Mark Steyn: Action stations

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 06/25//05 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

Steyn ping!

[You Dirty Rats]

Thanks for beating Q.

[Tax-chick]

It's getting so depressing to read Steyn's articles, because nobody with the power to do anything right ever does.

[randog]

Bump to finish later.

[RobFromGa]

Getting things done requires ships and transport planes and the like, and most Western countries lack the will to maintain armed forces capable of long-range projection. So, when disaster strikes, they can mail a cheque and hold a press conference and form a post-modern ‘Task Force’ which doesn’t have any forces and doesn’t perform any tasks. In extreme circumstances, they can stage an all-star pop concert.

Brilliant tearing down of liberal do-gooders.

[Conservatrix]

I am SO in love with you Mark Steyn. Please send your brain over for the weekend.

[in hoc signo vinces]

Seems like his last couple paragraphs say otherwise. Don't lose heart!

[Austin Willard Wright]

Based on his comments, Steyn apparently was pro-intervention on Bosnia. At least he is consistent, unlike many. Apparently, he has never met a quagmire he didn't like.

[Tax-chick]

Thanks for the nudge ... round of applause for Australia!

[subterfuge]

"The G8 summiteers will get a taste of this next month when they fly in to Gleneagles to get berated over Africa by elderly Caucasian pop stars. "

Haaa! So on-the-money.

[subterfuge]

So you believe Iraq is a quagmire?

[Austin Willard Wright]

Yes, I suspect that most freepers now more or less agree...at least if the current lack of "quagmire jokes" (which were quite pervasive here back in 2003) is any indication. The daily carnage there speaks volumes.

[Rummyfan]

Bruce wanes, visibly, under her withering riposte. I wouldn’t claim this film has anything as coherent as a philosophy, but they thought enough of that line to reprise it late in the action. ‘It’s what you do that defines you,’ Batman whispers to Rachel before diving off a rooftop to go whump the bad guys.

Remninds me of that old triplet:

To be is to do ... Sartre

To do is to be ... Nietzsche

Do Be Do Be Do ... Sinatra

Thanks Pokey!

[Rummyfan]

According to my favourite foreign minister these days, Australia’s Alexander Downer, ‘Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism.... Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented.’

God Bless the Aussies!

On a side note, how does Mark Steyn do it? This is the fourth piece I have read by him this week, each of them excellent. Is there really a Mark Steyn, or is there a bullpen of writers working full-time putting out this brilliance?

[PogySailor]

The passionate hostility of Miss Short and co to action — to getting things done — is remarkable, but understandable. Getting things done requires ships and transport planes and the like, and most Western countries lack the will to maintain armed forces capable of long-range projection. So, when disaster strikes, they can mail a cheque and hold a press conference and form a post-modern ‘Task Force’ which doesn’t have any forces and doesn’t perform any tasks. In extreme circumstances, they can stage an all-star pop concert. And, because this is all most of the Western world is now capable of, ‘taking action’ means little more than taking the approved forms of inaction.

Posers. The internation elite at its finest.

[Gritty]

BTTT

[tarheelswamprat]

Based on his comments, Steyn apparently was pro-intervention on Bosnia. At least he is consistent, unlike many. Apparently, he has never met a quagmire he didn't like.

Of course he has. Just for starters , he has eloquently skewered the UN, the US Senate, the federal Judiciary and the Mainstream Media, all of which are far worse "quagmires" than those issues which you insistently mischaracterize.

[Mr Ducklips]

I am convinced that Steyn and Thomas Sowell are the two smartest people in the whole wide world.

[thoughtomator]

I don't read that at all. It seems to me he is simply using Bosnia as a device to show what the EU/UN/socialists would do if they got their way elsewhere.