For some reason, both nutcrackers and gay apparel came up while I was guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show today. You can find a few highlights here. But we also discussed the other news of the day, including the CRomnibus fiasco in Washington, we also looked at the fallout from Sony's supposedly "edgy" comedy about Kim Jong-Un, and the siege at a coffee shop in Martin Place in Sydney that ended with the death of yet another Islamic lunatic but also two of his hostages. I'll have more to say about the Deranged Mohammedan of the Week (So Far) in a separate piece coming up a little later.
~I began the show with reference to something Rush said to a caller on Friday re the ghastly CRomnibus, and the danger of letting people think last month's election was "meaningless". And it reminded me of something I said to Rush when he interviewed me about what he called my "must-read new book". In The Limbaugh Letter, I put it this way:
STEYN: We've lived through elections that made a difference. Reagan's election in 1980 made a difference because if Carter had won, the West would have managed to contrive to lose the Cold War. As rotten and decrepit and on the verge of collapse as the Soviet Union was, a second Carter term and we would have lost the Cold War. They were picking off real estate all over the planet through the 1970s, from Afghanistan to Grenada, and a second Carter term would have sealed the deal. So that election mattered, that changed the global scorecard.
And Mrs. Thatcher's election in 1979. Had the Labor Party been reelected then, that would have been the complete death of one of the oldest, most stable societies on earth...
And if you lived through elections like that, that made a difference, the saddest thing is when you have an election that doesn't make a difference. And that was the tragedy of 2010. The Tea Party, as you said, was this genuine grassroots movement, and they pulled off this amazing victory - and then nothing changed. In part because the Republican leadership did not give voice to what their supporters had said. But also because — which is real banana republic stuff — basically the Regime sicced the commissars of the bureaucracy on these people, and made their life hell, and so they couldn't do the same thing in 2012. But there's no point to heading off the cliff in third gear, which is basically the position a lot of Republican Senators are wedded to. They're happy to go along in the same direction as the Democrats, they just want to shift down a gear. And that's not good enough. That's not good enough.
The third-gear Republican Senators had their way over the weekend. In 2010, it was Obama who said the election makes no difference. In 2014, even before the new Congress has been seated, it's the Republican leadership that's just told the voters last month's election makes no difference.
~The Daily Caller seemed to find this excerpt news-worthy, although it seems rather obvious to me:
STEYN: The president has unilaterally rewritten U.S. immigration law. He doesn't have the power to do that. But that rule doesn't matter… he did it, he did it. This is why, by the way, why things trend Democrat. Because Democrats just do what they want, they don't worry about the rules.
The president's idea of law is what you can get away with. And so he figures he can get away with this immigration amnesty, and that what he can get away with trumps the U.S. Constitution. And he's right about that, because when [Texas Senator] Ted Cruz had his vote, he lost 74-22..
It's not just a policy difference. It is about whether the president has the right to do it. Whether he's acting beyond the law like some Latin-American caudillo, or Kim Jong-Un when he has one of his uncles executed over in Pyongyang, or some of these other one-man states. The president thinks it's a one-man state and what he does trumps what the legislature does. And 74 of the 100 United States Senators agree with that.
~If you didn't care for my rendition of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You", my old friends at The Spectator over in London have dusted off a Steyn classic for the Speccie's special Christmas edition, in which I tell the story of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas".