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It's a good rule of thumb that so-called moderate opinion is several degrees to the left of popular opinion. You can test this for yourself easily enough: pick a subject such as, say, illegal immigration and compare the position of every Democratic senator, the majority of Republican senators and 90 percent of the media with the position of the American people. That's why the press were befuddled by last week's polls. A month of Richard Clarke, the 9/11 Commission, Bob Woodward, Muqtada al-Sadr, Fallujah and Basra, and a constant drip-drip-drip of conventional wisdom on the president's "vulnerability" from the Beltway...

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking. No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organisation's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in...

Wallowing in nuance, Dems lack resolve April 25, 2004 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST It's a good rule of thumb that so-called moderate opinion is several degrees to the left of popular opinion. You can test this for yourself easily enough: pick a subject such as, say, illegal immigration and compare the position of every Democratic senator, the majority of Republican senators and 90 percent of the media with the position of the American people. That's why the press were befuddled by last week's polls. A month of Richard Clarke, the 9/11 Commission, Bob Woodward, Muqtada al-Sadr, Fallujah and Basra,...

Mark Steyn says that the US President’s ‘transformational’ response to Muslim fundamentalism can save the Old World; European ‘managerialism’ can’t New Hampshire Last July, speaking to the United States Congress, the only assembly on the planet in which he’s still assured of a warm reception, Tony Blair remarked: ‘As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?’ Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in...

Americans don't get Europe. On the day of the Madrid massacre, I received a ton of e-mails from US readers along the lines of: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. Even the French will be in." Friends told me, "The Europeans get it now." Doughty warriors of the blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity with our loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a savvy guy with a smart website, declared that "Every member state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York." All...

I was sorry to see Niall Ferguson, currently living high off the hog in the bosom of the Great Satan, reduced to peddling the Max Hastings bloody-ignorant-Yanks-blundering-around-the-world line in Saturday’s Telegraph. He trotted through a brisk precis of the 1920 Iraqi uprising against the British and then wrote confidently: "I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events." I’ll take that bet! What do you fancy? Ten thousand bucks per commander, rising commensurately as we go down the ranks? Last year, at a roadblock in the desert between...

The coalition approach to Iraq was summed up a year ago by a British colonel. Explaining how they were trying to secure Basra without blowing up buildings and causing a lot of death and destruction, he said, ''We don't want to go in and rattle all their teacups.'' The avoidance of teacup-rattling remains a priority. Last week in Fallujah, American troops had rockets fired at them from a mosque. So they fired back, but with the state-of-the-art laser-guided weaponry that kills the insurgents but leaves the mosque virtually untouched. I'd have been quite happy to see it blown up with...

Some Bush-loathers rejoiced in the Fallujah atrocities: There is a virus of hate in the Democratic party On 31 March, four civilian contractors to the Coalition Authority in Iraq were ambushed in Fallujah. They were shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was then dangled from a bridge while the townsfolk danced for joy in the street. On his website The Daily Kos, Markos Zuniga marked the passing of these four individuals: ‘I feel nothing over the death of merceneries [sic]. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq...

How about that Richard Clarke! He's the bureaucrat-turned-book-tour celebrity who began his testimony to Congress by issuing a dramatic apology to the American people for the Administration's failure to prevent 9/11: "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you." Hey, thanks for that, big guy. But, if you want an example of a President doing nothing to prevent not thousands but the best part of a million deaths, how about the Rwandan genocide? Remember that? It was exactly a decade ago, and the media commemorations so far are, to say the least, low-key....

"We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus." I can't quite believe my old Loose Ends confrere Alistair Beaton has written a song by this name. But apparently so: Bush and Blair sing it in his new satire of the war on terror at the Birmingham Rep. Charles Spencer pronounced the show a stinker. "There is," he wrote, "one kind of laughter I loathe, and Follow My Leader is full of it. It is the smug, complacent laughter of theatre-goers revelling in their own sense of moral superiority as a dramatist shamelessly panders to their prejudices." Alistair was always a...

No lie: Kerry's just a wannabe April 4, 2004BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST For a year or so now, I've woken up to a ton of e-mails each morning with the subject marked BUSH LIED! -- or, to be more precise, BUSH LIED!!!!!!! I'm not one who thinks it helpful to characterize a policy difference as a ''lie.'' So, when John Kerry says he supports the Kyoto Treaty even though he voted for a bill that declared the United States would never ever ratify it, that doesn't mean he's a ''liar,'' it just means that, well, to be honest, I...

"Vote for the crook, not the Fascist." In 2002, that was the cheery slogan of French electors offered a choice between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Two years on, as part of the remorseless Francisation of Canada's political culture, it's now the strategy of Ottawa's Paulitburo. Yes, this Adscam business is a bit hard to explain, and it would be helpful if the statistically inevitable immolation of Yvon Duhaime's next federally subsidized Shawinigan enterprise could be postponed for a year or two, and maybe we need a two-billion dollar federal registry of single mums so that when Crown Corporation...

In the old days, the headline "Germans Go On Offensive" would have caused palpitations among Czechs, Poles, Belgians, etc. But, in the case of this weekend's AP headline, Germans going on the offensive refers not to sending German troops to foreign countries, but keeping foreign troops in Germany. And it's the Germans having the palpitations, after press reports that the Pentagon plans to pull out half its troops. Right now, Germany plays host to 175,000 Americans — military personnel plus their families — and reducing that number to 80-90,000 would leave a big hole in an economy that's already looking...

In January 2002, the Enron story broke and the media turned their attention to the critical question: how can we pin this on Bush? As I wrote in this space that weekend: "Short answer: You can't." So Enron retreated to the business pages, and, after a while, the media and the Democrats came up with an even better wheeze: how can we pin September 11 on Bush? Same answer: you can't. But that doesn't stop them every month or so from taking a wild ride on defective vehicles for their crazy scheme. The latest is a mid-level bureaucrat called Richard...

One year after the war began, Mark Steyn believes that anyone who looks honestly at liberated Iraq must see it as a success story New Hampshire Before we get on to the breezy assertions and specious arguments, here are ten facts about Iraq today: 1) Saddam Hussein is in jail, his sons are in ‘paradise’, and of the 52 faces on the Pentagon’s deck of cards all but nine are now in one or the other of those locations. 2) The coalition casualties in February were the lowest since the war began. 3) Attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines have...

A neighbour of mine refuses to let her boy play with "militaristic" toys. So when a friend gave the l'il tyke a plastic sword and shield, mom mulled it over and then took away the former and allowed him to keep the latter. And for a while, on my drive down to town, I'd pass Junior in the yard playing with his shield, mastering the art of cowering more effectively against unseen blows. That's how the "peace" crowd thinks the West should fight terrorism: eschew the sword, but keep the shield if you absolutely have to. Yesterday, The Telegraph reported...

I wonder if John Kerry has perhaps launched his descent into caricature a couple of months too early. Usually, the successful losing candidate waits till late spring/early summer before shifting gears and beginning each day with the campaign trying to explain some rhetorical triviality from the previous week that's stuck to his shoe and he can't seem to shake off. Ever since last summer, I've been mocking Sen. Kerry's tortured explanations as to why his vote in favor of such-and-such in fact demonstrates his staunch opposition to it. As I wrote a couple of months back: ''His vote against the...

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding. To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of...

Anyone who wants to understand why the media are held in such low regard by the public -- in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles -- should consider the following headline from an Associated Press story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week: ''Accused Spy Is Cousin Of Bush Staffer'' The accused spy is Susan Lindauer, who is accused of working for Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency. She describes herself merely as an "anti-war activist,'' though, as the daily rummage through the Baathists' scrupulous paperwork indicates more clearly every day, being...

"THE bombs dropped on Baghdad exploded in Madrid!" declared one "peace" protester in Spain. Or as Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty put it, somewhat less vividly: "If this turns out to be Islamic extremists . . . it is more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq." By "other allies", he means you – yes, you, reading this on the bus to work in Australia. You may not have supported the war, or ever voted for John Howard, but you're now a target. In other words, this is...

The US is powerful and religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn wonders whether it is any coincidence The other day, the guy on my local radio station mentioned that The Passion of The Christ was the Number One movie in America. ‘So congrats to Mel Gibson,’ he said. ‘And it’ll probably hold on to the Number One slot until the new Starsky & Hutch opens.’ It’s always useful to keep things in proportion. But, in fact, Starsky & Hutch opened and The Passion cleaned its clock. Last weekend, it took in $51.4 million, as against S&H’s $29.05...

I'm a small-government guy, so my default position on any issue is that, generally speaking, I'm on whichever side the government's not. Last week, for example, the government of Nova Scotia announced that it wished to clamp down on newspaper and broadcast usage of words such as "fruitcake", "nutcase", "madman", "kooky", etc, as these terms are hurtful to the mentally ill. To that end, it was offering cash rewards to citizens who reported sightings of these terms in the media. Whatever "hurt" these words do the mentally ill is less than that done to society by a state that polices...

Benyamin Cohen, editor of the online publication Jewsweek, went to see Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ and came out homicidal: "My first comprehensible thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew." Maureen Dowd of The New York Times agreed: "In Braveheart and The Patriot, his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history...." Really? You want to kick in some Jew teeth? I mean, really...

The news that Boris Johnson and half his Tory colleagues have been flirting with John Kerry like a Congressional overseas exchange intern programme came as no surprise to me. Though the Senator likes to think of himself as exuding Kennedy-esque glamour, to Conservatives he has the reassuring mien of an unexciting Cabinet heavyweight back when the party still had heavyweights and a Cabinet to put them in. You can see why the Tory benches have been mesmerised by the immobile features of the Botoxicated Brahmin: superficially, he has the air of a cadaverous Douglas Hurd. As the Tories used to...

THE CELEBRIFICATION OF MARRIAGE The other day in France a woman married a corpse. For some reason, this reminded me of Democratic Party primary voters and John Kerry. But others drew different conclusions. Because marrying a dead person is apparently entirely legal in la republique francaise, a gay activist wrote to me from San Francisco to point out that a French corpse has more rights than a California gay. True, but the French corpse has a duller club scene. The grass is always greener on the other side, particularly when you’re six feet under it. But these days proponents of...

The other day the Sun bestowed the title of "Britain's Laziest Woman" on Susan Moore of Burythorpe, North Yorkshire. Miss Moore had come to the paper's attention courtesy of its Shop-A-Sponger Hotline: as Alastair Taylor explained: "Super-sponger Susan, 34, has not done a day's work since dropping out of college in 1988." Despite receiving "Jobseeker's Allowance" for 16 years, she does not seek jobs, and never has. She was offered one by a supermarket, but it was five miles away so she wasn't interested. Ryedale Jobcentre put her on a "New Deal" course and, to make sure she attended, sent...

How goes the war? No, not Vietnam. The other one. You remember. It was in all the papers until a month ago when Vietnam returned for a Democratic Party dinner-theater tour starring Massachusetts' answer to Robert Goulet. Can't get into it myself. I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaida down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust...

Last weekend, George W Bush went to Florida for Nascar's Daytona 500 race. His likely Democratic rival, John F Kerry, did not approve. "We don't need," he declared, in the portentous drone he has been perfecting for three decades, "a President who says, 'Gentlemen, start your engines.' We need a President who says, 'America, let's start our economy.' " Hmm. If this is the best material Senator Kerry's high-price consultants can provide, it is going to be a long, long while from here to November. It's unlikely that any but the most partisan Democrats can stomach nine months of a...

<p>Conan O'Brien finds Anglophone Canadians can't take a joke about Francophone ones.</p> <p>W.C. Fields said never work with children or animals. That goes double if the animal's a hand puppet. So when Conan O'Brien's sidekick, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, visits Quebec and characterizes the natives as obnoxious, dull and mostly homosexual, and rent-a-quote Canadian Members of Parliament are asked for their reaction, the best response is: "Sorry, I'm a little tied up today. Why not try Miss Piggy or Lamb Chop?"</p>

The Default Democrat from another world How do you feel about "outsourcing"? John Kerry, the Default Democrat that his party's poor voters are trying hard to pretend to be excited about, is very opposed to it. His stump speech includes fierce denunciations of American corporations that export jobs overseas. He has pledged his support for a "Call Center Consumer's Right To Know", which would require that the guy at the call center identify his location at the beginning of every call. Right now, you just get vague hints – for example, if I'm in New Hampshire and dial directory inquiries...

If you own a computer or listen to talk radio or read the British or Australian papers, you'll know that John Kerry is currently beset by rumors of interns. By the time you read this, it may be that America's genteel broadsheets and network news shows will have overcome their squeamishness and tiptoed gingerly down the path blazed by Drudge and Fleet Street, or it may be that they decide to investigate it a bit longer, just to get chapter and verse nailed down, which means you may not get to read about it till, oh, midway through President Kerry's...

Mark Steyn on Conrad Black’s heroic virtues as a publisher — and the small-minded vices of his enemies New Hampshire Question: What is Hollinger? Answer: It’s a man called Benny. He was a barber from Haileybury, Ontario, and in 1909 he was way up north around Porcupine Lake prospecting for gold. He found it: ‘Benny was pulling the moss off the rocks a few feet away when suddenly he let a roar out of him and threw his hat to me,’ wrote Alex Gillies, his partner — sorry, pardner (I don’t want to make them sound like some New Labour...

Among my Christmas presents was a copy of Survive, a recent collection by Sports Afield magazine of helpful tips for the great outdoors. Most of the stuff was familiar - rub a raw potato on poison ivy, roast a wood bug before you eat it - but on page 70 I was surprised by this novel approach to mountain lions: "Do not approach one, especially if it is feeding or with its young. Most will avoid confrontation, so provide an escape. Do all you can to appear larger. Raise your anus, and open your jacket if you have one on."...

If I were a resident of the United Kingdom I would not pay the BBC licence fee. There is something repulsive about a subsidy culture so secure that a publicly funded organisation can pay its chief executive £500,000 a year off the backs of widows and spinsters. If the BBC wants to throw away million-dollar salaries, it should do so on its own dime. So, in that spirit, I hail the many stellar BBC "personalities" who are said to be threatening to quit the corporation. Go for it, Jonno! Sky beckons! Carlton awaits! And the Beeb can go back to...

For Howard Dean's Iowa concession speech, the decibel level was off the meter but the content was unexceptional — a list of states of the union, in no particular order, but still reasonably accurate. For his New Hampshire concession speech, the decibel level was much reduced but the content was a lot wackier. As Gov. Dean told his dwindling army of groupies: ''The biggest loss that we've suffered in this country since George Bush has been president is our loss of our sense of community.'' Really? The loss of ''our sense of community'' is a bigger loss than, say, the...

I love New Hampshire!’ I forget which candidate opened his Tuesday night speech with that line. Oh, hang on, they all did. Except Joe Lieberman, the ever optimistic Yiddisher pixie, who beamed at the crowd and said: ‘Is New Hampshire a great state or what?’ Senator Lieberman, the only unabashedly pro-war Democrat on the ballot, had been claiming at every campaign stop for the last week to have something called ‘Joe-mentum’, which is like ‘momentum’, but apparently much smaller, if not entirely undetectable. Nonetheless, running into him in the final hours, I caught the Joe-mentum fever and rashly predicted he’d...

The American media are all excited about a new poll showing that, come the election, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry would beat George W Bush by 49 per cent to 46 per cent. Back in September, they were all excited about a poll showing Gen Wesley Clark would beat Bush by – guess what? – 49 per cent to 46 per cent. Even the lively Vermont governor Howard Dean had a poll putting him within the margin of error against Bush. Yet here we are just a few months later: the Vermonster self-detonated on Iowa caucus night, and Gen Clark will...

I think we can all agree that Howard Dean overreacted. I'm not talking about his overreaction on Iowa caucus night. I'm talking about his overreaction to his overreaction. Ever since last Monday's audition for ''An American Werewolf In Des Moines,'' the Vermonster has been in sleep mode. ''What I'm not is a rock star,'' he told Diane Sawyer, as she struggled to stay awake. No, indeed. He's turned into Perry Como. Not Perry Como sitting in a patterned sweater in a rocking chair singing ''Sleepy Time Gal.'' But Perry Como after some shortsighted elephant hunter has fired an extra-strength tranquilizer...

Watching Howard Dean go ape and John Edwards emerge as a viable contender A little over a month ago, in the Wall Street Journal, I wrote that Governor Howard Dean looked ‘like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head’s about to explode out of his shirt collar’. On Monday night, Dean, a front-runner in the polls only a week ago, placed a very poor third in the Iowa caucuses — the first time, since he began his political career running for the state legislature in 1982, that the Vermonter has lost an election....

Dems don't want this general in command January 18, 2004 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement Where are we going to find the un-Dean? That was the cry of Democratic power brokers as Howard Dean rose unstoppably through last year, and the wise old birds fretted that he was unelectable. Judging from the polls, New Hampshire Democrats seem to have found their un-Dean. It's Wesley Clark. So now the Dem big shots can all start looking for the un-Clark. If they aren't already, they ought to be. Dean might be bad for the health of the party, but that's no...

This column appeared in the firstNational Review after Saddam’s capture. In the wake of Iowa, two things ought to be said: First, and most obviously, the anti-war movement at its rawest and shrillest is electorally disastrous even in Democratic primaries. But secondly, even though John Kerry, unlike Howard Dean, campaigns in long trousers, he’s said almost as many idiotic things about the war as the Vermonster. They’ll cause him problems down the road:  I’d barely heard of Noam Chomsky before 9/11. I’d dipped into Manufacturing Consent, but I kept dozing off, usually in the middle of phrases like “premises of...

Last week, I had occasion to mention Trevor Phillips, head honcho at the Commission for Racial Equality and a key player in the demise of Kilroy. Mr Phillips intervened in the Birmingham One's recent troubles to suggest that all would be well if, like glassy-eyed political prisoners paraded on TV in your average ramshackle dictatorship, the ex-presenter agreed to make a full public confession, enter re-education camp and give an unspecified proportion of "his vast earnings" to a Muslim charity. "Then I would say he has been properly contrite," said Mr Phillips, generously. But what's it got to do with...

Where are we going to find the un-Dean? That was the cry of Democratic power brokers as Howard Dean rose unstoppably through last year, and the wise old birds fretted that he was unelectable. Judging from the polls, New Hampshire Democrats seem to have found their un-Dean. It's Wesley Clark. So now the Dem big shots can all start looking for the un-Clark. If they aren't already, they ought to be. Dean might be bad for the health of the party, but that's no reason to go from bad to Wes. If the rap against Dean is that he's gaffe-prone,...

Is this (to use a phrase America's headline writers have become suddenly fond of) Howard's end? A month ago, Dr Howard Dean was reckoned to have the Democratic presidential nomination locked up: he was set to win the Iowa caucuses tomorrow, the New Hampshire primary a week later, and he was cocky enough to have already moved on to courting the big Southern states. Instead, the former Vermont governor is stalled in a three-way tie in Iowa, and in New Hampshire the wacky general Wesley Clark is said to be rising fast while the Dean balloon slowly deflates.When precisely did...

Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain. But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a...

According to a RoperASW poll from last year, 83 percent of Americans support mandatory detention and forfeiture of property for illegal immigrants, followed by deportation. Eighty-three percent. Pretty big number. So who are the 17 percent who don't think illegal immigrants should be seized, jailed, have their property confiscated and deported? Well, they're pretty much everyone in the two major parties, plus the entire U.S. media. So why don't they think as the masses do? In the media and the Democratic Party, everyone seems to subscribe to the wisdom of Carol Moseley Braun's mom. As Ambassador Braun told her audience...

Mark Steyn says the Democrats are gearing up for their inevitable humiliation by calling Bush-supporters ‘stupid’. It’s the ‘S’ factor in the presidential election New Hampshire The other morning I woke up, leapt out of bed, pulled the curtains and discovered what appeared to be a total eclipse outside. I leapt in my rig, drove a couple miles down the road and discovered the cause: the world’s biggest ‘John Kerry For President’ sign had mysteriously appeared in my neighbour Laura’s front yard, blocking out all sunlight for miles around. It’s also the only John Kerry sign for miles around. Every...

"Events" don't just happen One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: "Events, dear boy, events." It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and 1,000 Fleet Street columns as if it's some brilliant insight. It's not. It's an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European...

"Mark Steyn may prefer American hillbilly culture to that of the Swedish nanny state," wrote Ann Widung of Eastbourne on our Letters page last September. She was dissenting from my observations on the remarkable passivity of bystanders at the murder of Anna Lindh. "You may criticise the Swedish police," continued Ms Widung, "for being inefficient in solving murders, but I prefer to live in a culture of peace and solidarity to one of fear and gung-ho mentality. Better a nanny-state baby than Mark Steyn's 'citizen'." Well, it's true I subscribe to a gung-ho mentality, but I don't live in a...

Well, it's January, December's come and gone, so let's add up the final score: Coalition of the Willing: Saddam captured, Gadhafi neutered. The ''International Community'': Milosevic elected to Parliament in Belgrade. Yes, indeed. On the last weekend of the year, Slobo won a seat in Serbia's legislature, as did his fellow "alleged'' (as Wes Clark would say) war criminal Vojislav Seselj, and Seselj's extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party won more seats than anybody else. But hang on a minute. Aren't Milosevic and Seselj in jail at the Hague and facing the stern justice of an ''international tribunal''? Why, yes. Slobo's...