Obama’s Sort-of War
In his view, the current debacle has nothing to do with his own errors and omissions. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online How can we account for the apparent flip-flopping of the Obama administration about what we are doing, or might do further, to the Islamic State? At times the secretary of defense […]
What Exactly Is Comprehensive Immigration Reform?
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Comprehensive immigration reform — rarely has a catchphrase been so widely invoked and yet so little defined. Why? If proponents of so-called reform detailed exactly what they wanted, American voters would never support their self-interested agendas. Most Americans insist that existing federal immigration laws be enforced. They are adamant that […]
The Truth About Science and Religion
by Terry Scambray // American Thinker In 1925 the renowned philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead speaking to scholars at Harvard said that science originated in Christian Europe in the 13th century. Whitehead pointed out that science arose from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of […]
‘To Hell With the Constitution!’
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” This outburst reflected […]
The Middle East’s Maze of Alliances
It’s increasingly difficult to navigate the web of transitory enemies and allies in the region. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East. In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. […]
World at War
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Will the United States in its near future be hit again in the manner of the 9/11 attacks of thirteen years ago? The destruction of the World Trade Center, the suicide implosions of four passenger airliners, and the attack on the Pentagon unfortunately have become far-off memories. They are […]
Obama’s Foreign Policy of Empty Words
“When force threatens, talk is no good.” by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes […]
Obama’s Untruth, Inc.
Let us count the ways: bald lies, lies of omission, mythography, amnesia, redaction . . . by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online We can usefully view the Obama administration’s chronic untruthfulness as a sort of multifaceted corporation of untruth, with all sorts of subsidiaries. THE BALD LIES OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY Remember the al-Qaeda-is-on-the-run […]
Are the Orcs Winning?
Fantasy versus reality by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings [1] was sometimes faulted by literary critics for caricaturing the evil orcs [2] as uniformly bad. All of them were as unpleasant to look as they were deadly to encounter. There is not a single good orc or […]
Only Deterrence Can Prevent War
Most aggressors take stupid risks only when they feel they won’t be stopped. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The world seems to be falling apart. Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to […]
The New World Disorder
To Obama, the retrenchment of the West was not only inevitable but to be welcomed. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 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 […]
Mythologies and Pathologies of the California Drought
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The third year of California drought has exposed all sorts of water fantasies. If in wet years they were implicit, now without rain or snow for nearly three years, they are all too explicit. Add them up. Take the Bay Area, Ground Zero of water environmentalism. From Mill Valley […]
Obama’s Hazy Sense of History
For the president, belief in historical predetermination substitutes for action. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online President Obama doesn’t know much about history. In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for […]
Nothing to Do with Islam, Part 2
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine To read Part I, click here. In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: “So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are […]
The Madness of 2008
A nation became unhinged by trivialities like “hope and change.” It has now awakened. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 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. […]
Ferguson Postmortem
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The backstory of Ferguson was that out of the millions of arrests each year only about 100 African-American suspects are shot fatally by white police. And yet we were falsely and ad nauseam told that Michael Brown was proof of an epidemic. There may well be an epidemic of blacks killing […]
Sherman in Gaza
His march through Georgia has been gravely misunderstood ― as has Israel’s strategy in Gaza. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online William Tecumseh Sherman 150 years ago took Atlanta before heading out on his infamous March to the Sea to make Georgia “howl.” He remains one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures in American […]
All Fall Down
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO-The Corner Consider our dog days of August: An American journalist savagely beheaded on tape, with more promised to come. The Islamic State rampage. The Gaza war and Hamas’s serial truce violations — and the new neutral U.S. stance with implied disruptions in military support for Israel. The implosion of […]
Fanning the Flames in Ferguson
Why do only handful of such tragedies trigger national outrage? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Mo, has tragically followed a predictable script. On average, more than 6,000 African Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure […]
Nothing to Do With Islam
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a […]