Obama’s Ironic Foreign Policy
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media In the old postwar, pre-Obama world, the United States accepted a 65-year burden of defeating Soviet communism. It led the fight against radical Islamic terrorism. The American fleet and overseas bases ensured that global commerce, communications, and travel were largely free and uninterrupted. Globalization was a sort of synonym […]
Nuclear Gangbangers
Hostile countries with nuclear capabilities have the upper hand on the global police. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The gangster state of North Korea became a nuclear power in 2006–07, despite lots of foreign aid aimed at precluding just such proliferation — help usually not otherwise accorded such a loony dictatorship. Apparently the […]
Nelson Mandela, Western Saint
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The passing of Nelson Mandela has been attended with the usual global encomia we have come to expect from those political leaders who have become international celebrities. Sometimes these extravagant praises and out-sized mourning surpass any real achievement. It is hard to find any justification in Princess Diana’s life […]
How Presidents Lie
It’s nothing new for a president to lie to us, but Obama’s style is unique. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online In the past there have been all sorts of presidential fibbing. Some chief executives make promises that they know they probably cannot or will not keep. Before his reelection for his third term […]
Learning through Pain
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media What will history make so far of our five-year voyage with Barack Obama? What will it make of hope and change — other than a sort of hysteria of 2008 that was a political version of the Pet Rock or the Cabbage Patch Doll derangement? Did we really experience […]
A Month of Horror for Christians under Islam: September, 2013
by Raymond Ibrahim // Gatestone Institute The same month that Obama tried to wage war on behalf of the jihadi rebels in Syria (citing “human rights” concerns), some of the war’s worst atrocities were committed against that nation’s Christian minority, most notably in Ma‘loula, an ancient Christian region where the inhabitants still spoke the language of […]
New Study Exposes Scandalous Fatwas of Brotherhood and Salafis in Egypt
by Raymond Ibrahim // Gatestone Institute As the full ramification of the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power continues to be exposed, a new study by Al Azhar’s Fatwa Committee dedicated to exploring the fatwas, or Islamic decrees, issued by the Brotherhood and Salafis—the Islamists—was recently published.
Ignoring History: The Folly of Our Iran Pact
Dictatorships abandon treaties when they become inconvenient. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online According to our recently proposed treaty with the Iranian government, Iran keeps much of its nuclear program while agreeing to slow its path to weapons-grade enrichment. The Iranians also get crippling economic sanctions lifted.
The World’s New Outlaws
With America’s presence in the world receding, regional hegemons flex their muscles. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The American custodianship of the postwar world for the last 70 years is receding. Give it its due: The American super-presence ensured the destruction of Axis fascism, led to the eventual defeat of Soviet-led global Communism, […]
Obama’s Munich
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The interim agreement negotiated by the Security Council and Germany with Iran is a serious advance toward what Winston Churchill called the Munich agreement: “a total and unmitigated defeat” and a “disaster of the first magnitude.” Nothing in the agreement guarantees that Iran will fulfill its promises, or that inspectors will be allowed […]
Why Should We Study War?
Military history tells the story of human nature at its great heights and terrible lows. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas In the latter years of World War I, Winston Churchill met with the novelist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a winner of the Military Cross––he single-handedly routed 60 Germans and captured a trench […]
Obama and the Suspension of Disbelief
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Adding straws of scandal — Fast and Furious, the Associated Press monitoring, the IRS fiasco, and the NSA spying — on any presidential back except Barack Obama’s would have long ago broken it. Watergate ruined Richard Nixon. Iran-Contra earned a special prosecutor and nearly destroyed the Reagan second term. […]
America’s Coastal Royalty
The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America’s big decisions are made. They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and […]
Affordable Care or Patient Protection or Obamacare?
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner There are some rumors that the administration wants to distance itself from the slang “Obamacare,” a term the president embraced in the 2012 campaign but now finds hurtful to his polls and his colleagues in the Congress.
‘Muslim’ Jesus Demands Sharia Law and Jizya Tribute
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com Time and again, Muslims, especially those in Egypt, project Islamic thinking onto Christians: thus the Coptic church has been accused of smuggling and storing weapons in its churches to take over the nation (when in fact mosques are regularly exposed housing illegal weapons for the jihad); of kidnapping and torturing Coptic girls who convert […]
The War on Human Nature
For nations as for individuals, pretending self-interest doesn’t exist is perilous. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online At some critical point, everyone makes choices based on incentives and his own perception of self-interest. Somehow the Obama administration has forgotten that natural law. A therapeutic sense of self-sacrifice is fine in the abstract, but in […]
Facts, Democrats and the JFK Legend
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy in the 50 years since his death has verified the adage in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The JFK legend recycled all these years is of a liberal icon, the glamorous martyr whose violent death has validated […]
A Culture in Ruins
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Lady Gaga reportedly spent $25 million on pop art to jazz up her new and apparently underwhelming album. In contrast, Miley Cyrus’ sexual twerking at the MTV Music Video Awards earned her more millions by exposing her rather unimpressive anatomy. Both make the once vulgar Madonna seem like June Cleaver, but at least […]