The world according to Mark Steyn
radioblogger.com
It's the middle of the week, and so with great anticipation, Mark Steyn begins the Hugh Hewitt Show. Last week, I posted the transcript, and was overwhelmed with the response. So without further adieu, here's Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn:
HH: I want to start with a Candian story. Up in Nova Scotia, 220,000 baby harp seals are being killed today. I thought you Canadians were much more humane than this?
MS: Well, funnily enough, we're humane about the rest of the world, but we, in the Maritime provinces, we still enjoy clubbing seals. And funnily enough, Montreal is one of the few cities left in the Western world where just about all of the women own furs and proudly walk down the street in them. So on some things, we're not quite as wussy as we perhaps have the image of being.
HH: Yes, I saw that the fur pelt is up to $55 bucks from $20 dollars in 1985. That explains the new-found zeal for seal on behalf of the Maritime provinces.
MS: Yea, it actually is something where the...you know...everybody can be compassionate about things that don't involve them. And so Canadians who tend to be interfering and smug about other people's issues get very indignant, particularly in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and places, when they are told that they shouldn't be allowed to kill seals, which is basically what the Europeans told them in the 1980's. And it's a ridiculous thing, and the seal kill should be carrying at full pelt, as it were.
HH. It is. Now Mark Steyn, I'd like you to explain the May 5th election in Great Britain. The subject of a very long commentary in the Wall Street Journal today by Peter Stothard, and I'm more confused than ever over what a good, center-right American ought to think about this.
MS: Well, I think you start with the basic for Americans, which is that Tony Blair has been very supportive on the War On Terror. So that if Tony Blair is defeated, it will look like the Spanish election. It will look as if the electorate has repudicated the Bush/Blair view of the War On Terror. And that would be a bad thing. At the same, if you are a conservative, Tony Blair basically presides over a party that he's had to cajole into going along with him on this, because they're not really on board with the whole war thing. And in everything else he does, he's a quintessential, big government, nanny state liberal, in American terms. I mean it's actually quite and effective combination. If the Democratic Party had been able to come up with a Tony Blair figure, who was credible on national security and foreign policy, and yet was also a great big pantywaist on all the health care and the rest of it, they could conceivably have won the election. It's their inability to produce a Tony Blair figure that's held them back. And so I think for conservative Americans, it is a difficult situation. The Conservative Party in Britain has not been reliable on Iraq. And in that sense, it's hard to see why they actually deserve to win. But Tony Blair is approaching the end of his shelf life in any case. And so I doubt very much whether we'll be...whether he wins, I doubt very much whether we'll be talking about Tony Blair as a political figure in the U.K. for that much longer.
HH: Gordon Brown, who's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who's behind him, what would we expect from his leadership?
MS: Well Gordon Brown is much more to a conventional, mainstream, Labour Party figure. And I think it is possible to argue that although Gordon Brown would have been supportive on the Afgan campaign, he would have done his best to stay out of Iraq. So that's the other issue for people who essentially take the Bush view of the world. That even if you want to reward Tony Blair for his steadfastness, the chances are that in voting for Tony Blair's Labour Party this time around, you are enabling the rise of Gordon Brown to the Prime Ministership. And that is not in America's interest.
HH: Now what about Michael Howard? When he first descended into the leadership of the Conservative Party, many people, I don't know much about him, cited his intellect, that he would be a great debater. And now it seems most of the punditry has turned on him.
MS: Well, to be honest, I've never cared for him. He was Home Secretary, which is the...there's no real equivalence to it in the United States. It's basically like an Interior Minister. He has enormous powers combining the Justice Department and the powers of the Governors of most states, effectively. And he was very much an authoritarian, big government, coercive party figure who really doesnt, had no great commitment to liberty and small government, and all the rest of it. So he's an unsatisfactory figure. And you know, this is part of the confusion here, is that people look on Tony Blair as Mr. Bush's principal ally. But in fact, when you look around the world, it's John Howard in Australia who sees eye to eye with Bush, not just on the War On Terror, but on the United Nations, on Kyoto, and all kinds of other things. And they're really close on everything. And the Bush/Blair alliance is basically an alliance on the War On Terror. But they disagree about everything else. And unfortunately, that has complicated things. You know, Michael Howard is not a popular man in the White House, because he criticized the Iraq War and the Bush Presidency. And so they've basically stiffed him and don't want to know him. So there's no, you know, according to who you talk to, it's a situation where whoever wins will be good for America. Or whatever happens in the long term will be bad for America.
HH: Well, if you were a voter in Great Britain, who would you be throwing the lever for?
MS: Well, you know that's a...I keep getting asked that question, and I blow hot and cold on it. I think actually, a lot of people feel the way I do, and that turnout will be down on May the 5th, because people...there's a lot of people who aren't just apathetic about both parties, but a lot of people who feel that both parties no longer make sense in the post-September 11th world. You know, people on the right would like the British Conservative Party to be much more explicitly opposed to the European Union, for example. But they're reluctant to go there, and so they're hemorrhaging votes on the right to all these fringe parties like the United Kingdom Independence Party, and parties like this. So I think turnout will actually be down on May 5th, because a lot of folks are in my situation. They don't actually want to pull the lever for anybody.
HH: Don't tell me the liberal Democrats are actually going to be like the Irish party of old and hold the balance of power.
MS: Well, you know that is amazing to me, because the liberal Democratic Party, which is the heir to the great British liberal Party of the 19th Century, are wrong on everything.
HH: Yup!
MS: If you think of what your view is on any issue, and then come up with the complete opposite of it, that's what the liberal Democratic Party do. They're insanely pro-Europe, insanely pro-United Nations and this failed multilateralism, and the idea that 25% of the British electorate is prepared to vote for them is absolutely horrifying.
HH: Well, let's put it aside for a week. I'll check in with you again. A week from now, will we have a new Pope, Mark Steyn? Are you expecting a short conclave?
MS: I don't think so, actually, because I think one of the interesting features about this electorate is that because they were all picked by John Paul II. And they're basically an ideologically, fairly homogenous group in some ways. That the differences are at the periphery, and the differences between them, those kind of differences always take longer to thrash out. So I don't think we will have a new Pope by this time next week. I think it could take a little longer than that.
HH: All right. Your National Review article, The Icewoman Cometh, available in part at National Review.com, is very entertaining. She is coming. Joe Biden is standing in her way. Is she going to cut through him like a machete through sugar cane?
MS: Absolutely, and the reason is, Joe Biden is one of these figures who, he doesn't have the leeway to offend the base that Senator Clinton does. I mean she's basically the one woman, the one person in that party who's in a position to move to the right, or at least pretend to move to the right on issues like abortion and so forth, without offending the Democratic Party base. She's big enough to get away with it, in the way Joe Biden and Evan Bayh and these figures aren't. And so I think she is...and basically the history of the last fifteen years is that the only electable Democrats are those happen to have Clinton as their surname. And that's the story. If you've got...the Clinton's Democratic Party has been great for the Clinton's, and disastrous for the Democratic Party.
HH: But the Senate Democrats are so out of their mind. I mean if Harry Reid goes to the mattresses on the judges, doesn't he drag Hillary with him?
MS: I think she'd be very shrewd at avoiding that. You know, the problem with people like Harry Reid is that when you can't get elected to power, obstructionism is all you have left. And that's a good short term tactic. But if you're on T.V. every day of the week just obstructing something, like these whiners in this John Bolton thing, where they're basically complaining because they said something to him and he put his hands on his hips, and they thought that was an aggressive symbol. I mean these people sound like whiners and losers. Obstructionism is a useful short term tactic if you deploy it once every couple of years. As a way of life, it's disastrous.
HH: And do you see the Republicans pushing the judicial filibuster issue and winning this, Mark Steyn?
MS: Well, they have to, because they have the opposite problem. That at a certain level, if you're in office but not in power, you look pathetic. And the worst and most disheartening news about this has been the news that John Sununu, my Senator in New Hampshire, is wobbling on this. That's infuriated a lot of my neighbors. They're sending him New Hampshire spring water and saying you've obviously been drinking the water in D.C. too long.
HH: I hope that's true. I hope they send him cases and cases of it. |
