Happy Warrior

MY personal chronology of the Bush years is simple enough: For the first eight months, I did schtick. We all did. In April of 2001, he went to Quebec for the Summit of the Americas and was greeted by the then-Canadian prime minister, whose name escapes me, as I trust it does you. “Bienvenue,” he said to Dubya. “That means ‘Welcome.'” Ha-ha. What fun we had. There were the usual riots, of course, led by that French farmer famous for destroying his local McDonald’s on the grounds that “the free market is violence.” He was accompanied by various weekending trustafarians who’d motored up from the Ivy League, plus large numbers of Canadian students who’d had their exams postponed and were given $300,000 of taxpayers’money in order to enable them to get to Quebec City and smash the place up. I forget what the summit was about, although I had plenty of one-on-one face time with lonely Latin-American foreign ministers who couldn’t find anyone else to talk to, and I may even have filed a couple of widely unread thumbsuckers on the lines of: “The Guatemalan deputy trade minister gets it. Why don’t we?” In the end, the summit wasn’t really “about” anything. Not a lot was in those days.

Then came a Tuesday morning in September. And “Steyn butched up,” as a Canadian columnist recently put it. There was a lot of that about. Even mild-mannered coves like the State Department’s Richard Armitage were getting General Musharraf on the phone and threatening to bomb his country back to the Stone Age. The Taliban fell, and Mullah Omar scuttled out of town, hitching up his skirts and pausing only to put a false beard over his real beard, with no time to pack even the Rod Stewart cassettes subsequently found in the compound of the man who famously banned music throughout the land. (The old “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rod, not the namby-pamby Rod Stewart Slays the Great American Songbook stuff.) When the troops got to Tora Bora, they discovered our enemies really did live in caves-and not the Bond-villain underground lairs the CNN graphics department mocked up, vast inverted Trump Towers burrowing deep into the earth with Osama stroking a Persian as he plotted world domination from the upside-down penthouse in Sub-Basement Level 43; but just regular caves-as in a smelly hole in the ground with a carelessly demarcated communal latrine at the back.

About the Author

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human-rights activist.

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George W. Bush

MY personal chronology of the Bush years is simple enough: For the first eight months, I did schtick. We all did. In April of 2001, he went to Quebec for the Summit of the Americas and was greeted by the then-Canadian prime minister, whose name escapes me, as I trust it does you. “Bienvenue,” he said to Dubya. “That means ‘Welcome.'” Ha-ha. What fun we had. There were the usual riots, of course, led by that French farmer famous for destroying his local McDonald’s on the grounds that “the free market is violence.” He was accompanied by various weekending trustafarians who’d motored up from the Ivy League, plus large numbers of Canadian students who’d had their exams postponed and were given $300,000 of taxpayers’money in order to enable them to get to Quebec City and smash the place up. I forget what the summit was about, although I had plenty of one-on-one face time with lonely Latin-American foreign ministers who couldn’t find anyone else to talk to, and I may even have filed a couple of widely unread thumbsuckers on the lines of: “The Guatemalan deputy trade minister gets it. Why don’t we?” In the end, the summit wasn’t really “about” anything. Not a lot was in those days.

Then came a Tuesday morning in September. And “Steyn butched up,” as a Canadian columnist recently put it. There was a lot of that about. Even mild-mannered coves like the State Department’s Richard Armitage were getting General Musharraf on the phone and threatening to bomb his country back to the Stone Age. The Taliban fell, and Mullah Omar scuttled out of town, hitching up his skirts and pausing only to put a false beard over his real beard, with no time to pack even the Rod Stewart cassettes subsequently found in the compound of the man who famously banned music throughout the land. (The old “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rod, not the namby-pamby Rod Stewart Slays the Great American Songbook stuff.) When the troops got to Tora Bora, they discovered our enemies really did live in caves-and not the Bond-villain underground lairs the CNN graphics department mocked up, vast inverted Trump Towers burrowing deep into the earth with Osama stroking a Persian as he plotted world domination from the upside-down penthouse in Sub-Basement Level 43; but just regular caves-as in a smelly hole in the ground with a carelessly demarcated communal latrine at the back.