Mark Steyn looks back at 2009

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Now to our first guest, conservative commentator Mark Steyn. In a wide-ranging interview he discusses free speech, carbon trading, healthcare reform in the US, Afghanistan and President Obama. Michael spoke to him late last week.

Michael Duffy: We haven't talked for about a year so there's a bit to catch up on. Barack Obama, Nobel laureate. If you had to give a report card on his presidency so far, what are some of the things you'd like to say?

Mark Steyn: I think what's interesting is the way he so swiftly degenerated from the supposed post-partisan healer figure after the tumult of the Bush years into just another 50/50 president. In fact he's a little below that now, I think at some point his approval ratings and his disapproval ratings crossed and I think he's at 45 or 46 in the polls and heading south. In a sense that is partly his fault, but in a sense I think it's also the realisation that to govern is to choose and that this idea that you can simply be a benign princess fairy-pants and be all things to all people doesn't survive any prolonged time in office.

Michael Duffy: One of the reasons he was elected was because he makes a find speech. Are Americans still as impressed by those speeches as they used to be? I was listening to him the other day when he got the Nobel Prize, and it seemed to me (it may have been my imagination) that even he didn't sound quite so convinced by what he was saying as he once was.

Mark Steyn: I think the idea that he was this great rhetorical wunderkind was always something slightly suspect. I heard him speak in New Hampshire during the New Hampshire primary two years ago at a time when the media were raving about the fact that he was the greatest orator since Henry V at Agincourt or wherever it was, and I was not impressed. And I assumed, because I had read all this stuff about how great he was in the paper, that maybe he'd just had an off day. But I think what people say, particularly during the healthcare debate, was that he may be this great speaker but he can't actually close the deal. If you're opposed to what he's offering on healthcare, four, five, 12, 17 speeches by Barack Obama aren't going to change your mind.

In fact, his numbers only stabilised when he took a couple of weeks off in the summer and didn't make any speeches at all. His approval rating might be a lot higher if he went and lived in a cave for three months or, perhaps more congenially, he went to Bermuda and sat on the beach, because the constant exposure of this supposedly dazzling speaker has only reminded us that he's only a dazzling speaker in political terms, which doesn't quite translate in the real world in the same way.

Michael Duffy: You mentioned health, where is that at? We here in Australia are aware it's a huge issue over there, but we're not aware of the details. What's the reform approach looking like?

Mark Steyn: Basically the US is the only country in the world that still has a predisposition towards private healthcare as the norm. In other words, if you get sick it's your obligation as a freeborn citizen to make your arrangements about that. Some people have insurance, some people will write a cheque as they get sick, other people will leave it too late and find themselves in enormous difficulties. But the trouble is when you try to design a government healthcare system for 300 million people, you are setting yourself up for something that is going to be incredibly bureaucratic, incredibly complicated, going to have incredible cost overruns.

And to solve what most people regard as a relatively minor problem, which is a certain number of people who are uninsured and run into difficulties, it is asking a lot of people to give up the healthcare they're satisfied with and entrust themselves to a government plan. And he has been unable...I'm sure you know how this works in the US, they've suddenly taken an enormous interest in waiting times in Canada and horror stories from Britain's national health service about pregnant mothers giving birth in the parking lot and all the rest of it, because there is a great dread...there was a great understanding that once you cross this Rubicon you cannot go back.

Mark Steyn: I would put it this way, that the Republicans have made the mistake of getting into a lot of arguments about the details on this, and I think the people who are pushing for this have a much clearer understanding, that you get it through in any shape whatsoever, and anything that you want to do to it can be done once it's in position, that the natural ratchet effect of big government will take care of it once it's there. And I don't think, to be honest, that my fellow conservatives are quite aware of what a game changer this is in political terms, and they will be in for a rude awakening if this thing manages to wiggle through.

Michael Duffy: What about foreign policy; Afghanistan and Iraq and the somewhat confusing message that the President has sent out there? What do you think of his record?

Mark Steyn: Basically he campaigned on the position that George W Bush had chosen to go into Iraq and it was the wrong war and Afghanistan is the right war, and that Iraq has been a terrible distraction from Afghanistan. Not just President Obama but other Democrats had been taking this line for three, four, five years. It was essentially a very useful way to oppose the Iraq war while not looking soft on foreign policy and a muscular defence in general. You'll remember at one point during the campaign Barack Obama was threatening to invade Pakistan. I mean, if you want a quagmire, that's a quagmire on steroids!

And what happened then when he got into office was the Iraq war kind of went quiet because the George W Bush surge worked, and the Afghanistan war got a little more bloody and a little more complicated, and the Taliban began figuring that you could actually kill American and NATO troops and anyone else with impunity because some of these troops fight under absurd rules of engagement. So he had to make real decisions on Afghanistan, and suddenly this Democrat position that Afghanistan was the good war began to go all wobbly.

I think we've forgotten the reasons we've gone into Afghanistan, I think we've got it mixed up with a big trans-national nation-building exercise which is probably a doomed exercise in that particular country. And it was interesting to me that when he eventually gave his speech on Afghanistan, the one word that was absent there was 'victory'. He seemed to lack war aims, which is always a worrying thing in a commander in chief, and he seemed to think this was just another one of those issues that you can kind of finesse. It's not. Real lives are at stake and Americans and other countries should not have to expend blood and treasure if they no longer know what the end game is and what the objectives are.

Michael Duffy: Mark, I understand you've had some problems of your own in the last year or two, in fact you've written a book about them called Lights Out, to do with free speech issues in Canada. Can you tell us briefly what happened there?

Mark Steyn: Yes, I found that an excerpt from my previous book America Alone was published in Maclean's which is Canada's biggest selling news magazine. It's a very mainstream magazine, it's not extreme or right-wing or anything else in any way at all, and it became the subject of three complaints from the Canadian Islamic Congress. Essentially I was subjected to triple jeopardy because they filed complaints with the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

And those words, by the way, 'human rights commission', are quite relevant to Australians because there's been a lot of talk in your country recently about having a Canadian style system of human rights commissions. I regard them as an abomination. All the key protections of common law, the presumption of innocence, truth as a defence, the right to due process, the right to confront your accuser in open court, all these things go by the board under a human rights commission system, which is essentially a hierarchy of fashionable victim groups.

So, for example, if a gay group sues Christians, gays trump Christians in the victim group hierarchy. If a Jew sues an anti-Semite, Jews trump anti-Semitism in the victim hierarchy. It gets a bit more complicated if, for example, it was a Muslim suing a gay, then the hierarchy of fashionable victim's rights gets more complicated.

Michael Duffy: What about if a Muslim sues a Jew? Who's on top there? Or hasn't that been resolved yet?

Mark Steyn: That is a very interesting point because when Jewish groups under the Canadian system, for example...when Jewish groups have tried to bring prosecutions against inflammatory imams who say that all Jews should be killed...if you were a knuckle-dragging white skinhead who belonged to, for example, the Manitoba Ku Klux Klan or whatever, the human rights commission would come down on you like a tonne of bricks. But an imam, an inflammatory imam in Montreal, for example, published a whole book saying the Jews should be killed, homosexuals should be killed, the whole thing, and the human rights commission didn't want to go after them.

So they'll go after nobodies, they'll go after some so-called white supremacist living in his mom's basement in the middle Saskatchewan, but they won't go after some of the principal sources of anti-Semitism in the world today. And that's why I think if we're going to have these things be part of the legal system at all...and I really would rather not, I'd rather...if an imam says something stupid or offensive, I'd rather expose him to mockery and social censor rather than actually attempt to criminalise his speech. I don't think that does any good and I think one of the most disturbing signs in Canada, in Britain, in Europe, has been the ease with which free societies suddenly decide that they want to criminalise opinions that they don't agree with. It's one of the most disgusting trends in the developed world today.

Michael Duffy: Yes, some of the human rights commissions came after you anyway. Just briefly, what was the outcome of that?

Mark Steyn: Well, we had a one-week trial in British Columbia which was in many ways hilarious. It's quite something to sit in a court room and watch an expert witness who has been flown in at great expense discuss the tone of your jokes for a full day. This is something I wouldn't have expected to see outside the very obscure corners of minor literary magazines, but it happened. And the reality is that it's only because I was there in court mocking it and coming out of the court room and giving interviews to radio stations mocking not just my accusers but mocking the so-called judges, that essentially we were acquitted on political grounds because the human rights system felt that it couldn't take the heat.

In fact after we were acquitted, clearly we were guilty under British Columbia human rights law because essentially if someone feels offended by you, you are guilty. It's an emotional system. If a gay feels offended by a Christian quoting Leviticus, the Christian quoting Leviticus is by definition guilty because we have elevated the human right not to be offended into a bedrock human right. I think particularly in multicultural societies that governments are very comfortable with this because they regard themselves as the sole legitimate arbiter of acceptable public discourse between different social groups. So they think it entirely normal that if you have some gay guys over here and you have Muslims over there and you have some Jews over here and you have some uptight fundamentalist Christians over here, that it's the proper job of government to mediate relations between those groups. I think that's a recipe for a kind of politically correct tyranny that I want no part of.

Michael Duffy: Do you think you've come through this unscathed or do you think it may have deterred some people around the world from publishing your journalism or even your books?

Mark Steyn: I think actually that's one of the odd things about that has been to discover that actually the system has very few friends, that it wasn't only my accusers who came off badly from that but the system itself. So since then the House of Commons in Canada has held hearings on in fact abolishing this particular section of the human rights act. And on a personal level I've had odd things that never happened to me before; I was sitting in Montreal having lunch with a friend and a couple of guys at an adjoining table sent over a magnum of champagne, because being wanted as a hate monger in English Canada managed to endear me to these Francophone Quebecers. So in an odd sense I think actually being willing to stand up and take on this system rather did some good for my reputation.

Michael Duffy: That's good. You've written about western attitudes to Islam in the context of a certain amount of western self-loathing. Do you think that's got anything to do with this hysteria about global warming?

Mark Steyn: I think global warming is almost entirely driven by a kind of civilisational self-loathing, in part because I think...the US, which is the global hyper-power, is not a conventional imperialist nation in the way that Britain or Rome were. It doesn't generally go around the world and seize real estate and run up its flag and put its king or queen on all the banknotes. And so because of that, I think people who are anti-American have had to sort of funnel it into different ways. So it's not American imperialism that's the problem, it's just normal American habits of consumption. If you eat a cheeseburger your CO₂ emissions are too high, if you drive a sports utility vehicle your CO₂ are too high.

So the idea of actually targeting in the post-imperial age western lifestyle as the biggest destructive force on the planet has a kind of ingenuity about it. But I think that it is a form of civilisational self-loathing, and the idea that we would wind up transferring huge amounts of money from the dynamic part of the economy to essentially rackets like carbon trading and to a global bureaucracy that would be like every UN bureaucracy, utterly corrupt, I think is horrifying. This would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism ever attempted on the world stage.

Michael Duffy: We can't conclude without talking about music, as we're wont to do on these occasions, and I'm delighted to find that you have recorded another Christmas CD, it's called Gingerbread and Eggnog and that is just fantastic. You're singing on it along with Jessica Martin. In a moment we're going to play one of these songs, I was thinking of 'Sweet Gingerbread Man' but the 'Extra Nutty Recipe' version. Does that meet with your approval?

Mark Steyn: Yes, that certainly does. I like all the tracks, even if I don't like my performance I generally like Jessica's on it.

Michael Duffy: You sing a lot better than most conservative commentators, let me tell you that!

Mark Steyn: 'Sweet Gingerbread Man' is a song from the late 1960s by Michel Legrand who is a great French composer, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman who've written a tonne of big hits, 'The Way we Were', 'You Don't Bring me Flowers', 'Windmills of Your Mind', a big, big hit catalogue. But this song for me had not been really sung by anybody in 40 years. It had a kind of little moment at the end of the 1960s where it was done in a kind of style very much fitting that era, and I just thought this is too good a song just to let fade away, and it's one I've always loved and I wanted to do it, and it's a kind of Christmas song.

And on this 'Extra Nutty' version, as you put it, we were just fooling around towards the end of the song and we go into a bit of bossa nova and a bit of Bob Dylan and a bit of all kinds of other things at the end of it, just because the song...it's like a lot of those 1960s things, it fades, and you think you don't really want to do that, if you've got a band in there you want to put a real ending on the song. So we got a little carried away toward the end and had a bit of fun.

Michael Duffy: I think it came out very well. Mark Steyn, thanks for joining us on Counterpoint.

True brilliance is being able to communicate brilliantly extemporaneously, which is what Mark Steyn exhibits in this interview.

When he speaks, his organization, logic, phrasing, and rhetorical impact are as powerful as if he had sat and crafted these responses in writing for several hours.

Artificial intelligence can only recite well from a teleprompter.

Have you noticed that, when Steyn hosts a radio show, he will use the same phrasings, constructions, satire, parodies and jokes that he does in his article that week? I’ve often wondered which came first — the extemporaneous humor on the air? Or the article in print? Normally one would think the print article came first, but he’s so brilliant I’m not sure.

Completely off topic but I loved his take on the stimulus plan. He was driving around rural NH and noticed that there were roadblocks every few miles because the stimulus money was being used to fill in potholes (and undoubtedly paying off someone’s brother-in-laws road paving company). The net result was that Mark found it took twice as long to get anywhere he was going and of course, the potholes would be back latest by next spring.

I think it’s more of a frame-of-mind and expression that is in part natural and in part by training and practice.

I don’t doubt that he speaks some phrases he’s written or turned over at length, but I think he could speak like this for quite some time extemporaneously.

Love the guy! So bright. Plus, he seems so darned HAPPY, breaking into laughter in spite of the serious nature of the issues.

Mark Steyn should be one of Rush Limbaugh’s permanent guest hosts. He is funny, witty and conservative and manages to handle all the callers better than just about anybody. I can’t get enough of Mark Steyn.

this idea that you can simply be a benign princess fairy-pants and be all things to all people doesn't survive any prolonged time in office

Best line I've heard in a while.

Years ago I used to wơnder if Bill Buckley would have an intellectual heir. Steyn is a little less purely cerebral but he certainly has the wit and the precision with the English language.

As you note: true brilliance ...(re US Healthcare)

“Mark Steyn: I would put it this way, that the Republicans have made the mistake of getting into a lot of arguments about the details on this, and I think the people who are pushing for this have a much clearer understanding, that you get it through in any shape whatsoever, and anything that you want to do to it can be done once it’s in position, that the natural ratchet effect of big government will take care of it once it’s there. And I don’t think, to be honest, that my fellow conservatives are quite aware of what a game changer this is in political terms, and they will be in for a rude awakening if this thing manages to wiggle through.”

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.