High Time to Catch Up on Steyn

RWN has a great compendium of Mark Steyn quotes:

"Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we're no longer capable of being "judgmental" and "discriminating."

"Meanwhile, those of us who talk of reforming Iraq are assured by our opponents that it's preposterous to think that Arabs can ever be functioning citizens of a democratic state. If that's so, isn't that an issue, given current immigration patterns, not for Iraq tomorrow but for Britain, France, Belgium and Holland right now?"

"(During the Cold War), only five guys had their fingers on the nuclear button - Britain, America, France, China and the Soviet Union - but because two of those fingers belonged to Ron and Maggie the Left was convinced the apocalypse was just around the corner. Now we're at the dawn of the freelance nuke era, and the Left is positively insouciant about it."

"Two years after ''the day America changed forever,'' the culture is in thrall to the same dopey self-delusion it held on Sept. 10, 2001: There are no enemies, just friends we haven't yet apologized to."

"I spent a short time on the West Bank earlier this spring. I would have spent longer, but to be honest it creeped me out, and I was happy to scram across the Allenby Bridge and on through Jordan to Iraq. Say what you like about the Sunni Triangle and RPG Alley, but I never once felt I was in a wholly diseased environment. On the West Bank, almost all the humdrum transactions of daily life take place in a culture that glorifies depravity: you walk down a street named after a suicide bomber to drop your child in a school that celebrates suicide-bombing and then pick up some groceries in a corner store whose walls are plastered with portraits of suicide bombers."

"On 11 September 2001, I wrote that one of the casualties of the day's events would be the Western alliance: 'The US taxpayer's willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America's so-called "allies", freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned.' 'The West' was an obsolete concept, because, as I put it later that month, for everyone but America 'the free world is mostly a free ride'."

"Well, it's January, December's come and gone, so let's add up the final score: Coalition of the Willing: Saddam captured, Gadhafi neutered. The ''International Community'': Milosevic elected to Parliament in Belgrade."

Nuff said -- go RTWT...