On my weekly appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, Hugh and I discussed President Obama's peculiar decision to commit America to a war it can only lose. From The Daily Caller:
HUGH HEWITT: Did you see..? Ramadi not only fell, but the Jihadists have pushed out something like 10 kilometers beyond that. It appears as though Baghdad is encircled.
MARK STEYN: Yeah, I mean, it's incredible... The United States adopted a strategy that cannot win - these desultory, ineffectual airstrikes. It cannot win. So it embarked on a war that it could only lose. So this time last year when ISIS took Mosul, that was when America's back was turned. Then America assembled this 60 nation coalition and ISIS took Ramadi. So, in other words, instead of just rampaging in to a barren bit of territory, ISIS will be able to claim they defeated the Great Satan. And insofar as anybody reverses ISIS, it's going to be Iran. And it's absolutely incredible to me that the global superpower has embarked on a strategy that can only ensure that it is perceived as having lost to a rag-tag bunch of head choppers.
HEWITT: And we have the juxtaposition of the president going to the Coast Guard Academy and lecturing those young officers to be that their — global warming is their #1 concern, and the Ayatollah Khamenei going to Iman Hussein Military University in Tehran to announce that inspections, they will not occur at any military center and we're not going to be allowed to talk to their nuclear scientists. The juxtaposition is amazing.
STEYN: One of these guys is living in the real world and dealing with reality, and the other isn't. And the president's words were actually — aside from the fact that they're completely preposterous, the president's words were just in the most ghastly bad taste - when he's telling these guys that the main challenge they're going to have to face in their careers is the threat of climate refugees when just this week, in the three days, four days since ISIS took Ramadi, there are 100,000 refugees streaming west toward Baghdad because of him! There's not going to be any climate change refugees! The climate change refugees at the moment: Zero. None. Zip. There aren't any. But there's 100,000 refugees streaming towards Baghdad to add to the millions who've come from Syria and Iraq, destabilized Jordan. In Libya, they're getting on boats and they're going toward Italy and Greece, and ISIS is putting little jihadist boys onto those boats so they can get to Italy and Greece and disperse through Europe. These are real refugees - and he's telling the United States Coast Guard that the main challenge of their careers is going to be climate refugees. This guy is bonkers. He's fiddling with the temperature data while Ramadi burns!
HEWITT: That is it. He's bonkers.
We also discussed the latest revelations on the Clinton front - the clandestine appointment of Sid Blumenthal as personal Counselor of State to Queen Hillary, and the reality that, while the American people will never know what was in her emails, anyone who matters in Beijing, Moscow and beyond certainly does:
HH: Mark Steyn, that's a disqualifying admission from the deputy director of the CIA. Every intelligence service worth their salt in the world has all 85,000 emails. They know what she said. She's subject to blackmail.
MS: Exactly, and it isn't very difficult. The Chinese, the Russians, and even friendly intelligence services know that people's vulnerability are where their private and public lives intersect, so that someone can have an impenetrable government email, but you might happen to catch them when they're on vacation in the Caribbean, and they're using a private email on the missus' laptop or something. And in effect, Hillary Clinton made all her emails vulnerable to the intelligence services, because she was, her concern was that, with the usual Clinton paranoia, that she didn't want anybody knowing what she and Sid and the rest of the gang were up to. So instead, the American people know nothing, but the Chinese, the Russians, and if we're lucky, a couple of friendly intelligence agencies, know every single thing she did on all those emails.
You can find the full transcript of our interview here, and some audio here.
