On my weekly appearance with Hugh Hewitt, we got to all the doom and gloom, but mein host began with a fellow singing "Luck Be A Lady":
HUGH HEWITT: It's Thursday. That means Mark Steyn. And it's always Stump Mark Steyn Day. Mark Steyn, do you recognize that voice..?
MARK STEYN: I'm on a very bad phone line, but don't tell me you're playing the Marlon Brando version.
HH: I am, because I went to Guys and Dolls for the first time last night. I've never seen the show, I've never seen the movie ...and all that anyone could tell me was how bad Marlon Brando was in the film.
MS: Well, Frank Sinatra was also in the film... ,You cast Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando in a movie, and then you give all the songs to Marlon Brando. That's basically what they did with Guys And Dolls. And right to the end of his life, if you wanted to get a rise out of Frank, you could just go up to him and say 'Hey, you know, I thought Brando was pretty good in Guys And Dolls', and then just stand well back and listen to him lay it on you for the next 40 minutes.
In fairness, Frank Loesser, aware of the situation, wrote a delightful song called "Adelaide", and gave it to Sinatra to sing in the picture. Adelaide's dropped out of fashion as a girl's name, but it's worth bringing back just because you'd have one of the loveliest name songs ever written.
But then it was on to the doom and gloom:
HH: An Ohio man this afternoon trained with a terrorist group in Syria was charged today with returning to the United States with the goal of mounting an attack at home. They say Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, 23, is a naturalized American citizen whose brother was killed fighting in Syria. He returned to the United States hoping to attack an American military facility, prison or hospital. So it's happening, Mark Steyn.
MS: Yeah, you can't have this number of people with Western passports going to Syria and Iraq and training, and not expect them then to return to the countries of which they're nominally citizens. I get a kick whenever I see these things saying 'Ohio man', or 'California man', or the rest of it, because clearly, at a certain level, they obtained their citizenship fraudulently - because U.S. citizenship tests are quite up front about asking, by requiring you to renounce any other foreign prince or potentate, and that certainly includes caliphs, the brand new caliph in the Middle East.... It's actually a far more sophisticated and advanced version of what was going on in Afghanistan in the 90s when the Taliban subcontracted large chunks of Afghanistan out to al Qaeda as their training camp. In this case, we've got an organization that holds a lot more territory, has a lot more money, has attracted thousands and thousands of citizens with Western passports - and then sent them all back to their countries. And according to the German police, it takes about 600 people to keep track of any one of these individual returning ISIS jihadists. So you can imagine the manpower you require to prevent every single one of these guys not getting through somewhere, sometime or other.
I accidentally added a zero to that number. In fact, the Germans figure it's 60 people you need to track each potential jihad boy. Canadian police aren't in disagreement about that. So this issue is consuming vast amounts of police resources - and good luck with the crime rate once the petty thieves and burglars and whatnot figure out the logic of that.
Later in the interview, Hugh asked me about all the presidential candidates traipsing through New Hampshire at the moment, but in fact they're all traipsing through his show. He's the New Hampshire Primary of talk radio, and his guest microphone is the audio equivalent of the pancake-flipping contest:
HH: Now here's my frustration. I talked with Lindsey Graham, and some of that got picked up, and I asked him the question which is are we more susceptible to a mass casualty 9/11 attack today than we were six and a half years ago, and he said absolutely, we are. At the same time that was going on, Jake Tapper asked Marco Rubio would he go to a gay wedding, and Marco Rubio said yes. Today, I'm going to ask Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum the same question, but in the context of what is more important – knowing if they'd go to the wedding, or whether they would destroy the Islamic State before they throw hundreds of more gay men from towers to their death. And I am guaranteeing you, because I already see it, we prerecorded those, the answer that Rick Santorum gives will get more attention than Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, all of them talking about terrorism. It's really an upside down world.
MS: Yeah... We've moved on from same sex weddings, where we're talking now about transgendered bathrooms. And I'm sure we'll be talking about transgendered bathrooms when the mullahs nuke us.
You can find the full interview here.
Next week, I'll be out and about promoting the official Earth Day release in North America of Climate Change: The Facts. We've been shipping out personally autographed copies for a couple of weeks as a SteynOnline exclusive, but starting next week you'll be able to get the paperback out in the wider world, too. It's already available in eBook format via Kindle, Nook or Kobo, so, wherever you are on the planet, you can be reading it in the next 90 seconds. But, as I said, the official launch is next week for Earth Day, so I'll be venturing onto the airwaves - as will my co-author Christopher Essex - and we'll keep you apprised of which shows and when.
