Mark Steyn: Nuts and Bolton

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 03/19/05 | Mark Steyn

[libs_kma]

He's my hero too. Every time you think "this guy just flat out NAILED that subject! He couldn't top THIS column if he tried!".

Think again....and don't forget to read him tommorrow.

[usurper]

Steyn must have a team of researchers, writers and philosophers. It is not humanly possible for one man to turn out such brilliance on a daily basis.

[Carry_Okie]

Many thanks!

[GladesGuru]

"How does he continue to crank these gems out, day after day?"

Possibly there is an advantage writing about a nation not one's own - DeToqueville and Paul Johnson come to mind.

Whatever the reason, Styn clearly writes with a precision, simplicity, and insight that is unmatched.

[ride the whirlwind]

...why the international community might be minded to throw its hands up and shriek, ‘Quelle horreur!’

I so love when that happens!

[mc5cents]

In recent years, for example, I can find only one example of a senior UN figure having the guts to call a member state a ‘totalitarian regime’. It was former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali last autumn, and he was talking about America. John Bolton’s sin isn’t that he’s ‘undiplomatic’, but that he’s correct.

Steyn Bump!!

[Servant of the 9]

Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?

Well, she is certainly more honest and scrupulous than old Joe Kennedy who was made the first head of the SEC by FDR.

SO9

[BJClinton]

Here's an FR thread on it, FWIW.

[Romish_Papist]

Bump for later read.

[ken5050]

Great column..BTW, I gather there is NO Mrs. Steyn..

[Carry_Okie]

Thank you too.

It's an amazing statement.

[Clara Lou]

BTW, I gather there is NO Mrs. Steyn..
Somebody will be happy to hear this news! ;)

[Tolik]

Mark Steyn:

...That’s what was so stunning about Bolton. In a roomful of Euro-grandees, he was perfectly relaxed, a genial fellow with a rather Mitteleuropean moustache, but he thwacked every ball they served back down their gullets with amazing precision. He was the absolute antithesis of Schmoozer Bill and Pandering Eason: he seemed to relish their hostility. At one event, a startled British cabinet minister said to me afterwards, ‘He doesn’t mean all that, does he?’

But he does. And that’s why the Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism. Diplomats are supposed to be ‘diplomatic’. Why is that? Well, as the late Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson used to say, diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as a means to an end. Not any more. None of John Bolton’s detractors is worried that his bluntness will jeopardise the administration’s policy goals. Quite the contrary. They’re concerned that the administration has policy goals — that it isn’t yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of ‘diplomacy’ has become corrupted: it’s no longer the language through which nation states treat with one another so much as the code-speak consensus of a global elite.

For much of the civilised world the transnational pabulum has become an end in itself, and one largely unmoored from anything so tiresome as reality. It doesn’t matter whether there is any global warming or, if there is, whether Kyoto will do anything about it or, if you ratify Kyoto, whether you bother to comply with it: all that matters is that you sign on to the transnational articles of faith...

Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of good stuff that is worthy attention. I keep separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris, David Warren, Orson Scott Card. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).

[Capriole]

No, alas, he occasionally mentions his wife in the course of his writing and has said that she is "mostly apolitical." As I said, he needs to dump her and come to Mama. We can go shooting together.

[BJClinton]

Blew my mind when I first read it. I thought it was being taken out of context at first. The silence of the MSM on this is typical, after all we do need to know exactly what's going on in the Michael Jackson trial 24/7.

[Tares]

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of John Kerry is that, regardless of his government’s foreign policy, a UN ambassador has to be at some level a UN booster. Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration’s ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who’d just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. ‘No,’ Schultz would say, ‘this is your country’ — and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan’s embryo world government.

Thank you Mark for this account (and thank you Pokey for the ping). I hope and expect Condi is doing something similar.

[GretchenM]

So much pith; so little time! I like this one especially:

"Russia ... [m]idway through its transition from ‘superpower’ to ghost town ... "

[hattend]

Also in Davos, Bill Clinton endorsed the mullahs: ‘Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.’

Damn. Clinton said this? Didn't hear a thing on the lamestream press...surprise surprise!

[processing please hold]

This might be Steyn's best column ever. Bravo!

I say this about everyone of his articles that comes out. He just keeps getting better and better with each one.

[Ruth A.]

I fall in love with this man afresh each column! You better believe I BTT! Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration’s ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who’d just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. ‘No,’ Schultz would say, ‘this is your country’ — and point to the United States.