The return of Mark Steyn [Hugh Hewitt show]
Radioblogger
It's been three weeks since the world's columnist, Mark Steyn has been on the show. Here's what he had to say today:
HH: Mark, what did you make...welcome back. Good to have you back from your travels.
MS: Good to be back with you, Hugh. I should explain if you hear the occasional truck backfiring, I'm in a payphone in Vermont at the moment.
HH: Well, your dedication to the program and its audience is admirable. Thank you. Yesteray, a federal judge in Seattle sentenced the Millenium bomber to 22 years, of which 5 1/2 have been served, and three more can be had off for good behavior. What was your reaction to that sentence?
MS: Well, obviously, he'll be a very fit and vigorous man in young middle age, at the time he comes out of jail. And I don't think that's good. The grounds for doing it were that he was basically cooperating with the authorities, and then he ceased cooperation. And I think at the point of which he ceased cooperation, then that would probably have been the reason to actually shoot for the original full-term life sentence. For one reason, because I don't think these Islamic guys think in the same kind of time frame we do. So I think as long as he knows he's not going to die, he's not going to be executed, then whether he gets twenty years or 200 years, really makes little difference to him. They think in terms of a long time frame.
HH: Yup.
MS: I think this sentence is not in balance.
HH: Now, it is also, it seems to me, out of step with American public opinion, but we'll find out more. I have been finding it very interesting to read the British papers in the last couple of weeks. Do you know Tony Parsons, by the way, who writes for the Mirror?
MS: Yes, I do. He's an old colleague of mine from the Telegraph.
HH: Oh, he swings from the hips. He's pretty good.
MS: Yeah. He is good. Great writer.
HH: And today, he writes the British public will never forgive you, British politicians, if you allow our police force to be hamstrung and intimidated by the human's rights lobby. Is he correctly gauging the British public?
MS: Well, this is what gets to the core of the question here. That basically, if you do what they're trying to do in London at the moment, which is try it by the John Kerry means. In other words, take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. Treat them as criminals. That's fine in theory, but British and European law, and American law, all give great advantages to the criminals. And the British public, I think, will not forgive that. You can't go around saying we're going to shoot dead people on the tube, and if it's the wrong guy, that's tough. But on the other hand, if we happen to arrest the right guy, he can drag out the legal process for years, and get a suspended sentence.
HH: Yup. Now in the investigation that's unfolding, and it's going so quickly. We've discovered Pakistanis launched the first attack. A Somali was arrested yesterday. Three Turks last night. They're looking for an Iritrean. All of these people living in London a very long time, Mark Steyn. How bad do you think the jihadist network has been allowed to metastasize in London?
MS: Well, I think that's a very serious situation. If you land at Heathrow tomorrow, Hugh, as a U.S. citizen, as a law-abiding U.S. citizen, they'll put a big stamp in your passport, saying recourse to public funds prohibited, if you do that as a U.S. business traveler staying at the Ritz for 48 hours. This one guy they arrested yesterday, he's a Somali. He's been living in a council flat, which is public subsidized housing in London, for six years, at taxpayer expense, receiving income support. British taxpayers are essentially subsidizing the jihad against them, and that's an absurd situation that the British public can't tolerate for much longer.
HH: Do you sense a general hardening among serious people about this war? I mean, we do have people who do over the top like Tancredo, though I have not yet established whether you disagree with Tancredo's threat, and so let's pause there for a moment. What did you make of Tom Tancredo's nuke Mecca threat.
MS: I think that's a ridiculous suggestion, although I would say that at a certain level, if you want to fight a slow-motion war, in a rather desultory fashion, at some point, people are going to get annoyed and demand extreme measures. But to suggest we're at the stage of nuking Mecca right now, is just idiotic.
HH: Now today, a group of top U.S. Muslim scholars finally issued a fatwa. And I welcome it. It's good news. It's been four years since 9/11. But this fatwa is arrayed against all terrorists and would-be Muslim terrorists, saying it's simply unacceptable. Too little, too late, or is it the right thing that needs to happen?
MS: I think it's too little, too late. You know, I've met quite a few so-called moderate Muslims. And they all become moderate Muslims, not because of anything the Imam says in the Mosque, but because they happen to have established nice lives. They've got good businesses. They've got children in good schools, and they don't want their way of life destroyed. The religious establishment in Islam has been more or less useless on this, and as part of the Islamic thought police, that polices these communities very heavily. And they haven't been very much use. And I think moderate Muslims are beginning to realize now what is the main fallback of the London bombings, which is the turning of British public opinion, and Australian public opinion, and public opinion in a lot of other countries against the whole kind of multi-cultural, live and let live ethos. And that's why moderate Muslims are beginning to wake up.
HH: I still think it's better to issue it than not, and who knows? Maybe it will accelerate. I want to switch to domestic politics, Mark Steyn. You're up in Vermont. I'm surprised that the Dean people let you in there. But, you must be traveling through.
MS: Yeah, I had lunch in Quebec, lazy lunch, and I know how affronted you are if I ever call you from the dominion of Canada. So I said I've got to scram across the border in the next five minutes, and at least call him from a U.S. state, even Vermont, which might as well be a Canadian province.
HH: Yeah, marginal. Now, let's talk about John Roberts, and your impressions of his first two weeks under the microscope.
MS: Well, I think he's basically conducted himself very well. For a start, he's very genial, and the absurd attacks on him that have come from the left, you know, either the Pat Leahy thing, well we don't know quite what we've got against him, yet, but we're sure to find something. Or Chuck Schumer, who looked like a sort of one-man touring version of Nixon, all kind of hunched-over and five o'clock shadow when he was going on against him. All these crazy Democratic underground types, who've been speculating on whether he's gay, because he wore a plaid suit in the 70's. I mean, the derangement of responses to this man speaks for itself. So I think he's stood up to it very well.
HH: Now, you do mention the Schumer-Nixon parallel, which I, having worked for Nixon, found quite striking, in terms of the look. You know, you're right.
MS: Yeah.
HH: He's a heavy. You don't want him leading the charge on this stuff.
MS: No, and I happened to stay up until two in the morning with Judge Bork and John O. Sullivan of National Review, and a few other people, because we were over on the other side of the world, to watch the announcement live. And as soon as the president had announced this guy, and they'd all had a few laughs with his pretty, attractive wife, and their nice, young family. Then you get this guy, Chuck Schumer comes on, scowling all over the thing, you know, we are opposed to, insert name of judge here, because he is out of the mainstream. They would have been better to have left that 48 hours, and found someone more telegenic to do it, I think.
HH: Now I want to talk to you a little bit about the Rove/Plame scandal. I am convinced it's a Lord of the Flies moment for the Democratic left, that they are almost dancing around the bonfire. Do you think there's anything serious at the bottom of this?
MS: Well, the only serious thing is that the mission was a fraud. In other words, Joe Wilson shouldn't have been sent on that mission. He's not qualified to it. His wife got him the job. And the fact that he was sent to Niger to investigate the question of whether Saddam was trying to get uranium from Africa. The fact that he was sent in the first place is the only scandal here, because it shows how pathetic and politicized the CIA had become. But you know, this idea that there's any crime being committed...she might as well have been driving around Washington, dropping her kids off at school, with a proud to be the CIA mom of an honor student, on the bumper sticker on the back of her car. She wasn't a covert agent. And the only person who blew her so-called clandestine cover, the only one who mentioned that, was Joe Wilson. He mentioned it to the editor...to his colleague from the Nation magazine, David Corn. It's all rubbish. There's no scandal here, except Joe Wilson's behavior.
HH: And while the left, especially on the blogosphere side, but columnists as well are obsessing on this. Meanwhile, the bastion of the Democratic Party, big labor, is in schism. I mean, this is a huge story, that the Democrats don't seem to notice. How significant is the shattering of old labor, Mark Steyn?
MS: Well, I think that's the last of the big, popular, mainstream, mass-opinion, Democratic support groups. What you're left with now is the MoveOn.orgs, and the Hollywood, and the ethnic minorities. And you can't make a majority out of those components. You wrote a very good analysis of the three pillars of the Democratic Party, in your book, If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat. And effectively, what we've seen is the falling away of the last substantial pillar, if you don't have big labor as really the Democrats' last connection to regular folks.
HH: And so, looking ahead to '06, are you fairly confident that the president...he got CAFTA, he's getting his transporation bill. He's getting an energy bill without oil exploration, and let's pause there. What do you think of that, Mark Steyn? No oil exploration in the energy bill.
MS: Well, I think that's ridiculous, because we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have at the moment, if we got more oil from North America, which we could do. We could get it from Anwar, and we could get it from the Gulf of Mexico, and we could get it from Alberta, and you could have a serious component to increase the amount of North American energy, that the United States uses. I know Alberta is not in America, but it's a better client state to have than Saudi Arabia.
HH: So Bush's first semester of his second term, how do you grade it?
MS: I think it's been bad on some aspects, but the CAFTA thing and the energy thing, I think, are a nudge in the right direction.
HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure. Steynonline.com, America.
radioblogger.com |
