Excerpts from one of my favorite columnists:

January 4: “For all the money lavished on them, the UN is hard to rouse to action. Mr Egeland’s full-time round-the-clock 24/7 Big Humanitarians are conspicuous by their all but total absence on the ground… They’ve flown in (or nearby, or overhead) a couple of experts to assess the situation and they’ve issued press releases boasting about the assessments. In Sri Lanka, Mr Egeland’s staff informs us, “UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments”. Which, translated out of UN-speak, means the Sri Lankans can go screw themselves.”

January 17: “Even Enda Kilroy could make no more impressive claim of Kofi Annan than that he is “conspicuously present in Asia assessing the situation”. The battered coastal populations sent out an SOS, not an assess-O-S but that’s the only service the UN moral preeners seem able to provide. Would you let these guys run anything closer to home? Would you patronize a pub managed by the UN? “Two weeks after the beer ran out at O’Malley’s Bar, UN Breweries spokesman Jan Egeland announced that the Secretary-General had appointed a Beverage Supply Coordinator who would be flying in to assess the situation and co-ordinate talks on long-term imbibing needs.”

January 23: “I picked up The Village Voice for the first time in years this week. Couldn’t resist the cover story: “The Eve Of Destruction: George W Bush’s Four-Year Plan To Wreck The World.”


February 1: “Even the most benign liberator can’t “give” liberty to someone: you have to want it for yourself, and take it for yourself. This Sunday, Shia and Kurds and even the savvier Sunnis seized it. Iraq was a home of the brave this weekend and will be a land of the free… The most fascinating detail in the big picture was this: Iraqi expats weren’t voting just in Sydney and London and Los Angeles, but also in Syria. Think about that. If you’re an Iraqi in Syria, you can vote for the political party of your choice. If you’re a Syrian in Syria, you have no choice at all. Which of those arrangements is the one with a future?”

February 5: “For good or ill, Bush, Blair and Howard are all transformative figures: they’ve remade their political landscapes and driven their opponents into loopy, self-inflicted death spirals. All the Democrats needed last November was their own Tony Blair – on the war, tough, moral and credible, and a big pantywaist on health, education and the rest of the touchy-feely stuff. The story of this election season – from Canberra to Washington to Westminster – is that candidates who engage seriously with the central challenge of the age can see off their opposition, whether left or right.”

February 6: “’They can’t have an election right now,’ declared John Kerry, Senator Nuance himself, in the Presidential debates. ‘I personally do not believe they’re going to be ready for the election in January,’ said Jimmy Carter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peanuts. ‘There’s no security there.’ But Carter and Kerry and Old Europe were wrong, and the absurd absolutist simpleton was right. Iraq is free not just because of the military skill of America and her allies but because of the political will of one man, who stuck to his guns against the opposition of the Eurocynics, the UN do-nothings, the Democratic Party weathervanes, the media doom-mongers, and the unreal realpolitik grandees of his own party – the Scowcrofts and Eagleburgers.”

February 12: “The Tory Party looks a lot more like the Democratic Party and the Australian Labor Party than its nominal ideological soulmates. For one thing, they’re losers. Last year, after the Spanish election, after the failure to find WMD, after new commissions and reports every other week, and the sense from the press that the “BUSH LIED!!/BLAIR LIED!” stuff could be made to stick, they fell for the received wisdom that Iraq would prove an electoral liability for the three musketeers of the Anglosphere. Instead, John Howard won big, and so did Bush, and so will Blair. Meanwhile, Iraq’s more of a liability for their oppositions: the Democrats are split between a noisy anti-war faction (Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy) and a bunch of pusillanimous, jelly-spined, finger-in-the-windy weathervane pols who don’t know whether they’re for it or against it until their consultants run it by the focus groups (Kerry, Edwards, 2008 contender Evan Bayh). And somehow the Conservatives have wound up in the same position, divided between those who are agin it (like Do-Nothing Doug Hurd, fast becoming the Ted Kennedy of the Tories) and those who no longer know what they think about it and have fallen into what Janet Daley calls “post hoc equivocation”. As John Kerry learned, that’s unlikely to be rewarded on Election Day.”

February 15: “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ‘em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than George W Bush and Tony Blair did.”

February 21: “The President also found time [during his European visit] to cast his eye upon Europe’s internal affairs. As he told his audience in Brussels, in the first speech of his tour, “We must reject anti-Semitism in all forms and we must condemn violence such as that seen in the Netherlands.” The Euro-bigwigs shuffled their feet and stared coldly into their mistresses’ décolletage.”

February 22: “World leaders are always most fulsome when there’s least at stake… all airy assertions about common values, ties of history, all meaningless.”

March 5: “I bumped into Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister and man of letters. He was just back from Egypt, where he’d been profoundly moved when he’d been asked to convey the gratitude of the Arab people to President Chirac for working so tirelessly to prevent a tragic war between Christianity and Islam. You don’t say, I said. And, just as a matter of interest, who asked you to convey that? He hemmed and hawed and eventually said it was President Mubarak. Being a polite sort, I rolled my eyes only metaphorically, but decided as a long-term proposition I’d bet Wolfowitz’s address book of real people against Villepin’s hotline to over-the-hill dictators. The lesson of these last weeks is that it turns out Washington’s Zionists know the Arab people a lot better than Europe’s Arabists.”

March 22: “Almost every issue facing the European Union – from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities – has at its heart the same glaringly plain root cause: a huge lack of babies…”

March 31: “With a few honorable exceptions, Iraq press coverage has been a truly spectacular failure. One day in the future, we’ll dig out the yellowing cuttings and wonder how America managed to lose every daily battle and yet still win the war.”

April 14: “In reality, the unrelieved gloom is on the Dem side of the ledger: the Republicans are all but certain to increase their majority in 2006. Whereas, if you want the state of the Democratic Party in a single image, cut out the photograph from The New York Times the other day: a pumped Robert C Byrd giving a clenched-fist salute at a moveon.org rally. That’s the Rainbow Coalition 2005 model: a dwindling band of ancient vindictive legislators yoked to a cash-flush unrepresentative fringe. It would actually be to the Democrats’ advantage if the Byrd-Kos union were to crack up, but instead their union seems merely cracked, like a miscast double-act thrown together by a desperate burlesque agent.

April 28: “For three decades, most western governments trumpeted as a virtue what was, in fact, a profound weakness. In bragging about the numbers of Sikhs and Muslims, Africans and Arabs adding hitherto unprecedented vibrancy to the restaurant scene in Malmo and Winnipeg, western governments made multiculturalism as an indispensable part of their sense of their own goodness. In reality, Canada and western Europe needed immigrants because of their own terrible combination of unsustainable welfare systems and deathbed demographics. As China and India follow South Korea and Taiwan, and Iraq and Ukraine follow China and India, immigrants will stop coming. One day soon, Europeans may well become the emigrants, deciding there are better opportunities in India and Taiwan: the present trickle out of Holland could become a continent-wide version of American cities’ ‘white flight’.”

May 1: “The problem with the war on terror is that once it was framed as an existential struggle for western civilization it was all too predictable that the left would act as it did the last time we had one of those, the Cold War: they’d do their best to lose it. This is lamentable to those of us who thought on September 11th that the justice of our cause was so obvious that it wouldn’t be a party thing. It must be even more distressing to that brave band of British lefties who backed the war. Mr Blair has spent the last four years seeking to prove that a ‘progressive’ ‘liberal’ Europhile can still be a reliable US ally. His party’s told him to shove it.”

May 15: “All that the so-called ‘multilateralists’ require is that we be polite and deferential to the transnational establishment regardless of how useless it is. What matters in global diplomacy is that you pledge support rather than give any.”

May 21: “Both the US media and those rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs – not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of America’s Federally-regulated lo-flush toilets (inflicted on the nation by the eco-zealot Al Gore), a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek’s executive washroom.”

May 31: “The Eurofetishists can’t seem to agree their line on this referendum business. On the one hand, The Guardian’s headline writer was packing up and heading for the hills – ‘Europe Is Plunged Into Crisis’ – and EU leaders warned that ‘Europe’ might cease to function. Oh, come on. We won’t get that lucky. On balance, Jean-Claude Juncker, the ‘president’ of ‘Europe’, seems closer to the mark in his now famous dismissal of the will of the people: ‘If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue’.’ And if it’s a Neither of the Above, he will say ‘we move forward’. You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, ‘President’ Juncker covers his ears and says, ‘Nya, nya, nya, can’t hear you!’”

June 11: “Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America’s being flayed as the planet’s number one torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners’ co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Korans than Americans ever do, and even though the alleged insufficient respect to the prisoners’ holy book occurred at a rate of one verified incident of possibly intentional disrespect per year. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews – right after the complaints that it’s culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it’s the burial site of ten devout Muslim flying enthusiasts. Guantanamo will be remembered not as a byword for torture but for self-torture, a western fetish our enemies understand very well.”

June 21: “My favourite headline last week was in The International Herald Tribune: ‘E.U. Leaders And Voters See Paths Diverge.’ Traditionally in free societies, when the paths of the leaders and the voters ‘diverge’, it’s the leaders who depart the scene. But apparently in the EU this is too vulgar and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and so the great permanent Eurocracy decided instead to offer up Euro-variations on Bertolt Brecht’s jest about the need to elect a new people. Whatever the rejection of the European constitution means, it certainly doesn’t mean the rejection of the European constitution… Even if the French and Dutch had been boorish enough to want to vote no to the constitution, they would have been incapable of so doing as the whole thing was designed to be way above their pretty little heads. ‘It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text,’ declared Valery Giscard d’Estaing. ‘Europe’s Jefferson’ has apparently become Europe’s Jefferson Airplane, boasting about the impenetrability of his hallucinogenic lyrics. The point is the French and Dutch shouldn’t have read beyond the opening sentence: ‘We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people.’”

June 27: “There’s another photograph of Rachel Corrie – at a Palestinian protest, headscarved, her face contorted with hate and rage, torching a homemade Stars & Stripes. Which is the real Rachel Corrie? The “schoolgirl idealist” caught up in the cycle of violence? Or the grown woman burning the flag of her own country? Well, that’s your call… But you’ll look for [that second photo] in vain in the innumerable cooing profiles of the ‘passionate activist’ that have appeared in the world’s newspapers. One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of western civilization loathe that civilization – and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing.”