Mark Steyn at CPAC (Partial Video and a Few Tasty Quotes)
Pamela Geller, who blogs at Atlas Shrugged, got what I would consider the most plum job at CPAC. She got to introduce Mark Steyn. Steyn is one of the most brilliant conservative writer of our generation, if not the most brilliant. His cause célèbre is demographics, specifically the undeniable fact that in the West we are breeding ourselves out of existence and Muslims, along with the Islamists that dwell in great numbers among them, are filling that vacuum. His book, America Alone, is one of those books that changed the way you see the world around you while you’re reading it.
Here is one of Steyn’s more brilliant bits, which I transcribed from the video at Pamela’s site. It’s something that John McCain, if he were very, very smart, would print on a little postcard-sized reminder, keep in his breast pocket, and read every day.
Democrats take it as read[?] that the natural destination of an advanced western democracy is something like Scandanavia and America’s just taking a bit longer to reach that happy state, but we’ll get there eventually. If we do, we’re all doomed. Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and the dependence on mass immigration to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.
And just because…just because the Democrats have determined to play catch-up to the Europeans is no reason for the Republicans to play catch-up to the Democrats.
Oh heck, why not another? Another morsel or three or two from Steyn after the jump.
On the decline of Europe and where the left will bring us, if they can:
You often hear fiscal conservatives fuss over the federal deficit but the basic problem isn’t – quote – “the deficit”. It’s the government programs that cause the deficit and these programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them every month. They corrode the citizens’ sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree and that’s why conservatives should oppose middle-class entitlementry. It turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the nanny state.
Riffing on Gerald Ford’s famous dictum, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”:
A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. And that’s what the Europeans have at the moment. Their political class knows that their system is unaffordable and unsustainable and will bring them to the point of collapse, yet they can not persuade their electorate to give back any of these unaffordable entitlements they’ve grown used to. These guys say, “Oh, no problem. I’ve paid my taxes. I want my benefits.”
On a question from an audience member about a piece of “art” in his college which he described as “a swastika made up of little Bush faces”:
The gentleman from Macedonia who is here today, he knows what it’s like to live under a real tyranny. There are people still in early middle-age all over the Western world with very clear memories – millions and millions and millions of them – of what it’s like to live under totalitarianism, under fascism, under genocidal regimes. And every time some little twerp at some college compares Bush to Hitler, he demeand millions and millions of people who know the difference between real fascism and some twit driving around an American college town with a “9/11 was an Inside Job” bumper sticker…it is a sign of decadence and the left should be mocked for it whenever they raise it ebcause thehy’re insulting millions of people who died because of the real thing.
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Category: Cool Columnists and Wicked Writers, Political Pontifications
