The Amoral Nature of the Pawn Strategy
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online – The Corner The humanitarian crisis on the border derived from four callous parties who used illegal immigrants as pawns for their own self-interested agendas: (a) Central American governments wanted to export “excess” population, in hopes of soothing domestic social tensions and gaining remittances from loyal expatriates […]
The Incoherent Excuses for Hating Israel
by Bruce S. Thorton // FrontPage Magazine Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is […]
The Valley of the Shadow
How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Silicon Valley is an American success story. At a time of supposed American decline, a gifted group of young entrepreneurs invented, merchandized, and institutionalized everything from smartphones and eBay to Google and Facebook. The collective genius within a […]
Obama’s Tranquility
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Barack Obama’s team recently took credit for improving the “tranquility of the global community,” and the president made it clear just what a calm place the world has become during his tenure. But this summer Obama’s tranquil world [1] has descended into medieval barbarism in a way scarcely seen in decades. In […]
Inventing Freedom. How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The fundamental incoherence of multiculturalism comes from its cultural relativism that posits no one way of life is better than another, but then singles out the West as a uniquely oppressive global villain. Even more contradictory, at the same time that multiculturalists slander the West for its alleged crimes, […]
2014: Obama’s America
Scandals now come so fast that each new mess makes us forget the previous one. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The summer of 2014 will go down in history as the season when America fell apart. Let’s take a tour of the disasters. Germany in 2008 enthusiastically hosted candidate Barack Obama for […]
Illiberal Immigration ‘Reform’
People who call for “comprehensive immigration reform” seldom mean it. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The last thing a liberal proponent of immigration reform wants is liberal immigration reform. Remember that paradox, and the insanity at the border makes some sense. Each day a worried politician or pundit, with creased brow and […]
All Clintoned Out
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Barack Obama did not blow apart Hillary Clinton’s huge lead during the 2008 Democratic primaries just because he was a landmark African-American candidate, new to the scene, and a skilled campaigner. Even Democrats were all Clintoned out [1]. By such weariness, I don’t suggest that either of the Clintons is unpopular. […]
The Moral Crisis on Our Southern Border
A perfect storm of special interests have hijacked U.S. immigration law. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online No one knows just how many tens of thousands of Central American nationals — most of them desperate, unescorted children and teens — are streaming across America’s southern border. Yet this phenomenon offers us a proverbial […]
Are Obama’s Advisers Unhinged?
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Surely reports that President Obama is going down to Texas at the height of the Katrina-like border debacle to raise money at the home of the popular but often polarizing filmmaker and Quentin Tarantino–collaborator Robert Rodriguez are the stuff of right-wing mythology? No one could be so politically […]
Our Roost, Obama’s Chickens
From the Middle East to Russia to our own southern border, Obama’s bills are coming due. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution […]
Moral Equivalence, Moral Idiocy
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral chanting the Muslim war-cry “Allahu Akbar” as they carry the boy’s open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like “Intifada rise up” and “America and […]
California’s Hydromania
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Two events now characterize the California agrarian heartland, the richest and most productive farm belt in the world. One, of course, is the third year of drought. I refer here to nature’s lack of rain and snow. But also factor in the state’s additional man-made drought, through diversions […]
The Progressive Assault on the Legacy of Independence Day
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Independence Day is a good time to revisit the foundations of our political order, especially given the long record of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ disregard for the Constitution. The members of the Continental Congress who met in Philadelphia in July 1776 sought their independence from England in order […]
How Obama Lost the Middle East
The president put politics and ideology ahead of preserving hard-won gains in the region. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online In his first term, Barack Obama all but declared victory in America’s Middle East struggles. As he precipitously pulled out all U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq, the president had his own “Mission Accomplished” moment […]
The Language of Despotism
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change […]
Don’t Mess with Messiahs
Whenever things go wrong, it’s the fault of those obstructionists in Congress. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online In Obama’s most recent — and embarrassing — public whine, he lashed out at the once-obsequious press. In his now customary first-person I/me/my/mine lament (e.g., “They don’t do anything, except block me and call me […]
In Search of What You Resent
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The Maliki government in Iraq fueled anti-Americanism as it systematically destroyed the coalition government that the Americans had created and protected by the surge. Maliki, who had once been hunted by the genocidal Saddam Hussein, in a sense was a creation of the United States and its commitment to […]
Looking Back at Iraq
It is historically inaccurate to say the war was cooked up by Bush alone. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online So who lost Iraq? The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007–08 surge? […]
Obama’s World Disorder
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to […]