Mark Steyn, the Canadian conservative, brings together insightful punditry and devastating humor. That is to say, he is a true satirist. For a sample of what a good writer he is, consider his description in a piece on fall of the house of Clintonof Bill Clinton’s famous televised walk to the stage to receive his party’s nomination:

Bill Clinton understood a crude rule of show business — that, if you behave like a star, there are plenty of people who’ll treat you like one. The apotheosis of this theory was his interminable ambulatory entrance down mile after mile of corridor at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Slick Willie finally out-Elvised Elvis — or, more accurately, out-Smarted the opening sequence of Get Smart. Apparently, no-one had thought to tell him to try to get within four miles of the stage before the introductory video ended. He was, by my calculations, outside the men’s room on Corridor G27, Sub-Basement Level 6 of the Staples Center. As he began the long, long, lo-oo-oo-oong televised walk to the podium the crowd watching the monitors cheered — and, 20 minutes later, after he’d strolled down the first three or four windowless tunnels of attractive luminous drywall, hung a left by the water cooler, taken the emergency stairs, cut across the stationery closet, moved smoothly through the boiler room and had still only reached the Coke machine on Sous-Mezzanine Level 4 and there was at least a mile and a half between him and the stage, and the Democratic activists out in the hall were beginning to figure they could get dinner and a movie and still be back in time for the last third of his walk-on, they were nevertheless still cheering. In effect, President Clinton dared them not to cheer. Tom Jones wouldn’t have risked it. Engelbert Humperdinck would have balked. But, after eight years of talking the talk, Bill walked the walk. In the hall, the delegates’ hands were raw, bleeding stumps, but the Slicker knew that if he started his entrance in Idaho those Dems would cheer him every step of the way.

But Steyn has turned his satire on Muslims, and so he is being dragged before Canada’s human rights courts. Read this account of his case and mourn the way Western civilization, in the name of its own invention of multi-culturalism, is repudiating its liberties, persecuting its defenders, and committing cultural suicide.

Shopkeepers in England, annoyed by adolescents loitering around their stores, are installing a new device called the Mosquito. It emits an ultra-high pitched annoying noise—”eeeeeeeeek”–that people over 25 cannot hear. It drives away the kids while adults, with their deteriorating hearing, remain unphased. Read this: Merchants in Britain Give Young Loiterers an Earful.

Yes, some people in England are claiming that the device constitutes age discrimination. Still, young people have had their own version of the Mosquito for some time that drives away adults. It’s called rap music.

But still, isn’t the Mosquito a great invention? Don’t you just want one? I can imagine many other uses. I wonder if Mosquito technology could be applied to all boom-boxes and car stereos, once the windows are opened, so that only young people could listen to their music despite their good-hearted impulse to share it with the rest of us.

William F. Buckley, the influential conservative writer, intellectual, and raconteur, is dead at 82.

Go to National Review Online, which he founded, for a wide array of tributes.