Finding the Great Republican Hope
The GOP can’t win in 2016 by thinking inside the box. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The usual criteria for political success — plenty of New York and Washington IOUs, youthful vigor, good looks, glibness, access to lots of money — aren’t sufficient any longer to galvanize the Republican party or get out […]
The Liberal Circus
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce. Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks […]
Make the ISIS Caliphate a Jihadist Kill Zone
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine President Obama’s proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS comes at a time when Iran and ISIS are fomenting disorder and destruction throughout the Middle East. Despite the enmity between these two species of jihadism, both pose serious threats to our interests and security and […]
Our Illiberal Immigration Policy Leads to Chaos
We need a meritocratic, ethnically blind system — the opposite of the status quo. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Obama’s executive order that overrode existing immigration law. The result is more acrimony and chaos. It is a good time to remember that there are more than […]
Obama Derangement Syndrome?
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner Some, like Ezra Klein, have posited that Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Obama may not be patriotic and Scott Walker’s hesitation to assert that Obama is a Christian illustrate a sort of unhinged Obama Derangement Syndrome. Aside from the fact that Obama himself characterized President George W. Bush […]
How to Empower Violent Extremism
Every time Obama “contextualizes,” Putin and ISIS grow bolder. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Not too long ago, most Russians were reportedly unhappy with Vladimir Putin. His crackdown on freedom and his kleptocratic economy were hardly popular. Most likely, given theirdruthers, Russians were not all that interested in Putin’s risky and costly dream […]
The Administration’s Adolescent Rants about ISIS
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner It is disheartening to listen to Obama and his administration voices childishly reiterating that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam because it does not represent the majority of Muslims or what Westerners perceive as normative values distilled from the Koran. No radical ideology, religious or otherwise, starts […]
President Franklin Delano Obama Addresses the Threat of 1930s Violent Extremism
Imagine Obama as an American president in 1939. by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia “The United States has made significant gains [2] in our struggle against violent extremism in Europe. We are watching carefully aggressions in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and in Eastern Europe. My diplomatic team has made it very clear that aggression against neighbors is […]
Class, Race, And Illegal Immigration
by Victor Davis Hanson // Peregrine The driving forces behind three decades of de facto non-enforcement of federal immigration law were largely the interests of elites across the political spectrum. Employers in agriculture, construction, the hospitality industry, landscaping, and food processing wanted access to cheap, industrious foreign national laborers. So do the well-off households of […]
Our Dangerous Historical Moment
Obama and European leaders are repeating the mistakes of their 1930s predecessors. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online World War II was the most destructive war in history. What caused it? The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of otherwise […]
The Reckoning
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Let us start our grand tour of an increasingly out-of-control world in Russia. Putin plays a two-bit Hitler in trying to gobble up his neighbors. The West responds with a one-bit imitation of 1930s Britain and France. ISIS reminds us that beheading and human incineration are contemporary, not […]
Five Middle East Blunders
The underlying causes of chaos in the Middle East are indigenous. But Obama hasn’t helped. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online President Obama claims he inherited a mess in the Middle East. Not so. Fracking and horizontal drilling on private lands in the U.S. had taken off in the last years of the […]
Brian Williams’s Truth Problem, and Ours
The NBC anchor’s lies are symptomatic of a culture in which truth has become relativized. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New […]
How to Make Sense of an Incoherent America
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The United States can be quite an incoherent place at times. Here are a few examples. Diversity Sometime in the 1990s the growing contradictions of affirmative action in a multiracial society became problematic. Ethnic ancestry was often neither easily identifiable nor readily commensurate with class status, and […]
Snarker-in-Chief
No one — least of all the American people — is exempt from our president’s snark. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort […]
The Scorching of California
How Green extremists made a bad drought worse by Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal In mid-December, the first large storms in three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In […]
Are We Smart Enough for Democracy?
By Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas In December, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, had to explain to Congress several remarks he had made about the “stupidity of the American voter,” as he put it in one speech. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh frequently uses the more […]
Still More of President Obama’s Moral Equivalence
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner President Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, said: Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery […]
The Roots of Obama’s Appeasement
The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. […]
Moore of Michael’s Nuttery
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner I know that it’s shooting whales in a barrel to point out Michael Moore’s — once a guest in the Carter presidential box at the 2004 Democratic Convention — continued displays of ignorance. Nonetheless, the latest example is Moore’s lingering hurt because years ago Clint Eastwood once […]