Obama: Nihilist or Just Incompetent?

Who knows; the only mystery left is how much damage will the last gasp of 2016 bring? 

by Victor David Hanson // PJ Media

Photo via PJ Media
Photo via PJ Media

Three things so far have saved Obama’s otherwise unfortunate tenure; all came over his own objections.

One, after the 2010 midterm tsunami, the newly elected House Republicans put a lid on spending — ratified by the wins of 2014. Sequestration is a crude blunderbuss and slashed defense, but it at least slowed down Obama’s disastrous serial $1 trillion-plus budget deficits. In spending terms, it certainly has vastly reduced the government’s share of GDP. We know that because Obama occasionally brags of falling deficits, as if to say, “Thank you for not letting me be entirely myself.” When he leaves office, we will have $20 trillion in debt and nearly 100 million permanently out of the work force, as well as uncontrolled and unaddressed entitlement spending on life support through zero-interest rates. But we will still be alive for now, thanks to sequestration. Shutting down the government may have been politically unwise (or not — given the 2014 midterm elections [1]), but it kept the debt financeable.

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Hillary Clinton’s Empire of Dirt

Hillary Clinton’s Freudian Slip 

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty)
Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty)

For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But “in the end,” what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists — in other words, their “empire of dirt”?

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The 2016 Pack

Plus some thoughts on Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, and the damage inflicted upon American culture by the Frankfurt School.

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

gop_reagan_library_debate_9-20-15-1We don’t know yet what issue will end up driving the autumn phase of the 2016 election. In 2008 a hectoring Obama thought it would always be Iraq — an issue that he had scrubbed from his website by mid-2008 when the surge had rendered his anti-war traction irrelevant.

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Is Obamism Correctable?

Here and abroad, the Obama administration damages whatever it touches.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

rfrThe next president and Congress will inherit what President Obama left behind. Whether Democrat or Republican, the president will have no choice other than to try to undo much of what Obama has wrought. But can he or she?

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Hillary’s Campaign Has Already Begun to Derail

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

What Makes Donald Run?

He’s giving fed-up Republicans something other candidates are not.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off the Public

If there were not a Donald Trump, he would likely have had to have been invented. 

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Shot and chaser: Democrat activist Jorge Ramos of Univison badgers Donald Trump; is (temporarily) deported from presser by Trump’s security. (AP Photos/Charlie Neibergall)
Shot and chaser: Democrat activist Jorge Ramos of Univison badgers Donald Trump; is (temporarily) deported from presser by Trump’s security. (AP Photos/Charlie Neibergall)

Why did the illegal-immigration issue launch Donald Trump’s campaign? Why did his recent tense press conference exchange with Univision’s Jorge Ramos please even some of Trump’s liberal critics? What is it about illegal immigration that has finally turned off so many Americans?

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Donald Trump and the Other Class Warfare

When democratic masses tire of being condescended to.

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Photo via FrontPage Magazine
Photo via FrontPage Magazine

The rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump reminds us that “class warfare” is an eternal constant of democracies, for as Plato said, every city is in fact two cities, “one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” But possession of wealth is not the only factor in this eternal conflict between the few and the many. The masses of course resent the elites’ greater wealth, but even more they dislike the assumption of superior wisdom and virtue that elites have always claimed as justifications for their status. It is this galling assumption and the anger it arouses in people that Donald Trump has brilliantly exploited.

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The Democrats: Too Old and Too White?

Leftwingers’ taunts in 2008 and 2012 have come back to haunt them.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Photo via NRO
Photo via NRO

In the jubilation of the Obama election victories of 2008 and 2012, the Left warned Republicans that the party of McCain and Romney was now “too old, too white, too male — and too few.” Columnists between 2008 and 2012 ad nauseam berated Republicans on the grounds that their national candidates “no longer looked like America.” The New York Times stable crowed that the Republicans of 2008 were “all white and nearly all male” — not too long before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. In reaction to the defeats of McCain and Romney, Salon and Harper’s ran stories on the “Grand Old White Party” and “Angry White Men.”

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Absurd—and Not-so-Absurd—Immigration

Trump’s plan of mass deportations en masse is unworkable, but that’s not an argument against weeding out criminals and those without work histories in the U.S.

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Photo via NRO
Photo via NRO

In the discussion of Donald Trump’s agenda for dealing with illegal immigration, lots of his proposals are said to be absurd. But are they all?

Mass Deportations?

Targeted deportations are not the same as mass deportations. Trump may want all of the latter, but just as absurdly the Democratic Party seems not to want any of the former.

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