Greetings from Copenhagen, where I'll be speaking at the Danish Parliament tomorrow, Saturday, on the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons. If you're one of the untold millions of "Syrian" "refugees" currently vacationing in Northern Europe, do swing by and say hi.
~Back in the US, I see my old boss from National Review, Rich Lowry, has also been sharpening his scimitar, although aiming it somewhat lower than the head-hackers. The other night he asserted re Trump on Fox News that "Carly [Fiorina] cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon". Reader Maggie Menzies writes from beautiful British Columbia to comment:
I bet your pal Jason Steorts won't like this.
Indeed. Jason Lee Steorts is Rich Lowry's Number Two and something of a delicate flower who tut-tutted over what proved to be my final column that "I found the derogatory language... both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent." So I wonder if he will be, any day now, deploring Rich's inaugural balls.
I was not hitherto aware that what Lowry looks for in a presidential candidate is a ruthless emasculator. Say what you like about the Reverend Jesse Jackson, but at least, when he ventures into this territory, he offers to do it himself.
If I understand Rich correctly, at the first debate Carly Fiorina was excluded - like Cinderella, unable to go to the ball. At the second debate, Cinderella seized her moment and went for the balls.
But the problem with the Lowry statement is that it's not true. Carly Fiorina certainly had a good night at that debate - aided by the faintheartedness of some of the supposed heavyweight candidates, like the now departed Scott Walker, who appeared not to have any balls to cut off. However, it will be interesting to see, as I said to Sean Hannity while the debate was still in progress, whether Carly's success translates into anything more concrete than a couple of points in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Nevertheless, the frontrunner has held his lead in all post-debate polls and is up over Fiorina by an average of more than 12 points - a situation that NBC wishfully reports as "Trump: On the Ropes?"
~To modify Stalin:
One dead Syrian moppet is an indictment of the entire western world.
But 700 dead pilgrims crushed at Mecca is just another day in the Ummah.
I wonder how long we'll have to wait to see such a scene in one of the Continent's Islamifying cities.
Apropos the Europe-wide tour of Camp of the Saints currently being mounted by impresario Angela Merkel and the Islamic Repertory Company, British reader Henry George writes:
I'm a student in the UK in my final year of an undergraduate history degree (a proper one at a proper university, not one of those "all must have prizes" places). I've been a fan of yours for over a year now, and thank God that there are still people like you out there saying what needs to be said. Your column "The Emperor's Moral Narcissism" is spot on concerning the current demise of Europe, in particular the now meaningless geographic area known as Germany. As a student of history, the current events bear an uncanny resemblance to the events at the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th centuries AD, when the Roman Empire began to crumble under the weight of outside attacks and immigration combined with lower birthrate and unsustainable decadence and lack of will. I believe that the present situation is strongly analogous, and quite frankly have given up hope on Europe. It's gone, never coming back and will worsen horrifically. The inter ethnic violence will only get worse, and as Melanie Philips says, it's going to a lot more bloody. Whenever I hear our self-rightously culturally suicidal liberal (or not, in the case of Jeremy Corbyn) left I feel so angry that they can be so blind to what is the death of Western civilisation, which has done more to advance humanity than anything else.
And before the Romans there was Greece. In my highly prescient bestseller America Alone, I quote Polybius, writing circa 150 BC:
In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...
For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.
Hmm. Pretentiousness, indolence, raised in affluence, wasting their substance... All we need is Chancellor Merkel explaining that the solution is increased Muslim immigration.
What makes Europe's disgraceful reaction to the current invasion distinctive is that it's an explicit rejection of the basis of representative democracy. The governments of modern nation states owe their primary duty to their citizens, and in return the citizens accept the legitimacy of those governments. Germany, France, Sweden et al are declaring, more or less openly, that the interests of untold millions of "refugees" trump the interests of their own citizens. That nullifies the bargain of representative government - and is unlikely to end well.
Pace Rich Lowry, the government subordinating the interests of its own people to foreigners is also relevant to Trump's rise in America.
~From a commenter at Daniel Pipes' website:
Steyn's Eurabia now happening before our eyes....
You write a book like America Alone not to predict the future but to change it. I regret that in that respect I seem to have failed utterly.
~Whether or not Carly cut Trump's balls off, Sean Hannity cut my tie off. The controversy rumbles on. Reader Roger Calvert wonders whether I was wearing a non-Sharia-compliant piece of neckwear:
I thought your tie had some sort of nasty image on it - or possibly an image of the prophet - and had thus been pixelated by the shows producers.
Actually, a line of Mohammeties is a brilliant marketing idea.
