Archive for the ‘Victor Davis Hanson’ Category
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com
September 2, 2014
The New World Disorder
To Obama, the retrenchment of the West was not only inevitable but to be welcomed.
By Victor Davis Hanson
In just the last five or six years the world has been fundamentally transformed. Instead of the old
accustomed Western-inspired postwar global order, crafted and ensured by the United States and its European and Japanese partners, there is now mostly chaos, from Ukraine to Syria to the South China Sea. Or, rather, there may be emerging new rules, given that we are still frozen in a Wild West moment, when everyone in the saloon has drawn his six-shooter, paused, and is wondering what happened to the sheriff — and wondering, too, who will be the first to dare start shooting.
The general cause of the unrest is that, fairly or not, the world senses that the United States is tired after its recent interventions, cutting back its defenses, and all but financially insolvent. We might scoff at Neanderthal notions like a loss of deterrence inviting aggression, but Neanderthals do not.
Barack Obama apparently believes that such a retrenchment was both inevitable and to be welcomed. He thought that most U.S. interventions abroad had been either wrong or futile or both; he questioned the world’s status quo and certainly felt, for example, that the widespread persecution of Christians in the Middle East was not nearly as much of a problem as Islamophobia in the West. He came into office believing that Iran, Hamas, and Russia had all been unduly demonized, especially by George W. Bush, and could be reached out to by a sensitive president whose heritage and attitudes might not appear so polarizing.
To Obama, old allies like Britain and Israel either did not need unflinching U.S. support or did not necessarily warrant it. The postwar world that the U.S. had once ensured was no fairer a place than is America at home, and certainly did not justify the vast investment of American time and money — resources that could be far better be spent at home addressing inequality and unfairness. A program of higher taxes, huge budget deficits, and enormous increases in entitlement spending did not have budgetary space for the sort of defense required to keep things calm abroad.
As a result, we now are witnessing a world in transition — a world of regional hegemonies that are filling the vacuum after the abdication of the United States. And we have no idea how it will eventually pan out. Barack Obama, for example, believes the chaos is only superficial. He thinks the reported universal warring is a sort of artifact of global social networking that too easily lets us know, for example, what Putin is doing in a way we could not with just radio and TV. But old-fashioned television lets us know perfectly well that Russia now determines the course of events in the huge area of the former Soviet republics — and from time to time steps into the Middle East to remind the U.S. that it is clueless. Putin just reminded the West that his nuclear arsenal makes it unwise to “mess” with Russia. (more…)
Posted in A Force for Good in the World, American History, Arab Winter, Election 2016, England, Europe, Foreign Policy, Illegal Immigration, Israel, Middle East, Military, National Defense, Nuclear Energy/Weapons, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Islam, Russia, Terrorism, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 27th, 2014
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com August 26, 2014
The Madness of 2008
A nation became unhinged by trivialities like “hope and change.” It has now awakened.
By Victor Davis Hanson
America is suddenly angry at the laxity, incompetence, and polarizing politics of the Obama
administration, the bad optics of the president putting about in his bright golf clothes while the world burns. Certainly, no recent president has failed on so many fronts — honesty, transparency, truthfulness, the economy, foreign policy, the duties of the commander-in-chief, executive responsibilities, and spiritual leadership.
For those who are “shocked” at the present meltdown, of a magnitude not seen since the annus horribilis of 1979, in their defense: Obama certainly did not campaign on a new health-care plan that would force Americans to give up the doctors they liked and their existing coverage, while raising premiums and deductibles, while giving exemptions for insiders and cronies, and while raising the deficit.
Nor did we hear on the campaign trail that Obama would push gay marriage, open borders, near-permanent zero interest rates, six consecutive $1 trillion deficits, and record food-stamp and Social Security disability payouts. He criticized Bush for relatively minor executive orders, suggesting that he would never rule by fiat — as he since has done in matters of Obamacare, immigration law, and environmental regulations. Remember the promise of ending the revolving door and stopping aides from cashing in — and then follow the post-administration careers of Obama’s closest advisers.
Obama promised to halve the deficit — not run up more red ink than almost all prior presidents combined. Indeed, he once as a senator voted against raising the debt limit and blasted Bush for borrowing from China. He once sermonized to us that the presidency is serious stuff, that it entails inordinate personal sacrifice and even a virtual absence of downtime and vacation — and then he became just the sort of president he was critiquing. But those deceptions were simply politics as usual, and it was logical for the hard leftist Barack Obama to try to appear to be a moderate, given that no Northern liberal had won the presidency in the half-century since John F. Kennedy.
The antidote to the great madness of 2008 would have been, instead of focusing on what Obama claimed or hedged, simply to recall what he had done before he ran for president and to notice what he did during the campaign. Had America done that, there would never have been a President Obama to surprise us now. (more…)
Posted in American History, Foreign Policy, Liberalism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Politics, Radical Left, U.S. Presidents, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Thursday, June 19th, 2014
America’s Middle East Dilemma
Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Two and a half years ago, the U.S. pulled every soldier out of a mostly quiet Iraq. In the void thus created, formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists calling themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” are now tearing apart the country, leaving medieval savagery in their wake.
Obama partisans are blaming the Bush administration for going into Iraq in the first place. But critics counter that Obama wanted out of Iraq before the 2012 election at all costs. The result of that reckless skedaddle is that we have thrown away the hard work of the 2007–08 surge that finally broke the back of both al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists.
Almost everyone faults Nouri al-Maliki, the ingrate Shiite prime minister of Iraq, who has serially trashed the American benefactors who liberated his country from Saddam Hussein’s genocidal regime. Maliki has sabotaged every effort to bring Shiites and Sunnis together. Now he is desperate for American help to save his scalp. Iran may end up intervening, as Iraq is splitting into Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni warring states.
President Obama has announced that we will pull all troops out of Afghanistan in 2016. But Afghanistan is even less stable now than Iraq was when we left. We can assume what Kabul will look like when the last American leaves.
Most believe that Libya is now worse off after the U.S. and European bombing of the Moammar Qaddafi regime that led to its removal and subsequent sectarian fighting. The U.S. was unwilling to send troops openly to restore order. The subsequent rise of al-Qaeda terrorists led to the destruction of the American consulate in Benghazi and the death of our ambassador and three other Americans.
Al-Qaeda affiliates have slowly taken over the resistance to the barbaric regime of Syrian president Bashar Assad. Syria is now a wasteland like Libya — and perhaps soon most of the Middle East. Obama threatened to intervene, issued red-line threats, backed off, and then asked Russian president Vladimir Putin for face-saving help.<
There is a common theme to the repeated messes in the Middle East. Invading countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq to topple genocidal anti-American tyrants doesn’t result in long-term advantages unless there are years of American postwar occupation — which is costly and deeply unpopular with voters.
Letting Middle East factions kill each other off — and kill tens of thousands of innocents in their way — poses a humanitarian disaster and can lead to the sort of chaotic badlands that allowed Osama bin Laden and his gangsters to plan attacks on the U.S. (more…)
Posted in American History, Foreign Policy, International Affairs, Iraq - Surge, Middle East, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Islam, Terrorism, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Saturday, March 15th, 2014
March 13, 2014
Following the Trail Nixon Blazed
Obama shows the same Orwellian disregard for the Constitution.
By Victor Davis Hanson— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com . © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
What would a president do if he were furious over criticism, or felt that his noble aims justified most means of attaining them?
Answer that by comparing the behavior of Richard Nixon to that of an increasingly similar Barack Obama.
Nixon tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies — although his IRS chiefs at least refused his orders to focus on liberals.
Nixon ignored settled law and picked and chose which statutes he would enforce — from denying funds for the Clean Water Act to ignoring congressional subpoenas.
Nixon attacked TV networks and got into personal arguments with journalists such as CBS’s Dan Rather.
Nixon wanted the Federal Communications Commission to hold up the licensing of some television stations on the basis of their political views.
Nixon went after “enemies.” He ordered surveillance to hound his suspected political opponents and was paranoid about leaks.
Now, consider how President Obama has directed government, as opposed to the platitudes he has offered about how it should operate.
The IRS? So far, the Obama-era IRS has succeeded in hounding nonprofit tea-party groups into political irrelevancy. By holding up rulings on nonprofit status, the IRS ensured that the Tea Party’s big political wins of 2010 would not be a factor in the president’s 2012 reelection bid. Disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner headed the division that focused inordinately on conservative groups. But she has refused to answer questions to Congress — invoking the Fifth Amendment to protect herself from self-incrimination.
The FCC? According to FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, Obama’s agency, until outrage arose, had planned “to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their ‘news philosophy’ and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.” In other words, Obama FCC appointees dreamed of predicating federal licensing on having politically correct views similar to their own (more…)
Posted in Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Transparency, U.S. Presidents, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 8th, 2014
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
January 7, 2014
The Outlaw Campus
The university has become a rogue institution in need of root-and-branch reform.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered the key to an ascendant middle-class existence. (2) Until recently a college degree was not tantamount to lifelong debt. In other words, American society put up with a lot of arcane things from academia, given that it offered something — a BA or BS degree — that almost everyone agreed was a ticket to personal security and an educated populace.
Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.
Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.
In short, the university has abjectly defaulted on its side of the social contract by no longer providing an affordable and valuable degree. Accordingly, society can no longer grant it an exemption from scrutiny.
Here are ten areas that need radical reform.
1. Tenure. Few if any other professions — not law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. — offer guaranteed lifetime employment after a six-year apprenticeship. Tenure was predicated on a simple premise: The protection of faculty free speech and instruction was worth the possible downside of complacency and an absence of serious ongoing faculty audit. Whatever may once have been the case, in our time tenure does not ensure free expression, but instead a banal orthodoxy, in which 90 percent of the faculty in the humanities share the same progressive outlook. Tenure also created a caste system far more rigid than anything found in private enterprise, while a huge permanent faculty class ensured inflexibility in scheduling and budgeting. The associate or full professor enjoyed a lifelong right of selection of his classes without too much worry over whether they were either needed or taught well. Worse, the nontenured faculty member, in the fashion of the Middle Ages, was admitted to the guild only if his tenured peers believed that he was agreeable in politics and attitude. He was usually judged by teaching and publication criteria that did not necessarily apply to his board of overseers, many of whom had achieved tenure 20 years earlier under entirely different criteria. (more…)
Posted in Education, Liberalism, Spending, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Friday, January 3rd, 2014
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com
January 2, 2014
The Year of the Dud
Obama, and left-wing causes, had a bad 2013.
By Victor Davis Hanson
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Lots of things that should have happened in 2013 did not.
We were supposed to have long ago reached “peak oil” and an age of always-higher gas prices. Wind and solar power — and a reduced lifestyle — were our dismal future.
But someone or something did not cooperate with gloomy government predictions. After all the failed subsidized green companies, the postponement of the Keystone Pipeline, the radical restrictions of new gas and oil leasing on federal lands, and the promises for radical climate-change legislation curtailing carbon-energy use, the United States nevertheless seems awash in old energy.
Gas prices have been going down. Oil and natural-gas production is going up. America may soon be the largest coal exporter in the world. There is little worry over any more Middle East embargoes and cutoffs of oil.
Energy-intensive industries talk of relocating from Asia and Europe to a new America of cheaper electricity. The more the Obama administration wanted a landscape of alternative energy, the more, it seemed, traditional oil and natural gas gushed out of American soil.
Obamacare may take its place among Sasquatch, crop circles, and the Loch Ness monster as one of the great hoaxes of all time. Before the 2012 election, Americans swallowed hook, line, and sinker the con that they could all at once keep their existing health plans, keep their own doctors, keep their 25-year-olds on the family health plan, never be denied coverage for a costly preexisting condition, sign up instantaneously on a website, buy insurance only after becoming seriously ill — and yet save $2,500 in annual premiums as part of the bargain. And all that without any new taxes on the middle class. (more…)
Posted in Energy, Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Liberalism, Middle East, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Oil Industry, Progressive Movement, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Sunday, December 15th, 2013
Learning
through Pain
by Victor Davis Hanson
What will history make so far of our five-year voyage with Barack Obama? What will it make of hope and change — other than a sort of hysteria of 2008 that was a political version of the Pet Rock or the Cabbage Patch Doll derangement? Did we really experience faux-Greek columns and Latin mottoes (vero possumus) as Obama props to usher in the new order of the ages?
Only as America slowly sobers up from five years of slumber can we begin to fathom Obama’s likely legacy — which is mostly wisdom acquired only from pain.
Liberals always had thought a right-wing bully president would erode civil liberties. How ironic that a charismatic, post-racial, self-described “constitutional law professor” has done more damage to our Constitution than has any president since Richard Nixon. Had the AP, IRS, or NSA scandals occurred during the Bush second term, congressional Democrats would have been calling for impeachment.
The old controversial presidential signing statements of the past are mere misdemeanors compared to Obama felonies of declaring settled law null and void, from the employer mandate to the implementation guidelines of Obamacare to exempting pet businesses and congressional staffs from the requirements of the law.
A president can now decide not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or grant pre-election, de facto amnesties. Why, then, pass laws in the first place? The idea of political opponents being audited by the IRS or critical journalists having their phones monitored will be Obama’s Nixonian legacy. After Obama, one of two things will happen: either the presidency will be redefined as a sort of super-executive that can both make and enforce statutes, or a constitutional reaction will set in, and Obamism will be cited as a danger to the republic that we wish in the future never to repeat. (more…)
Posted in American History, Big Government, Constitution, Election 2016, Europe, Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Justice Department, Legal Issues, Liberalism, Middle East, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Politics, Progressive Movement, Racism, Redistribution of Wealth, Social Justice, Socialism, Stimulus, U.S. Presidents, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Friday, August 30th, 2013
The Israeli Spring
Victor Davis Hanson
8/29/2013 12:01:00 AM – Victor Davis Hanson
Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality — given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders.
The Arab Spring has turned Israel’s once-predictable adversaries into the chaotic state of a Sudan or Somalia. The old understandings between Jerusalem and the Assad and Mubarak kleptocracies seem in limbo.
Yet these tragic Arab revolutions swirling around Israel are paradoxically aiding it, both strategically and politically — well beyond the erosion of conventional Arab military strength.
In terms of realpolitik, anti-Israeli authoritarians are fighting to the death against anti-Israeli insurgents and terrorists. Each is doing more damage to the other than Israel ever could — and in an unprecedented, grotesque fashion. Who now is gassing Arab innocents? Shooting Arab civilians in the streets? Rounding up and executing Arab civilians? Blowing up Arab houses? Answer: either Arab dictators or radical Islamists.
The old nexus of radical Islamic terror of the last three decades is unraveling. With a wink and a nod, Arab dictatorships routinely subsidized Islamic terrorists to divert popular anger away from their own failures to the West or Israel. In the deal, terrorists got money and sanctuary. The Arab Street blamed others for their own government-inflicted miseries. And thieving authoritarians posed as Islam’s popular champions.
But now, terrorists have turned on their dictator sponsors. And even the most ardent Middle East conspiracy theorists are having troubling blaming the United States and Israel. (more…)
Posted in Arab Winter, Dictators, Foreign Policy, History, International Affairs, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Islam, Syria, Terrorism, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Sunday, August 25th, 2013
Two Americas
Victor Davis Hanson
8/22/2013 12:01:00 AM – Victor Davis Hanson
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Reggie Love, the erstwhile presidential assistant and “body man” to President Obama recently reported on the critical moments of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. The president apparently was not glued to live video feeds, as the photos from his re-election campaign suggested.
“Most people were like down in the Situation Room,” Love said, “and [the president] was like, ‘I’m not going to be down there, I can’t watch this entire thing.’ So he, myself, Pete Souza, the White House photographer, Marvin [Nicholson], we must have played 15 games of spades.”
The commander in chief was playing cards while Navy Seals risked their lives to kill America’s No. 1 enemy — only later to use photos of himself watching live feeds for his re-election sloganeering: “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!”
Two quite different 21st-century Americas are emerging. The nation is not so much divided by “wars” between the rich and poor, men and women, or white and non-white. Instead, there is the world of reality versus that of triviality.
In the vast plains of the Dakotas and the American West, thousands of men and women of all classes and colors are fracking oil and gas to create new energy for millions of homeowners and commuters — while giving America a second chance at strategic energy independence.
Yet the beneficiaries mostly ignore these elemental efforts. They instead prefer to fixate on the alleged sexual creepiness of big-city political mediocrities like Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner.
As we sleep, 7,000 miles away there are still thousands of American soldiers of all races, ages, classes and genders in godforsaken conditions fighting the Taliban to allow millions in Afghanistan the chance for an alternative to medieval theocracy and to deter terrorists.
Meanwhile, back home, the nation is focused not on such existential struggles but transfixed by racial melodramas.
Was Oprah victimized by racial insensitively in a Swiss boutique when inquiring about purchasing a $38,000 crocodile purse? Were 10 black “American Idol” contestants really victims of “cruel and inhumane” treatment because their arrest records were brought up on the show? Should a rodeo clown — whose stock and trade is humor — be sent to “sensitivity
training” for wearing an Obama mask? (more…)
Posted in Culture Rot, Demographics, Media, Military, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Racism, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Sunday, August 11th, 2013
Obama Who?
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On August 5, 2013
Critics of the president are convinced that Barack Obama will do lasting damage to the U.S. I doubt it.
Obama came to power in the third year of large Democratic congressional majorities. In his first referendum, he lost the House and he may soon lose the Senate; in other words, there followed a somewhat normal reaction against a majority party. Obama’s popularity rating is well below 50%, despite an obsequious media and a brilliantly negative billion-dollar campaign that long ago turned Mitt Romney into a veritable elevator-using, equestrian-marrying, canine-hating monster.
In the second term, there is little of the Obama bully pulpit left. “Make no mistake about it” and “let me be perfectly clear” can incur caricature, not fainting. “Really,” “I’m not kidding,” “I’m serious,” “in point of fact,” and “I’m not making this up” often prove rhetorical hints that the opposite is true. When Obama warns about gridlock in Washington, the “same old tired politics,” the dangers of a tyrant or king in the White House, the need for an honest IRS, or the perils of government surveillance, these admonitions have tragically become a psychological tic to warn us about himself. Former jokes about siccing the IRS on his enemies [1] or using Predator drones to go after suitors of his daughters [2] are as eerie as they are comedic.
Each new “historic” speech is by now mostly history repeating itself as farce. The Victory Column oration gave way to a flat vignette at the Brandenburg Gate. The Cairo speech follow-ups were mostly confusion about Egypt and Syria, without the fictions of the West’s underappreciated debts to Islam. The second Trayvon Martin aside on racial look-alikes was even more disturbing that the first. I don’t think Obama’s advisors will allow him to proclaim any more “deadlines,” or “red lines,” or any sort of lines at all in the Middle East.
Aside from Obama himself, no one in the post-Benghazi, -AP, -NSA, and -IRS scandal era references the president any longer as the former “professor of constitutional law.” In Obama’s case even the inflated title [3] has become an oxymoron.
Ever so slowly, the press, albeit still for the most part privately, is learning that it has been had by one of its own [4]. The breach of journalistic ethics turned out not to be a necessary means to an exalted liberal end, but instead was interpreted cynically by Obama as exemption for doing pretty much what he pleased — like going after AP reporters for leaking national security in a way the administration could only envy, given its own less impressive efforts to divulge what should not have been divulged. How odd that a truly adversarial press is an aid to conservatives in power, in keeping them on their toes about scandal, and how ironic that liberal media obeisance green-lights wrongdoing among those whom they deify.
What does the Arab Spring conjure up? Or “lead from behind”? Or “reset”? (If only Obama could envision Putin as George Zimmerman, we might get real on Russia.) Or an “OK” from the Arab League to act? Or CIA gun-running in Libya? Or the military non-response to Benghazi? Or the incarceration of Mr. Nakoula, the supposedly evil filmmaker? Or “al-Qaeda on the run”? Or the successive flip-flops on Mubarak, Morsi, and the Egyptian military? Or serial “deadlines” to Iran, or consecutive “red lines” in Syria? (If only these threats abroad carried as much weight as Obama’s promises to “bankrupt” coal companies and send our power bills “skyrocketing.”) Or the “peace-process” with the Palestinians? Or closing down the embassies of the Middle East? (If only Islamists were Republicans, they might be on the receiving end of real presidential threats like “punish our enemies.”) What do all these misadventures abroad have in common? I think the answer is nothing and everything: no consistency other than confusion. (more…)
Posted in Corporate Cronyism, Democrats, Election 2012, Energy, Environmental Issues, Environmental Protection Agency-, Foreign Policy, IRS, Liberalism, Lobbyists, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Populism, Transparency, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
