05-02-18 Angry Reader
From An Angry Reader: Fake Claims. WE HAVE A CONGENITAL LIAR AS A PRESIDENT. HE HAS SCAMMED THE US WITH TAXES AND BANKRUPTCY. HE IS A SERIAL ADULTERER AND SEXUAL PREDATOR. EVEN AS I TEXT HIS BUSINESSES ARE PROFITING FROM MY HARD EARNED AND MEAGER INCOME. HE IS A NARCISSIST AND EGOTIST. AND YOU CRITICIZE […]
If Only Hillary Had Won . . .
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Leakers and lawbreakers rewarded with Clinton-administration jobs — and the American public none the wiser about deep-state corruption There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted. The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic […]
The Double Standards of the Mueller Investigation
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers. The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck. In one direction, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong […]
Strategika Issue 50: Pakistan’s Partnership with the United States
The United States and Pakistan: Frenemies on the Brink Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Peter R. Mansoor in Strategika. For much of its short seventy-year history, Pakistan has managed to thoroughly mismanage its strategic relationships with great power patrons, regional competitors, and non-state clients. It has […]
Rough Riders
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution America has always enjoyed two antithetical traditions in its political and military heroes. The preferred style is the reticent, sober, and competent executive planner as president or general, from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter. George Marshall remains the epitome of understated and quiet competence. The alternative and more controversial sorts are the loud, often reckless and […]
What Randa Jarrar Teaches
The following piece is by my colleague, Craig Bernthal. Since Randa Jarrar fired off her disgusting tweet about “the witch,” Barbara Bush, being a racist, I, like other members of the Fresno State English Department, have received about a dozen emails asking, alternatively, how we could have participated in hiring her, and then, what we would […]
Revolution and Worse to Come
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what’s next? The Resistance wants Trump’s head — on the chopping block. On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump […]
Respect Unearned
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Washington’s self-righteous establishmentarians talk of professionalism when they act unprofessionally. They refer at length to their intellectual and professional pedigrees when they prove incompetent. And they cite their morality and ethics when they possess neither. And then, adding insult to injury, when the public expresses abhorrence at their behavior, […]
When to Wage War, and How to Win: A Guide
Victor Davis Hanson // New York Times What is “grand strategy” as opposed to simple strategy? The term is mostly an academic one. It denotes encompassing all the resources that a state can focus — military, economic, political and cultural — to further its own interests in a global landscape. “On Grand Strategy,” by John Lewis […]
Trump Seeks Middle Ground in Foreign-Policy Balancing Act
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The best course is to use overwhelming military force only when the interests or credibility of America and its allies are on the line. Was the latest round of airstrikes in Syria a one-time hit to restore deterrence and stop the future use of chemical weapons, or was it […]
Colluders on the Loose
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Andrew Weissmann, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Harry Reid, Samantha Power, Clinton attorney Jeannie Rhee . . . If collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington. Robert Mueller was tasked to find evidence of Trump and Russia […]
Donald Trump, Tragic Hero
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review His very flaws may be his strengths The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable […]
Dueling Populisms
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution Populism is seen as both bad and good because people disagree about what it represents and intends. In the present age, there are two different sorts of populism. Both strains originated in classical times and persist today. In antiquity, one type was known by elite writers of that time […]
Mueller at the Crossroads
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017 in reaction to a media still gripped by near hysteria over the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. For nearly a year before Mueller’s appointment, leaks had spread about collusion between Russia and the Donald Trump […]
Five Catastrophic Decisions
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review 1) The Obama administration’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to come into Syria ostensibly to stop the use of weapons of mass destruction. The latter did not happen, but after an over 40-year Russian hiatus in the Middle East, Putin has recalibrated the region, and Russia will be far harder […]
The Ideology of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist. Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten […]
The Limits of American Patience
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any […]
A Response to Kevin Williamson
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the past, I have often enjoyed Kevin Williamson’s essays. Even when I found them occasionally incoherent and cruel, I thought it hardly my business to object to a colleague’s writing. But I gather, under changed circumstances, such deference no longer applies, given that in Williamson’s very first column at The […]
Trump Is Cutting Old Gordian Knots
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed. When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through […]
The New Last Refuge Of Scoundrels
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Samuel Johnson famously used that line in an attack on William Pitt for supposedly advancing his agenda under warped pretenses. During the McCarthy era and the 1960s anti-war movement against Vietnam, when leftists were called unpatriotic, they offered Johnson’s line as […]