 |  | | Feb. 11, 2015 |  | No. 158 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | You should not underappreciate the contrast displayed to the world last week after ISIS released a video in which they burned Jordanian pilot Moath al Kasasbah alive.
At the time, Jordan's King Abdullah was here, in America, meeting with congressional leaders. He cut his scheduled visit short and before returning home, here's what he told one of our congressmen:
"He said there is going to be retribution like ISIS hasn't seen," said Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr., a Marine Corps veteran of two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, who was in the meeting with the king. "He mentioned 'Unforgiven' and he mentioned Clint Eastwood, and he actually quoted a part of the movie." . . .
"He's angry," Hunter said of King Abdullah. "They're starting more sorties tomorrow than they've ever had. They're starting tomorrow. And he said, 'The only problem we're going to have is running out of fuel and bullets.'"
King Abdullah then flew back to his home and before the sun rose the next day, his government executed the two ISIS prisoners it held.
Twenty-four hours later, President Obama stood before the National Prayer Breakfast and gave a speech castigating Christians and the West for intolerance and worse. You've heard the line by now. You should hear it again: "And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."
If you care to see our president's nonsense taken apart, Jonah Goldberg does a fine job. But by this point, Obama's really moved into his post-presidential phase. He no longer seems to care about appearances, let alone consequences. He's just telling America what he really thinks. That's fine. It's nice to be prepared for what former President Barack Obama will be like in 2017. But the problem is that he's still president.
Islamic jihadists have been sadistically slaughtering prisoners on film for a long while now-remember when the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg were terrible novelties? This behavior is important. It means something.
Atrocities happen all the time in war. There are reports, for instance, of Japanese officers vivisecting POWs during the Second World War. The difference is that as evil as those men were, it would never have occurred to them to turn such things into jubilant public spectacles. As Mark Steyn notes, even the Nazis realized that the Final Solution couldn't be as out and proud as they might have liked:
The Germans didn't have social media, but they had newsreels, and Hitler knew enough not to make genocide available to Pathé or "The March of Time." He had considerations both domestic and foreign. Pre-Wannsee, in Poland and elsewhere, German troops had been ordered to shoot Jewish prisoners in cold blood, and their commanders reported back to Berlin that too many soldiers had found it sickening and demoralizing. So the purpose of "the final solution" was to make mass murder painless, at least for the perpetrators-more bureaucratic, removed, bloodless.
There is a cardinality of evil in this world and Islamic jihadism is way up at the very tippy top.
Our president's weakness is apparent for all the world to see. And weakness is, as always, a provocation. America still has 23 months left of Obama's tenure. One shudders to think how much ground evil will gain in that time. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "'The Koran makes clear that a force of occupation can be resisted for however many years it takes,' said the insurgent leader. 'We have watched you in Anbar for three-and-a-half years,' he continued. 'We have concluded that you do not threaten our faith or our way of life. Al Qaeda does.' If there is one key moment in The Endgame, an impressive account of America's Iraq war from the fall of Saddam Hussein until the final U.S. withdrawal in December 2011, this is it.
"It is nearly all there in this encounter: the tragically wasted years of 2003-06, the allies' new sophistication in 2007, the ultimately decisive combination of the patriotism of the Iraqi people and the decency and determination of the allied project in their country, and the bottom line that the whole thing was ultimately about the Iraqis, not us. Finally, unmistakably, there is in this exchange all that we need to know about the long-term potential the United States enjoyed in Iraq, and about the wanton profligacy of spurning such a valuable and hard-won alliance, as we did in late 2011."
-Bartle B. Bull, "Victory in Iraq" from our February 11, 2013, issue.
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Heather Wilhelm on Cosmo's terrible sex advice. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "Clinton's flaunting of her grandchild is one of the most transparently cynical and sentimental acts of a major American politician that I can recall. We have had presidents who have been parents, and we have had presidents who have been grandparents. But a campaign based on grandparental solidarity? A novelty.
"Even before Charlotte's birth, the Clintons were finding ways to mention their forthcoming grandchild in speeches to bankers and to other paying audiences, saying they would care extra hard about the fate of the country and the planet once Chelsea became a mom."
-Matthew Continetti on Grandmother Hillary, February 6, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | Something a little lighter, then, before I sign off: How about that Brian Williams?
I confess to being basically unperturbed by the fact that Williams was caught lying about being shot at while riding in a helicopter in Iraq. I mean, he's a TV anchorman: Isn't pompous storytelling kind of his job description? (Mark Steyn, again, has a pretty great riff on why Williams's storytelling really is problematic.)
If anything, I'm slightly annoyed by the super seriousness of TV news types who insist that our talking heads must be unimpeachable paragons of journalism. Never forget that when it comes to "broadcast journalism," the modifier trumps the noun.
Not that I don't have a healthy respect for TV anchormen. To be an anchor is to possess a very specialized skill set. Anyone can read the news on a day-to-day basis. (I'm Ron Burgundy?) But what makes an anchor so valuable is that they can sit at the big desk and manage a fluid broadcast on big news days when there's lots of information, everything is being ad-libbed, and the teleprompter isn't there to help them. On an election night, for example. Or 9/11. Or when the Challenger blows up. In those moments, people turn on their televisions and you need a real presence to sit there and be still, yet dynamic. Solid, yet fluid. It's incredibly rare talent.
To my mind, I never really thought Williams worked as a prototypical anchor. When you think of a network anchor, you think of Brinkley or Brokaw or Jennings or even Rather (who was my favorite back in the days when I watched the evening news).
When you look around the TV landscape these days, there are precious few personalities who fit the anchor archetype. (We may look back on Brit Hume as the last of the greats in that sense; he's world-class.) If I were running a network news division, the only two people I'd want at the big desk would be Lester Holt and Bret Baier, both of whom are classic, throwback anchors.
The other problem with Williams-again, from a television point of view-was the unseemly way he was always chasing after celebrity. He was on in 10 million homes every night, yet you'd always see him popping up on Sesame Street or 30 Rock acting goofy, looking for a little crossover pop. Say what you want about Dan "Courage" Rather, but at the height of his powers, he wouldn't have been caught dead making faces with Tracy Morgan during primetime.
Speaking of, the cruelest turn of all last week was when, in the deafening silence of Tom Brokaw not defending Williams, out popped Rather to vouch for Williams as an "honest" man and an "excellent reporter." Kiss. Of. Death.
Last night NBC announced that they were suspending Williams for six months, without pay. It's unclear whether or not Williams will hold onto his job in the long run; my guess is that he probably will. The financial considerations are too big-he's due $50 million over the next five years. And anchors have survived worse-even walking off the set and leaving dead air. Whatever else the TV news business is, to a large degree, it's show business.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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