Europeans find it unhelpful to the cause of mollifying their own restive Muslim populations, and wealthy Arabs want to get on with buying up the western world’s banks and soccer teams with a somewhat lighter level of scrutiny than they’ve been subject to these last seven years.
As for President Bush’s own citizens, Code Orange is fine if it’s just taking your shoes off at the airport, but as a 24/7 mindset it’s kind of exhausting. So the United States elected a chief magistrate who talks about health care and job creation and hardly mentions terrorism, except for occasional effusions about invading Pakistan, which one assumes is one of those back-burner midway-through-the-second-term things after he’s lowered the oceans and healed the planet. Certainly, in the chancelleries of Europe they don’t take it too seriously. The Bush fever is assumed to have passed.
Still, there remain a handful of us who think “the war” was not entirely a construct of Rove-Cheney’s dark imagination, and valiantly tootle around town with our “FEAR, NOT HOPE” bumper stickers. Brian Kennedy of the Claremont Institute had a grim piece in The Wall Street Journal the other day positing an Iranian-directed freighter somewhere off America’s shores capable of firing a nuclear-armed Shahab-3 missile that explodes in space over Chicago:
Gamma rays from the explosion, through the Compton Effect, generate three classes of disruptive electromagnetic pulses, which permanently destroy consumer electronics, the electronics in some automobiles and, most importantly, the hundreds of large transformers that distribute power throughout the U.S. All of our lights, refrigerators, water-pumping stations, TVs and radios stop running. We have no communication and no ability to provide food and water to 300 million Americans.
This is what is referred to as an EMP attack, and such an attack would effectively throw America back technologically into the early 19th century.
If Brian Kennedy were to switch it from an Iranian freighter to an Iranian freighter secretly controlled by a Halliburton subsidiary, he might have a scenario he could pitch to Paramount. But he’s got a tougher job pitching it to America. This is the Katrina nation: Our inclination is to ignore the warnings, wait for it to happen, and then blame the government for not doing more. That last part will prove a little more difficult after an EMP attack. I doubt there’ll be a blue-ribbon EMP Commission for Lee Hamilton to serve on, or much of a mass media for him to be interviewed by Larry King and Diane Sawyer on. “An EMP attack is not one from which America could recover as we did after Pearl Harbor,” writes Mr Kennedy. “Such an attack might mean the end of the United States and most likely the Free World.”
Are there really people out there who want to do that? End the entire Free World? The very term sounds faintly cobwebbed. When nukes were confined to five reasonably sane great powers, the left couldn’t get enough of Armageddon: There were movies, novels, plays, even children’s books about the day after, and the long nuclear winter. When it was crazies like Reagan and Thatcher with their fingers on the buttons, the liberal imagination feasted on imminent nuclear immolation. Now it’s Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il and who knows who else with their fingers on the buttons, and nobody cares: What’s the big deal?
Well, the Iranians have held at least two tests in the Caspian Sea to launch missiles in the manner necessary to set off an EMP meltdown. And if you were, say, Vladimir Putin and obsessed with restoring Russia’s superpower status, you might reasonably conclude that that might be well nigh impossible without diminishing the superpower status of the other fellow. And, while you wouldn’t necessarily want your fingerprints on the operation, you wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to dissuade whichever excitable chaps were minded to have a go.
But beyond that is a broader question. In Afghanistan, the young men tying down First World armies have no coherent strategic goals, but they’ve figured out the Europeans’ rules of engagement, and they know they can fire on Nato troops more or less with impunity. So why not do it? On the high seas off the Horn of Africa, the Somali pirates have a more rational motivation: They can extort millions of dollars in ransom from seizing oil tankers. But, as in the Hindu Kush, it’s a low-risk occupation. They know that the western navies that patrol the waters are no longer in the business of killing or even capturing pirates. The Royal Navy that once hanged pirates in the cause of advancing civilization and order is now advised not even to take them into custody lest they claim refugee status in the United Kingdom under the absurd Human Rights Act.
“Weakness is a provocation,” Don Rumsfeld famously asserted many years ago. The new barbarians reprimitivizing various corners of the map are doing so because they understand the weakness of what Brian Kennedy quaintly calls “the Free World”. One day the forces of old-school reprimitivization will meet up with state-of-the-art technology, and the barbarians will no longer be on the fringes of the map. If that gives you a headache, I’m sure President Obama will have a prescription drug plan tailored just for you.
Ping!
The result of the naive 0bama "rose colored view" is that this time we will probably lose a major American city. I just pray it isn't mine.
Things will change again when American Idol is replaced by news scenes of tens of thousands of dead Americans lying in the streets of some American city.
LLS
The Obama administration is about to provoke the entire world.
Weakness is an invitation.
The day after it happens, the media will circle the wagons and prohibit display of those images. Then they will berate anyone who tries to do anything about it as more dangerous than the terrorists. Then they will trash our troops and call it Vietnam. After a few years of that, Americans will start to forget and instead of worrying about terrorism they will be whining for new entitlement programs. I call it the 9/12 playbook and the media and dems (redundant!) will break it out again. And it will probably work.
Isn't that just the money line of the day!!!
My spell check blew a fuse on reprimitivizing
Remember that series "Jericoh" a few years ago?
Great premise, until the writers decided that is was an act of DOMESTIC terrorism by Americans themselves that wrought the destruction.
That's what the Libs believe, that it would be NRA members and home-schoolers that kill America, and not Islamist terrorists.
A maddening mind-set from the media elites.
Steyn:
“Things will change again when American Idol is replaced by news scenes of tens of thousands of dead Americans lying in the streets of some American city.”
LibLieSlayer:
“The day after it happens, the media will circle the wagons and prohibit display of those images. Then they will berate anyone who tries to do anything about it as more dangerous than the terrorists”
I believe that the more devastating the attack, the _greater_ the likelihood that Obama will capitulate.
I wouldn’t be surprised to have an announcement from the White House that the Obamas have “converted” to Islam and - in a perverse parallel to the Roman emperor that converted the Roman empire to Christianity - declare that the United States, in order to make peace with Islam, would adapt some of the principles of the Quran.
We are in for difficult times ahead.
- John
That’s one reason why spell checkers suck: only really sophisticated ones (I had one in an implementation of GNU emacs at work years back) allow for the correct creation of new, but undoubtedly proper, English words through the application of standard rules of English morphology (like adding re- to a verb to indicate repetition or return to an earlier state, or -ize to an adjective to create a verb, forming a present or past partciple of a novel verb, and so forth).
No matter what ill now befalls us, the news media will rally around their beloved Obama, blame America in general, Republicans specifically, and George Bush personally. They will carry the line that we got what we deserved, and now it is up to us to make things right by trying to understand those who did (whatever) to us and by the way, women and minorities were hardest hit, so we need to raise taxes.
I don't know if it will change anything. Not only did 9/11 not get us away from the scourge of political correctness, it actually turned muslims into a favored victim class for liberals. Before we knew it, that bastion of liberal stupidity, Minnesota, was electing the first Muslim congressman into the House. And only 7 years after 9/11, guilt-ridden whites were tripping over themselves to put a Hussein in the White House.
I truly believe that there is no coming back from the crippling, virus-like mindset of political correctness. Western Civilization will collapse under the weight of its own "open-mindedness" within two generations.
I don’t think the money is there to keep this madoff scheme going for very much longer.
It was still a great show. I miss it.
Dick Morris (who is a great analyst but a lousy interpreter of his analyses), pointed out yesterday that if you’re inflating the hell out of the currency you don’t need to raise taxes. What’s the point?
I'm more and more convinced that this is what will be required for western civ TO come back. But I definitely believe that the high water mark of civilization has come and gone for the foreseeable future. Ask the Pope. He gets it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.