Richard
09-13-2009, 09:55
I get the distinct impression that Professor Hanson does not think much of our Organizer-In-Chief...an opinion held by many today.
And so it goes...;)
Richard's $.02 :munchin
Not This Pig
Victor Davis Hanson, 9 Sep 2009
And On It Goes
I support the President on Afghanistan and am relieved he did not pull out of Iraq as once promised (all combat brigades out by March 1, 2008 — he said during his initial campaigning).
That said, almost a year ago, I wrote [1] that the Democratic congressional chest-thumping for Afghanistan, as the good war, would cease as soon as Bush left office and that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was always going to be the harder, messier war in the long run.
Just as the John Kerrys of the world lined up on October 10, 2002, to authorize the Iraq war to bolster their security fides in what they then thought would be another walk-through, only to bail with “Bush made me vote that way,” so too they sought cover in anti-war protest over Iraq by praising Afghanistan as the good war, thinking it was won, Iraq was lost, and Bush was in power.
Now Bush is history; Iraq is quieter; Afghanistan is heating up. So? An Obama invasion into Pakistan in ‘hot pursuit’? I don’t think any of them ever realized that they would own Afghanistan and their own bellicose rhetoric would come back to haunt them. Have there been any New York Times exposes about our post-Jan. 20, 2009 Predator assassinations in Pakistan, in which we obliterate houses, families and all, without Miranda rights or habeas corpus (what candidate Obama himself once deplored)? (And if the State Department was supposed to oversee private guards responsible for embassy security in Kabul, and the State Department in turn was responsible to the White House, does the administration have culpability in the fashion that the rogue sex-pervert guards at Abu Ghraib, supposedly reflected the Bush-era military? If we blow up 90 in Afghanistan is it a war crime, or an honest mistake? When you turn the media into Pravda, it becomes impossible to keep the party line straight sometimes.)
But other than continuing past policy on the two wars, almost everything Obama had done is consistent with his past associates (Pfleger, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), his past vocation (grievance organizing), and his past methodology (most partisan in the Senate, surrealistic Senate campaign in which foes mysteriously dropped out, the Axelrod/Emanuel Chicago way, etc.).
<snip>
Orwellian
In America of 2009 the following are “true”:
The Arabs invented the printing press, and spurred us on to the Enlightenment and Renaissance. Muslims in Cordoba advised the brutal Christians to show tolerance during the Inquisition. Slavery ended in America without violence. The Berlin Airlift was a worldwide effort. The Americans liberated Auschwitz. There are 57 states. FDR was President in 1929 and gave television addresses. We can either drill offshore or inflate our tires properly.
There are no terrorists or a war on them, but only overseas contingency operations and man-made catastrophes. Those who object to healthcare are ungodly, and the nation’s children must go to school and see the messiah address them en masse on state-run television screens. Nazis, brown shirts, a mob, insurance lackeys, Brooks brothers elites, etc. all go to town halls. Doctors chop off limbs and gleefully take out tonsils for profit. George Bush is our Emmanuel Goldstein whom we must hate collectively each morning for a couple of minutes.
Rather Angry People, Given their Middle-Class Backgrounds and Past Entitlements
Our environmentally-correct czar believes that we were behind 9/11, that whites pollute poor neighborhoods on purpose, that American agriculture is pathological, that Republicans are “assholes” and so on. He is the ideological version of the buffoonish Robert Gibbs. What do they teach at Yale (and Harvard) law school? Is admission there synonymous with graduation?
The new Supreme Court Justice thinks that some judges are better than others based on their gender and race. The Attorney General (we are “cowards” afraid to talk about race) wants to try agents of the CIA, not hunt down terrorists that plotted to destroy America. No wonder, in a past incarnation he helped to pardon terrorists from Puerto Rico for similarly careerist purposes.
The Government, All the Time, Everywhere, All of Us…
In short, we are now in theory to be governed by enlightened despots and philosopher kings who have never run a business, never understood private enterprise, and never been off the government payroll, but always hypercritical of their opposites. We have suddenly dozens of czars — how better to avoid Senate confirmation? To sidestep existing checks and balances? To substitute administrative fiat for majority-vote ratifications? To enact hope and change without messy town hall-like recriminations against elected officials?
Given all this, an unhinged activist like a Van Jones is not the exception, but emblematic of the new frontier. All the old wisdom, the old reverence are going by the wayside, replaced by a brave new world in which we will be the same in spirit and outlook, committed to replace truth with orthodoxy, roughly equal in ability, neither successful nor failures, neither rich nor poor, nothing “exceptional” at all, mere happy cogs in the brotherly redistributive wheel — mouthing platitudes about diversity and being green, clueless as to their meaning, but clued in to the necessity of chanting such mantras.
And given the President’s rhetoric, and the media as our new ministry of truth — we will be more or less happy idiots, as the old fades and the new absorbs us.
All I can say is non hic porcus, not yet, not by a long shot.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson090909.html
And so it goes...;)
Richard's $.02 :munchin
Not This Pig
Victor Davis Hanson, 9 Sep 2009
And On It Goes
I support the President on Afghanistan and am relieved he did not pull out of Iraq as once promised (all combat brigades out by March 1, 2008 — he said during his initial campaigning).
That said, almost a year ago, I wrote [1] that the Democratic congressional chest-thumping for Afghanistan, as the good war, would cease as soon as Bush left office and that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was always going to be the harder, messier war in the long run.
Just as the John Kerrys of the world lined up on October 10, 2002, to authorize the Iraq war to bolster their security fides in what they then thought would be another walk-through, only to bail with “Bush made me vote that way,” so too they sought cover in anti-war protest over Iraq by praising Afghanistan as the good war, thinking it was won, Iraq was lost, and Bush was in power.
Now Bush is history; Iraq is quieter; Afghanistan is heating up. So? An Obama invasion into Pakistan in ‘hot pursuit’? I don’t think any of them ever realized that they would own Afghanistan and their own bellicose rhetoric would come back to haunt them. Have there been any New York Times exposes about our post-Jan. 20, 2009 Predator assassinations in Pakistan, in which we obliterate houses, families and all, without Miranda rights or habeas corpus (what candidate Obama himself once deplored)? (And if the State Department was supposed to oversee private guards responsible for embassy security in Kabul, and the State Department in turn was responsible to the White House, does the administration have culpability in the fashion that the rogue sex-pervert guards at Abu Ghraib, supposedly reflected the Bush-era military? If we blow up 90 in Afghanistan is it a war crime, or an honest mistake? When you turn the media into Pravda, it becomes impossible to keep the party line straight sometimes.)
But other than continuing past policy on the two wars, almost everything Obama had done is consistent with his past associates (Pfleger, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), his past vocation (grievance organizing), and his past methodology (most partisan in the Senate, surrealistic Senate campaign in which foes mysteriously dropped out, the Axelrod/Emanuel Chicago way, etc.).
<snip>
Orwellian
In America of 2009 the following are “true”:
The Arabs invented the printing press, and spurred us on to the Enlightenment and Renaissance. Muslims in Cordoba advised the brutal Christians to show tolerance during the Inquisition. Slavery ended in America without violence. The Berlin Airlift was a worldwide effort. The Americans liberated Auschwitz. There are 57 states. FDR was President in 1929 and gave television addresses. We can either drill offshore or inflate our tires properly.
There are no terrorists or a war on them, but only overseas contingency operations and man-made catastrophes. Those who object to healthcare are ungodly, and the nation’s children must go to school and see the messiah address them en masse on state-run television screens. Nazis, brown shirts, a mob, insurance lackeys, Brooks brothers elites, etc. all go to town halls. Doctors chop off limbs and gleefully take out tonsils for profit. George Bush is our Emmanuel Goldstein whom we must hate collectively each morning for a couple of minutes.
Rather Angry People, Given their Middle-Class Backgrounds and Past Entitlements
Our environmentally-correct czar believes that we were behind 9/11, that whites pollute poor neighborhoods on purpose, that American agriculture is pathological, that Republicans are “assholes” and so on. He is the ideological version of the buffoonish Robert Gibbs. What do they teach at Yale (and Harvard) law school? Is admission there synonymous with graduation?
The new Supreme Court Justice thinks that some judges are better than others based on their gender and race. The Attorney General (we are “cowards” afraid to talk about race) wants to try agents of the CIA, not hunt down terrorists that plotted to destroy America. No wonder, in a past incarnation he helped to pardon terrorists from Puerto Rico for similarly careerist purposes.
The Government, All the Time, Everywhere, All of Us…
In short, we are now in theory to be governed by enlightened despots and philosopher kings who have never run a business, never understood private enterprise, and never been off the government payroll, but always hypercritical of their opposites. We have suddenly dozens of czars — how better to avoid Senate confirmation? To sidestep existing checks and balances? To substitute administrative fiat for majority-vote ratifications? To enact hope and change without messy town hall-like recriminations against elected officials?
Given all this, an unhinged activist like a Van Jones is not the exception, but emblematic of the new frontier. All the old wisdom, the old reverence are going by the wayside, replaced by a brave new world in which we will be the same in spirit and outlook, committed to replace truth with orthodoxy, roughly equal in ability, neither successful nor failures, neither rich nor poor, nothing “exceptional” at all, mere happy cogs in the brotherly redistributive wheel — mouthing platitudes about diversity and being green, clueless as to their meaning, but clued in to the necessity of chanting such mantras.
And given the President’s rhetoric, and the media as our new ministry of truth — we will be more or less happy idiots, as the old fades and the new absorbs us.
All I can say is non hic porcus, not yet, not by a long shot.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson090909.html