Sunday, April 05, 2015

A difference of degree

Mark Steyn had this to say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show about the "deal" with Iran:
I gather the talks were near to collapse when the Iranian foreign minister proposed converting the Fordo nuclear facility into a homophobic bakery. At that point, the Americans threatened to walk out and the whole thing looked it was going to collapse. But fortunately, they said they're going to keep the centrifuges spinning in that underground facility that can't be bombed...

HUGH HEWITT: Al-Shabaab has mercilessly executed 147 at a Kenyan university this morning. Things are quiet around the globe thanks to the leadership of President Obama.

MS: Yeah, that's right... Again, they demanded to know whether people were Christian or whether they were Muslim, and then, at this university in Kenya, they killed all the Christians. They haven't started killing them, yet, in Indiana, but this TV reporter going from pizzeria to coffee shop and demanding to know if the proprietors were Christian and what they thought of the legislation in Indiana, and then finding some poor sap who was willing to talk to her, and then the Big Gay enforcers descended on that pizzeria and forced it to close down. That's actually a difference of degree.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, I am a huge fan of Apple. I own every Apple device. I’ve got two of them in front of me. I think Tim Cook is a visionary. And I haven’t sold a share of the stock since I’ve got it. I’ve still got it. I believe in it. It’s a great product. On the other hand, he wrote this piece in the Washington Post, and he did not mention. I called his PR people and invited him to come on. I’d like to hear him answer this. He is selling products in Saudi Arabia. He is selling products in China. These are two of the world’s worst human rights violators. There is no freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia. In China, people are thrown in jail for gathering for prayer. You never see them again. What in the world prompts American CEO’s to attack a Religious Freedom Restoration Act which has been in effect in Washington, D.C. since 1993 without a single instance of the discrimination of the sort worried about by critics of the Indiana law?

MS: Yeah, you’re right. In a sense, a company like Apple has no nationality, has no borders. It’s global. And it does business with whoever wants it to do business with. I have no doubt that if Kim Jong Un made them the right offer, Apple would happily do business with Kim Jong Un. The Iranian government, after today’s events, will have a lot more money with which to buy a lot more Apple products, and I’m sure he looks forward, Apple looks forward to opening up in the Iranian market. They pick on Indiana because they can. And that’s the difference. That’s why they don’t, there’s nothing accidental about this. People who think that litigious betrothed gays are accidentally stumbling into homophobic bakeries, it’s an organized campaign targeting these bakeries. Now they’re not going into the nice, little Muslim patisserie in Dearborn, Michigan, or Falls Church, Virginia, and demanding that the Muslim bakers bake them a gay wedding cake, because they know they’d get an entirely different kind of response. Muscle respects muscle. And so Apple is happy to intimidate Indiana, but it understands that it’s, when it comes to Iran, that it’s not going to be able to intimidate them. And that’s why, and that’s why, and as you say, Apple makes very fine products. And congratulations to them on that. But when the CEO of a global company thinks that the biggest issue facing the world today is homophobic wedding cakes in Indiana is nuts, and he’s a bully, because bullies pick the weak targets, and Indiana Christians are a weak target, just like these poor Christian students in Kenya are a weak target.

Hewitt closes by asking Steyn about Hillary and her server being wiped clean:
Let me close by asking you about the politics of Hillary and her serve. She has brazenly wiped it down, and she got rid of the Sidney Blumenthal million emails from his private intelligence network, which at least to some people appear maybe to have skirted the outskirts of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Does she get away with this?

MS: Well, you know, the fact is Trey Gowdy offered her, I think, some kind of private meeting with his committee. In other words, he accepted Hillary Clinton’s view of herself, that she is not one of the 300 million citizens of this country, but she is some kind of special person. She’s like Barbra Streisand in politics. When Barbra Streisand comes into a room, you’ve got to have it carpeted before she’ll enter it, because otherwise, it might affect her voice. And Hillary Clinton regards herself as belonging to a special category. And the job, if any of this, these checks and balances things in the Constitution mean anything, the job of Trey Gowdy and other congressmen is to remind Mrs. Clinton that she is a citizen of the United States, no different from you, and no different from any other employee of the United States government when it comes to the bureaucratic requirements.

HH: Do you expect that to happen? 20 seconds.

MS: Well, given the way the Republican Party has behaved from Washington to Indiana to Arkansas in this last week, I think one would have to say that’s a bit of a long shot. But if I ever ran for the House of Representatives, Hugh, I can assure you it would happen. She’s supposed, if she’s going to be the president, she’s going to be a citizen president, not a queen.

HH: Oh, I thought we might have heard the prospect of a Steyn for House race there. We’ll follow up on that next week on the next Hugh Hewitt Show.
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