Noonan Award Nominee: Mark Steyn

It's been a long time since I've given out one of these, but today's recipient is super-deserving of the honor. For those of you who are relatively new readers, the Noonan Award is named after conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who suffers from an almost comical inability to appreciate the irony of the arguments she advances to support her beliefs.

Specifically, the Noonan Award goes to people who resort to an argument to score some minor rhetorical point without realizing how easily that same argument can be turned against them.

Today's recipient is Mark Steyn, who in his latest and perhaps most despicable column to date, focuses his fire on the two Fox News journalists who were kidnapped in Gaza and forced to convert to Islam under threat of death (or worse). Steyn argues that the willingness of these men (who both had families to think about) to engage in a sham conversion rather than martyr themselves, shows just how "weak" the West has become. Steyn writes:

[F]or the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported
their release, what's the big deal? Wear robes, change your
name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah's name hither
and yon: If that's your ticket out, seize it. Everyone'll know it's
just a sham.

But that's not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a
Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the
dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true
believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and
the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak,
that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's
not willing to trade.

He continues:

In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video
and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they
will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they
draw their own conclusions.

Now it's hard for me to put into words just how loathsome I find this entire column. It really has to be read in its entirety to be believed. Not only is Steyn willing to criticize the behavior of men who bravely agreed to work in a war zone and who were put in a position that he cannot possibly understand, but in the process he takes some gratuitous potshots at other people, including a bizarre jab at Andrew Sullivan's sexuality. The column is so unhinged and all over the map that it reads like the rantings of a drunkard.

But that's not why I've nominated Steyn for the Noonan Award. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the column is the fact that Steyn's reasoning, to the extent it can be discerned, cuts against everything he stands for. Glenn Greenwald explained this irony brilliantly in a post yesterday:

[T]he most striking irony is this. So much of the neoconservative
warrior cries are built on an ethos of deep fear, of exactly the
desperate desire to be protected and saved which Steyn and
company claim is the hallmark of the girlish, soul-less West. As
they strike the warrior pose, they are desperately willing, even
eager, to fundamentally change the character and principles of
our republic and to sacrifice the core liberties which define it
because they are scared and want, more than anything else, to
be protected.

Do you want to hear what a person sounds like when they really
are -- to use Steyn's words -- "weak, that there's nothing --
no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade"? Here is
Bush loyalist Sen. John Cornyn, explaining why we should allow
the President to break the law and eavesdrop on our
conversations without any oversight: "None of your civil
liberties matter much after you're dead." And here is Pat
Roberts, showing how willing he is to trade all American values
in the hope of being protected from the things he fears: "I am
a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth
Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if
you are dead." That "rationale" means we do anything -- give
up all freedoms, relinquish all values -- because desperately
trying to stay alive is the only thing that matters.

So someone -- like Centanni or Wiig -- who recites a few words
that they don't mean in order to avoid death is a wretched,
feminine coward who has no core values and nothing they are
willing to die for. But if that's the standard, then people like
Steyn and his fellow neoconservative warriors -- who want to
place blind faith in the Government in exchange for promises
of "protection," vest in the President the most unlimited
powers, and fundamentally change how our country functions
and the values which define it, all because they think that
doing so is necessary to increase their chances of living -- are
drowning in a self-protective cowardice that dwarfs by many
magnitudes that which they mock in others.

Ouch. I may have to rename this the Steyn Award from now on.