The Undocumented Mark Steyn (8 page)

“Okay, I will!” said Sabine.

She had me just for a moment, and then we both exploded in guffaws and ordered another bottle of the Château Margaux.

THE MEDIA’S MATERNAL INSTINCTS

The National Post
, May 15, 2000

BACK IN THE SIXTIES
, when he held one of Britain’s oldest Cabinet posts, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, was greeted by a foreign dignitary as “Lord Heath.” Mr. Heath explained that, though Lord Privy Seal, he was neither a lord nor a privy nor a seal.

Likewise, yesterday’s Million Mom March: there were neither a Million, nor did they March, and while most were Moms, or anyway female, their mommyness was not their defining characteristic. Instead of marching, they milled on Washington’s Mall, listening to keynote speaker Rosie O’Donnell. Instead of a million, the Moms themselves downgraded expectations to a hundred thousand. I see my friends at
The Sunday Telegraph
in London persist in referring to the “so-called Million Mom March,” but no such niceties trouble the U.S. media. Perhaps like Heinz’s “57 varieties” the formulation is now so familiar that only a boorish literalist would require it to be accurate. But at least, when the Reverend Louis Farrakhan started this thing with his Million Man March, the old race-baiter and wacky numerologist was insistent that one million living, breathing, countable African-Americans would be present.

There weren’t. But a deluded nutcake crazy enough to believe he can draw a crowd has more integrity than the Moms’ last-minute attempt to pre-spin their low turnout.

As to their maternal status, Wednesday’s
Washington Post
put it this way: “The Million Mom March was conceived last August in a suburban New
Jersey mother’s living room.” Donna Dees-Thomases “called a few friends, and they called a few friends, and within a week they had an idea.”

Ah, citizen activism, you can’t beat it. According to ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, she’s “a typical mom.” According to Diane Sawyer, Ms. Dees-Thomases has “never really organized anything larger than a car pool.” According to NBC’s Lisa Myers, she’s “a suburban mom, too busy with her two daughters and a part-time job to pay much attention to politics.”

Car pool, ’burbs, daughters, Jersey: you get the idea. In fact, Ms. Dees-Thomases used to pay quite a bit of attention to politics: she was a staffer to two Louisiana Democrat senators, Russell Long and Bennett Johnston. How many “suburban moms” have been staffers to not one but two senators? Perhaps she snoozed her way through those jobs, spending most of her time on the phone organizing car pools for fellow soccer moms. But she’s been paying enough attention to politics in recent months to be a contributor to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.

Still, maybe she was just helping out a family member: Her sister-in-law, Susan Thomases, is Hillary’s closest political advisor.

And, just to round things out, even that reference to “a suburban New Jersey mother’s living room” is only technically accurate. Although Ms. Dees-Thomases is “a suburban New Jersey mother,” the living room in question was in her other home on Fire Island, the hedonist playground long favored by fetching young men of a certain persuasion.

If there’s anywhere that could use less gun control, it’s Fire Island. The last time I was there you could barely find a leaf within nine feet of the ground: the deer population had grown beyond the ability of the local vegetation to sustain it. But unfortunately this is not hunting country: for Fire Island’s menfolk, the thrill of the chase lies elsewhere. So the trees have been defoliated as high as the whitetail can reach and many of the poor beasts now look as emaciated as the louche chaps lounging on the beach listening to their Bette Midler CDs.

But “The Million Mom March was conceived last August in a gay resort community by a Hillary Clinton donor who’s never organized anything larger than a Democratic senator’s office” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

And why should ABC, NBC,
The Washington Post
, and
The New York Times
be expected to know any of this? Just because half her surname might have rung a vague bell is no reason to leap to conclusions and assume she’s connected with Susan Thomases—any more than it would be wise to assume from the other half of her name that she’s related to Rick Dees and his Cast of Idiots, whose “Disco Duck” was a Number One hit in 1976.

But, speaking of Casts of Idiots, what about CBS? By now, you may be curious about that “part-time job,” as NBC coyly referred to it. A couple of waitressing shifts? A little secretarial work for the school district?

No, Donna is a part-time publicist for David Letterman’s
Late Show
.

Before that, she was a full-time publicist for CBS news anchor Dan Rather.

CBS This Morning
, which is part of the same news division as Dan’s nightly broadcast, was one of the first news shows to report the Million Mom March movement last September, when Hattie Kauffman interviewed Donna.

“What,” asked Hattie, “turns a mild-mannered suburban mom into an anti-gun activist?”

The correct answer is: “A leave of absence from my employer, CBS, which, by remarkable coincidence, is also your employer, Hattie.”

But that’s not what Donna said. Only in the last week has CBS News begun disclosing that she’s one of theirs. As to Ms. Dees-Thomases’ work for those two Dem senators, not one U.S. newspaper or TV network has mentioned them, with the exception of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. Mr. Murdoch, as we know, is a malign influence seeking to use his media outlets to further his sinister personal agenda.

Try it the other way round: “Barbara Bush was a typical Maine housewife with no interest in politics until she decided to start Housewives for Massive Tax Cuts. ‘As a typical housewife,’ she says, ‘I know what it’s like when an ordinary working stiff like George comes home every night and says, Geez, Barb. Not Cheez-In-A-Can on a second-hand Pop Tart again.’”

Or: “Canada’s Moms for Monarchy Movement was conceived last August by Elizabeth Windsor, a typical mother of four struggling to balance the needs
of her family with the pressures of work. Liz, who’s never organized anything larger than a Royal Tour, says she’d always been too busy signing bills into law and giving Throne Speeches to pay much attention to constitutional matters.”

Every year, tens of thousands of pro-life women descend on Washington on the anniversary of the landmark
Roe v. Wade
decision. And every year they’re buried at the foot of the “Local News Briefs” on page E29. When you remark on the contrast between their perennial obscurity and the delirious coverage of the Milling Mall Moms, the news honchos say, “Ah, well. That’s because the Million Moms are so much more media-savvy.”

What kind of kinky post-modern response is that? Don’t worry, we’re not biased, we’re just easily manipulated, and who better to manipulate us than Dan Rather’s press agent?

I believe Dan when he says “liberal media bias” is one of the great myths. Although various recent polls show that half of all Americans live in households with guns, think Dubya is better on gun control than Al Gore, and have a positive opinion of the NRA, I’m willing to accept that no one who works in the CBS newsroom knows anyone who belongs to that half of the populace. But what happened with Donna Dees-Thomases goes beyond “bias”: In essence, America’s major news outlets colluded in the perpetration of a fraud on their audiences.

Well, the non-March is over now, and the non-Millions are relaunching themselves today as a political lobby group. Good luck to them. But yet again those old Soviet hardliners can only marvel: They spent decades smashing presses and jamming transmitters in an effort to shut down the flow of information. America’s achieved that happy state just by leaving it to ABC, CBS, and NBC.

LIVING LARGE

Syndicated column, January 18, 2013

I WAS OUT
of the country for a few days and news from this great republic reached me only fitfully. I have learned to be wary of foreign reporting of U.S. events, since America can come off sounding faintly deranged. Much of what reached me didn’t sound entirely plausible: Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player?
¹
Did the President of the United States really announce twenty-three executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully pre-screened grade-schoolers (“I want everybody to be happy and safe”)? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous.

Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman, and various other American eminences apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of
Business Insider
called the trillion-dollar coin “the most important fiscal policy debate you’ll ever see in your life,” most Democrat pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit-reduction plans, all the Treasury Secretary has to do is
pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change.

The trillion-dollar-groat fever rang a vague bell with me. Way back in 1893, Mark Twain wrote a short story called “The Million Pound Bank Note,” which in the Fifties Ronald Neame made into a rather droll film. A penniless American down and out in London (Gregory Peck) is presented by two eccentric Englishmen (Ronald Squire and Wilfrid Hyde-White) with a million-pound note which they have persuaded the Bank of England to print in order to settle a wager. One of the English chaps believes that simple possession of the note will allow the destitute Yank to live the high life without ever having to spend a shilling. And so it proves. He goes to the pub for lunch, offers the note, and the landlord explains that he’s unable to make change for a million pounds, but is honored to feed him anyway. He then goes to be fitted for a suit, and again the tailor regrets that he can’t provide change for a million pounds but delightedly measures him for silk shirts, court dress, and all the rest. I always liked the line Mark Twain’s protagonist uses on a duke’s niece he’s sweet on: He tells her “I hadn’t a cent in the world but just the million pound note.”

That’s Paul Krugman’s solution for America as it prepares to bust through another laughably named “debt limit”: We’d be a nation that hasn’t a cent in the world but just a trillion-dollar coin—and what more do we need? As with Gregory Peck in the movie, the mere fact of the coin’s existence would ensure we could go on living large. Indeed, aside from inflating a million quid to a trillion bucks, Professor Krugman’s proposal economically prunes the sprawling cast of the film down to an off-Broadway one-man show with Uncle Sam playing every part: A penniless Yank (Uncle Sam) runs into a wealthy benefactor (Uncle Sam) who has persuaded the banking authorities (Uncle Sam) to mint a trillion-dollar coin that will allow Uncle Sam (played by Uncle Sam) to extend an unending line of credit to Uncle Sam (also played by Uncle Sam).

This seems likely to work. As for the love interest, in the final scene, Paul Krugman takes his fake dead girlfriend (played by Barack Obama’s composite
girlfriend) to a swank restaurant and buys her the world’s most expensive bottle of champagne (played by Lance Armstrong’s urine sample).

Do you ever get the feeling America’s choo-choo has jumped the tracks? Joe Weisenthal says that the trillion-dollar coin is the most serious adult proposal put forward in our lifetime “because it gets right to the nature of
what is money
.” As Weisenthal argues, “we’re still shackled with a gold-standard mentality where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully.” Ha! Every time it rains it rains trillion-dollar pennies from heaven. I believe Robert Mugabe made a similar observation on January 16, 2009, when he introduced Zimbabwe’s first one-hundred-trillion-dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that’s what’s so great about being American. Because, when you’re American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: Everybody knows that.

Whether the world feels this way is another matter. For Paul Krugman, the issue is the insanity of the Republican Party, as manifested in their opposition to automatic debt-ceiling increases. By contrast, the contrarian Democrat Mickey Kaus thinks Republicans ought to be in favor of the trillion-dollar coin as an easy short-term fix to prevent them from getting screwed over by Obama and the media for the second time in a month. But out there, in what the State Department maps quaintly call the rest of the world, nobody cares about Democrats or Republicans, and the issue is not the debt ceiling but the debt. Forty-four nations voted at Bretton Woods to make the dollar the world’s reserve currency. If they were meeting today, I doubt they’d give that status to a nation piling on over a trillion in federal debt per year, 70 percent of which its left hand (the U.S. Treasury) borrows from its right hand (the Federal Reserve) through the Nigerian-e-mail equivalent of Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar groat.