The New Yorker cover at right has attracted a lot of comment. It shows Hillary Rodham Clinton outside the locker room trying to get in. But the locker room is full of white Republican males - Walker, Paul, Bush, Cruz, Rubio... Okay, the last couple are Hispanic, but let's not get hung up on details. And Bush identifies as Hispanic on voter registration forms, but let's not get hung up on the paperwork...
But, in fact, the GOP has already let a female into the locker room - Carly Fiorina - plus a black guy - Ben Carson - and an Indian - Bobby Jindal. So nothing celebrates diversity like the locker room for the Republican primary debate: whites, blacks, browns, Hispanics, men, women, old, young... Over in the Dem locker room, there's hardly anybody in there, and the few that are are all white, and old: Hillary, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren.
By the way, is there a whiter cultural artifact than The New Yorker? Mark Ulriksen is the cartoonist, and a useful reminder of why I'll take the Charlie Hebdo crowd any day. He should do a picture of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Bobby Jindal banging to get in the door of his outmoded Republican stereotype.
Also by the way, I hate having to talk like this - to buy into the left's hideous civilization-sapping trope that identity politics is the only thing that matters: We've got two Hispanics; where's yours? Where's your Indian? Where's your transgender candidate? It's pathetic, but what can you do with an artist who thinks "provocation" means "pandering to the delusion of upscale white liberal solipsists"?
And isn't the big problem with the picture is that it's the wrong way round? I mean, Hillary's in the room, isn't she? Hermetically sealed off from voters and reporters and competing candidates. And it's not any old locker room, but the A-list power-players' locker room: There's Hillary, and Bill, and Chelsea, and tireless Clinton Foundation charity worker Sid Blumenthal; and Hillary's brothers Tony and Hugh, who got into a spot of bother over a hazelnut scam in the Caucasus (not a phrase one often has cause to type) but it's all been smoothed over and, during their brother-in-law's tenure as Haitian earthquake-relief honcho, they wound up on the advisory board of some Haitian gold-mining venture; and that FIFA guy Septic Bladder whose corrupt and criminal organization is a Clinton donor; and the corrupt and murderous Government of Qatar, who are also Clinton donors; and high-flying paedo Jeffrey Epstein, who likes to offer Bill a ride on the Lolita Express, where the stewardesses take off more than the plane; and a couple of Kazakh warlords, and Russian oligarchs fronting for Putin, and Saudi princes, but only the real heavyweights, none of your distant cousins...
What are the chances of poor old Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders busting into that room and having a real primary?
Yeah, right. Is that Hillary I hear through the door doing her amusing southern accent for the benefit of the Kazakhs while Tony passes the bowl of hazelnuts?
~Maybe the best explanation of Mark Ulriiksen's all-male locker room is that it's meant to be the local bathhouse. Several folks have asked me to comment on the decline of National Review as represented by their 5,500-word cover story in support of gay marriage, which, with their usual impeccable timing, they published the day before the launch of their spring fundraiser asking loyal readers to pony up to keep this bastion of principled conservatism standing athwart history.
I generally don't comment on publications to which I used to contribute, because it's best just to move on. But I confess I did get a mordant chuckle out of Kathy Shaidle's take. As she likes to say, we're gonna need more KY for that slippery slope.
~I'm not usually envious of other people's book titles, but I did feel a stab of regret when I saw that Ann Coulter's new release is called, brilliantly, Adios, America! That would have made a great trilogy-completer for America Alone and After America. I also liked her subtitle "The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole", until I reflected for three seconds or so and remembered it's "The Left's and Seven-Eighths of the Right's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole". See these immigration policy scorecards. That all-white GOP locker-room evidently needs a lot of towel boys. It's not just Jeb with his wacky plans to save Detroit by making it part of the ummah.
Unlike the wimps at ABC, CBS and NBC, Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV is actually willing to have Miss Coulter on his show, and she was on splendid form, starting with her advice to Americans: "If you don't want to get killed by ISIS, don't go to Syria. If you don't want to get killed by Mexicans, I can't help you." She continued:
I think there are cultures that are obviously deficient and if they weren't deficient you wouldn't be sitting in America interviewing me. I'd be sitting in Mexico. You fled that culture because... there are a lot of problems with that culture. Hopefully, it can be changed. But we can share our culture with other nations without bringing all of their people here. When you bring those people here you bring those cultures here. That includes honor killings, it includes uncles raping their nieces, it includes not paying your taxes, it includes paying bribes to government officials. That isn't our culture. You can see the successful cultures in the world that have been studied ad infinitum. America is about, it is the best in the world and we are about to lose it. And, everyone who lives here is going to lose that.
She's right. You're gonna lose it. Culture trumps economics - every time. So, absent assimilationist incentives everyone's too squeamish to apply, a country that grows more Latin-American demographically will trend more Latin-American culturally, too. America's not alone, of course. The entire western world has chosen to commit immigration-assisted suicide as some kind of civilizational penance for imperialism, or racism, or just being so culturally insensitive as to build the parts of the planet that function. In Europe and Canada, they're ceding their turf to Islam. In the United States, they've chosen Latin America. So fewer clitoridectomies.
Without cultural continuity, a country is just real estate. Just across the Iraq border, where I stood 12 years ago, is the town of Mari. It's in Eastern Syria now, but it was once the furthest outpost of the Kingdom of Hammurabi, the guy who cooked up the first legal code. It's currently being destroyed by jihadist loons. What value do Hammurabi and his pre-Islamic laws have to ISIS? The past has no meaning, because it's someone else's past.
In a mid-21st century America that's imported millions more low-skilled Latin-American peasants on the transformative scale Democrats and most Republicans accept, why should the Founding Fathers be any more relevant than Hammurabi is to the Islamic State?
~I'll be on the radio today, Thursday, with Hugh Hewitt, live coast to coast at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific.
