I started my Wednesday morning with the great John Oakley on Toronto's AM640. We talked a lot about Iran, a little bit about climate change, and just a soupçon about Mr John Graves Simcoe*, who may be an obscure figure these days but is a great man of the kind I'm not sure our world is any longer capable of producing.
I reiterated to John the point I made on the telly last night - that these routine Obama/Chamberlain comparisons are grotesquely unfair to Neville Chamberlain. He was 69 years old in 1938, and like almost everyone of that age he lived with the horror of a largely pointless war that had cost the British Empire one million lives. As I said to John, even far away in, say, Newfoundland, the toll of the dead reached into every village, every family. There were spinsters everywhere, not because these particular women had no wish to marry but because there was no one to marry. I disagree with Chamberlain but I can understand why avoiding at all costs doing that to another generation might be his priority.
Whereas what are we appeasing Iran for? Out of civilizational ennui - because to ask us to stare down some apocalyptic dimestore mullahs would take too much time away from the small, sensual pleasures of our electronically pampered lives. Yesterday Hillary Rodham Clinton, the officially designated president-in-waiting, gave a short statement on Iran, after which a journalist asked her, "Are you going to Taylor Swift tonight?"
As I put it to John, whatever one feels about Chamberlain, at least at Heston Aerodrome on September 30th 1938, no Fleet Street hack asked the Prime Minister, "Are you going to Ukulele Ike tonight?"
They were a more serious people. We are trivial, and if we're fortunate our triviality will kill us before the mullahs do.
Click below to listen to our conversation:
~There's more from my Hannity appearance at The Daily Caller:
"Whether you look at missile defense in Eastern Europe, where [Obama] takes the side of Russia over US allies like Poland and the Czech Republic; if you look at little things, like the FalklandsIslands, where he takes the side of Argentina over a U.S. ally like the United Kingdom," he argued. "And in the Middle East, he's taken the side of Iran over U.S. allies like the Sunni monarchies and Israel - because his central view is that America and American power is the problem in the world. And, therefore, American allies are part of that problem. And, therefore, what he does is, in a sense, withdraw from the world, and enhance the position of the enemies of American allies. That's what he's done in the Middle East. And it won't be confined to the Middle East, it'll spread beyond that."
~Tomorrow, Thursday, I'll be keeping my weekly date on The Hugh Hewitt Show, live coast to coast at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific.
*CORRECTION: I originally wrote "Lord Simcoe", momentarily confusing the man with the old hotel. Thanks to Donald McKenzie and others who wrote to point out that, while the hotel owners ennobled him, his sovereign never did.