Steyn Week: Tories Too Strident and Too Timid

This week it’s all Steyn, all the time. And today Mark Steyn
takes
after Britain’s Tories for being too strident on immigration when anyone could have known that a
whisper on immigration would have been magnified by the lefty media into a trumpet blast. And
any Tory Party worth its salt would have come out with some
“Thatcher-sized themes,” you know, smaller government and lower taxes.

It's The Culture Stupid

Thomas Sowell trots out the basic finding of his Race and Culture trilogy for the benefit of
Opinion Journal readers. The reason that blacks (and also Southern red-neck whites) have
fared
poorly in the United States is their violent, illiterate culture.

“The culture of the people who were called `rednecks’ and `crackers’ before
they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was
a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement,
as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. ”

Sowell’s great finding is that if you want to predict the speed at which an immigrant to the United
States will assimilate, you should look at his/her education and tradition of living under law. Groups like
Jews and East Asians that have revered education and have an experience of living under law have
thrived immediately. Groups like the Irish, the Scots-Irish, and the blacks have struggled because they lived under the
boot of oppression or knew only a culture of force and feud before they came to the land of self-government.
Michael Barone’s The New Americans makes the same point.

Conclave or Congress: Which Gets the Job Done?

Mark Steyn
chooses
the College of Cardinals as the more serious institution. Why, it took them only
a couple of days to elect a new pope, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee takes all month just
to worry about John Bolton yelling at a bureaucrat in a hallway in central Asia ten years ago? You’d
think that they would applaud him for encouraging better performance. You’d think the Democratic Party
was more serious. You’d think the Republican Senators would have more cojones.

Not What They Had In Mind

A roundup of comment on the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI in the
Weekly Standard gives us a flavor of fashionable opinion on the new pontiff.
There’s no doubt about it. People don’t like their ox being gored, and a traditional Catholic Church
is a threat to their peacefully grazing cattle. But one man’s peacefully grazing ox is another man’s
rampaging bull. The Church and its traditionalist allies think that their traditional Christian ox is sorely
threatened by the rampaging progressivist bull.

Not What They Had In Mind

A roundup of comment on the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI in the
Weekly Standard gives us a flavor of fashionable opinion on the new pontiff.
There’s no doubt about it. People don’t like their ox being gored, and a traditional Catholic Church
is a threat to their peacefully grazing cattle. But one man’s peacefully grazing ox is another man’s
rampaging bull. For the Church and its traditionalist allies think that their ox is sorely
threatened by the rampaging progressivist bull.

British Election: Tories Should Lose

The Sunday Times’
Minette Marrin
thinks that the Conservative Party needs a few more years in the
political wilderness to allow the New Labour project to come to fruition.

“And until the new Labour project has discredited itself thoroughly the Conservative party will never have the political
courage — or rather the political chance — to declare what it truly stands for,”

which is, or which ought to be
“that less central government, less local government, less regulation,
less tax and less surveillance would be better for everyone.”

No kidding.

Steyn: Westerners are All Teenagers

Joke-a-graf Mark Steyn gets serious for a moment and
reflects
that we westerners are all
grown-up teenagers:

“Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the
world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions
and we spend our pocket money on our record collection,” our cars, and our porn site
subscriptions. And that’s the way we like it.