On Thursday I kept my weekly date on The Hugh Hewitt Show:
HUGH HEWITT: If you want to read Mark Steyn, you ought to go get ...his climate change book, Climate Change: The Facts, as well as Steyn vs the Stick. It's all over at www.steynonline.com. A Disgrace To The Profession is the brand new book. Mark, welcome, how are you?
After the wall-to-wall book plugs, the main topic of conversation was the Democrats' debate and its curious aversion to foreign policy:
HUGH HEWITT: Mark Steyn, the Fetching Mrs. Hewitt is in Jerusalem at this hour, and she assures me she's fine. But I do think we're on an interesting cycle in the Middle East, which includes the appearance of a Cuban general in Syria now. Back to the 70s with Barack Obama.
MARK STEYN: Yeah, he said the 1980s are asking for their foreign policy back. He taunted Mitt Romney with that line. We now have Cuban troops in the Middle East in the way they were once all over Africa during various coups during the Cold War. They served as the Soviet Union's proxies. And clearly, you know, they're not the most efficient military in the world, and they can't mobilize on a dime, so clearly, Putin and the Castro brothers have been planning this for some time. In other words, he stitched Obama up even while he was at the United Nations. And what I find interesting about this is running around Syria right now, you have the Russians, who were the beneficiaries of Hillary Clinton's famous reset button. And then you also have troops from the two nations that Obama just in the last couple of weeks has made historic rapprochements with - ancient American enemies with whom our relations have been frozen for decades. That's to say, Iran and Cuba. And barely is the ink dry on those agreements than the troops from those two nations, plus Russia, are now running around Syria killing American-trained allies there. It's quite extraordinary.
HH: It is. It's really unfortunate at the debate this week with the Democrats did not spend the entire time on the collapse of Middle Eastern policy. I thought the former Secretary of State was allowed to skate on this, Mark Steyn. What did you think?
MS: Well, I thought Kirsten Powers, actually, on Fox News, I think it was just yesterday, put it very well when she said that this is something that the Democrat base is just not interested in. They're not interested in ISIS. They're not interested in Iran. The trick with foreign policy, as everybody from Lincoln Chafee to Bernie Sanders demonstrated, foreign policy as a subject is something that a successful Democrat candidate wants to steer as far clear of as he can. And in a way, that's for the best. I mean, if you look at where the Fetching Mrs. Hewitt is at the moment in Jerusalem, where they have this epidemic of random stabbings, and the United States government has had absolutely nothing useful to say about that.
By "random" I meant that the targets are randomly selected. Measured by the strategic goals of civilized entities, a campaign to "Stab Israelis" (as their Facebook page titles it) is completely pointless. But, measured by the accelerating depravity of Islamic imperialism, there is a crude strategic purpose: The object is dead Jews. The more the better. Obama's failures ripple across the map, destabilizing America's allies, whether Israel or Jordan or the Gulf monarchies:
MS: Everybody, whether it's Iran or Cuba or Russia, everybody else has seized their opportunity in that vacuum of power. And I always quote this line Bernard Lewis said to me, the great Bernard Lewis said to me many years ago. I've quoted it before on your show, that America risks being seen as impotent as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend. And I think that is what is happening.
To be fair to Bernard, he actually said America risks being seen as "harmless" as an enemy, treacherous as a friend. The Israelis and the Kurds and the Jordanians and the Yazidi and all manner of other people are on the sharp end of that dictum. A strategically vital region is being divided up between the new Russo-Iranian alliance and the Islamic State consortium of head-hackers. If this keeps up, world war and millions dead will be the way to bet.
You can read the full transcript here, and hear the complete audio here.
~As for the book Hugh was kind enough to mention, I'm proud to say that, after another flaccid attack by non-reader David Appell, "A Disgrace to the Profession" is still Number One on the Climatology Hit Parade, with its companion volume Climate Change: The Facts still at Number Seven and outselling both Michael E Mann's new book and the ghastly Bill Nye's.
~On Monday I'll be back on the air at WRKO Boston and across the north-east with New England's radio colossus Howie Carr, live at 3.30pm Eastern. Hope you'll set your radio dial and tune in.
