Steyn’s columns are usually laced with wonderful takeaway lines, the kind you can cut and paste into the header of your blog. Real substantive and sharp; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an issue from an entirely different angle while reading his stuff. Rarely does he write a dull piece, and this weekend’s did not deviate from his regular excellence.
I hope I don’t sound like too much of the alarmist here, but Obama’s weakness and inbred radicalism could make him one of the most dangerous presidents we’ve had in modern times. Steyn points out that Obama’s enormous Cairo appeasement carrot is being used as a big stick by the very folks it was supposed to placate. Will Barry learn from his mistakes, or are we in for more groveling on the world stage?
Maybe you’d know that, on domestic policy, Obama uses the veneer of disinterested arbiter as a feint. Or maybe you’d just figure that no serious world leader can ever be neutral on vital issues. So you’d start combing the speech for what lies underneath the usual Obama straw men — and women: “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.” Very brave of you, I’m sure. But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up as the victims of honor killings in Germany and Scandinavia and Toronto and Dallas? Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery masquerading as such.
They used to say that the downfall of GWB was his arrogance and his stubbornness. I’ll posit that we’ve got an even more arrogant and stubborn guy in the Oval Office at the moment–and why shouldn’t he be? A god-king is never wrong–and it could be the downfall of us all.
Read all of it. And then read it again.
It’s like ‘killing’ and ‘murder;’ all murder is killing, but not all killing is murder.
One of the problems about “lying” is that our language doesn’t have precise words to distinguish moral deception from immoral deception … even though moral people generally can tell the difference.
Grey is only black and white at poor resolution..
That’s true in pure essence, Ilion.
But then I also tell people I am just human.
I am NOT God or Christ.
And even Ghandi reportedly said he was not sure that Hitler (in power at the time the question was asked by one reporter) could be removed by allowing oneself to get clunked on the head by a rattan cane.
As was done against a softer giant, the British Empire, for whom the sun was already setting.
Context, context, brother.
Even for the application of absolutes, we have the need to unthread the definitions.
If all rape involves sex, does that mean that all sex is therefore rape?
Ask your wife or ladyfriend that question next Valentine’s day.
It’s not the moral absolutes do not exist. And Kangas was an extreme example of someone pulling out all the stops to praise Statist tactics. But this ungulate-like posture in the face of danger concerns me.
I was merely pointing out the oddball posture on moral absolutism against lords of terror at a time of war, when on virtually all other fronts we are daily told by the left that absolutes have no place in personal lives nor politics.
Other angles serve us well.
My son stubbed his toe the other day. OUCH!
BAD news.
A couple of years ago we found out he inhereted my lousy set of asthmatic lungs, and OH also, he has some kind of metabolic bone disease in his leg.
Guess which OUCH I’d rather hear about.
Yeah–the need of bandaids on toes.
Not all badness is equally bad. Whether caused by humans in response to something far worse (water on the face, vs. burning buildings or the need for the US military to get the deed done by carpet bombing villagers), OR unfortunate events.
Would I tell a lie to save my family’s life? YES.
I freely admit my heart and mind are not strong enough to think the alternative if that kind of unlikely event is put before me, and a killer armed with machetes and shotguns queries me on their location and I happen to know they are in the basement and I think I can throw him off the trail.
Is lying wrong?
Generally, yes. You bet.
Bill Clinton–whom many conservatives still try to link to all of the nation’s woes.
Can’t speak for everyone’s thoughts on Wild Bill, but he’s old hat by now except in some comedy.
Bill made some idiotic personal decisions, but for the most part, other than the mysterious Kosovo intervention that killed thousands on the ground in the EUROPEAN nation because the orders were to bomb from over 15 thousand feet, I think his malignment in the Lewinskification was a little overdone.
I’ve told some to back off by now.
The oldie mouldie some more often hearken back to is JAMES EARL CARTER.
The eternal optimist about Palestinian gut-splat brigades meaning well for the commonweal and eternal hater of the Jewish people.
Obama has a simliar disdain and apparent timidity in some foreign affairs when not ordering Israel to almost go extinct.