Happy Father's Day to all dads and daddies, pops and paters among our readers. We have a song for the season.
If Baghdad's your bag, dad, it was a turbulent week. Here's the last seven days as seen by Mark:
~The week began with Ray Charles, who had Georgia on his mind.
~In Baghdad, they had the other Georgia on their minds: for wealthy Iraqis, the only flight out was to Tbilisi. On Monday, it looked as if President Obama was only losing one war, with his pitiful non-deal deal to spring the Taliban dream team from Gitmo. By midweek, he was the first US leader to lose two wars in one week, as a detainee he released from US custody in 2009 took Mosul and Tikrit, and the US Embassy in Baghdad readied for its Saigon moment. As the dominoes tumbled, Mark pondered an America "harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend".
~On Tuesday Hillary Clinton's new book was launched, prompting Mark to take a stroll down memory lane. Later that day, he checked in with Dana Perino on Fox News to discuss the supposedly "inevitable" next President of the United States.
~There was more Hillary talk in Mark's Wednesday conversation with Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley, as well as discussion of the downfall of another "inevitable" politician, the "next Speaker of the House" Eric Cantor, whose "amnesty"-driven defeat provided our most-read piece of the week.
~Thursday saw a provincial election in Mark's home province of Ontario. The Tories did not prove as unstoppable as ISIS. As female role models go, Steyn preferred the Illinois cupcake crusader to Kathleen Wynne.
~On Friday Obama held a press conference in front of a Saigonesque helicopter and then he and his golf clubs took off for Palm Springs for the weekend. Mark in turn got ready for the weekend by considering the weak end of the American era.
~On the warm front, Canada's Stephen Harper and Australia's Tony Abbott got together to form a sinister axis of denialism - turning what Big Climate enforcer Michael E Mann calls the vast Potemkin Village of Denialism into a vast pan-global Commonwealth of Denialism. Meanwhile, Washington Post readers concluded Steyn is too foreign and unlikeable for an American jury. Yeah, sure. That's what they said about the Taliban Five. Notwithstanding the odds, all of us remain thankful for your continuing support, via the Steyn store, for Mark's end of the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial of the century.
~To round out the week, Mark considered the cultural dominance of superheroes and supervillains - the last surely a poignant jest when, in reality, the so-called superpower is losing to goatherds.
A new week at SteynOnline begins tonight with our Song of the Week.
