Don’t Forget the Other Entitlement Monsters
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The continuing attention devoted to the blunders, incompetence, and lies surrounding the Obamacare rollout is much deserved. But we shouldn’t forget that the President’s health-care monstrosity is merely the latest and biggest of scores of government entitlement programs suffering from the same flawed progressive assumption––that government “experts” armed with […]
The Political Debate We Need to Have
Today, we treat politics as a sport, but it’s really a conflict of ideologies between federalists and technocrats. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas The media and pundits treat politics like a sport. The significance of the recent agreement to postpone the debt crisis until January, for instance, is really about which party won and […]
Needed: A Different Sort of President
Charismatic career politicians don’t make the best commanders-in-chief. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The second terms of the latest three presidents have not been successful. Bill Clinton was impeached after his infamous lie to Americans, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” George W. Bush was blamed for the postwar violence […]
Exploiting Christian Persecution to Demonize Israel
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com What’s worse than the silence of Western Christians concerning the Muslim persecution of their coreligionists in the Islamic world? Answer: Cynically exploiting that persecution for a political agenda—in the case of a recent Daily Beast article, to excoriate the state of Israel and its supporters.
Hillary’s Odyssey
From Senator Clinton’s tergiversations on Iraq to Secretary Clinton’s lies on Benghazi by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Hillary Clinton is no doubt a talented speaker. She recently went into what the left wing sees as the heart of darkness of the American 1 percent at Goldman Sachs, purportedly gave two brief chats, and […]
The Double-Dealing Middle East Is Double-Dealt
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Boo-hoo, Middle East About every day or so, a throat-clearing Middle East pundit weighs in to warn us of the Obama’s administration’s dereliction of traditional American engagement. They rightly lament “lead from behind” in Libya. After Benghazi, Libya has turned into something like Somalia. Far more are dying there […]
Obamacare and Human Nature
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner Obamacare was predicated on the idea that it would be techie-driven and noble in inspiration, and therefore, presto, just had to work. But the entire program, whether one likes it or not, assumes things that simply are contrary to human nature, and therefore, unless modified, will never offer […]
The Obamacare Ten-Step Self-Help Program
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner As all the still underappreciated contours of Obamacare become known, and as those who hold employer-provided plans will soon discover their existing “scams” also do not pass ACA muster, the public will begin to understand that Obamacare is another redistributive zero-sum plan to transfer wealth from one segment […]
How Historic Revisionism Justifies Islamic Terrorism
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com How important, really, is history to current affairs? Do events from the 7th century—or, more importantly, how we understand them—have any influence on U.S. foreign policy today? By way of answer, consider some parallels between academia’s portrayal of the historic Islamic jihads and the U.S. government’s and media’s portrayal of contemporary Islamic […]
Obama’s Credibility Gap
The former hope-and-change president no longer gets a pass. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his “credibility gap” — the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam. “Modified limited hangout” and “inoperative” were infamous euphemisms that […]
For Obama, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Rasmussen reported last Friday that 52% of likely voters approve of Obama’s job performance. This number is both astonishing and depressing. The avalanche of Obama’s failures both domestic and foreign should have buried this presidency months ago. Yet despite the slow-motion implosion of Obamacare now catching the attention of […]
Is Obama Still President?
His cadences soar on, through scandal after fiasco after disaster. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online We are currently learning whether the United States really needs a president. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen to any more, issues threats that scare fewer, and makes promises that almost no […]
Questions Rarely Asked–and Never Answered
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media It Can’t Happen Here? What does it take to warn Americans about unchecked pension growth, socialized medicine, vast increases in entitlements, higher taxes, and steady expansion of government? In other words, what is it about Detroit, Italy, or Greece that we do not understand? In the last five years, the Obama administration has […]
The Launch of the Freedom Academy
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Today launches the Freedom Academy®, a project some 18 months in the making. In the present age, we need a meeting place where people can rediscover what freedom entails and appreciate the origins and role of liberty. The majority of Americans yearn for a rebirth of these values that have […]
ObamaCare and the Techocratic Abyss
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The continuing disaster of the Obamacare website, like the law itself, illustrates one of the biggest bad ideas of the Progressive movement, one that reflects a central assumption of modernity: that new knowledge is now available that will allow an elite of technicians to order society more justly […]
VDH UltraAngry Reader #10
Angry Reader: We Americans are much better informed these days, and while your numbers may be accurate, you failed miserably to account for inflation and any increase in the gdp. I can only surmise that you disincluded this information in order to skew the numbers to your advantage.We call this lying. It is intended to make folks believe something […]
Obamacare Redefines the Shutdown
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner Democratic senators up for reelection in 13 months are now embracing, in their calls to delay Obamacare, the same themes as did the House Republicans and a few senators a few weeks ago—hoping to preempt mounting criticism. In this surreal landscape, three weeks ago Obamacare was unquestioned “settled” […]
Beware of Beautifully Misnamed Laws
Who would oppose “affordable care” and “farm security”? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Washington has a bad habit of naming laws by what they are not. These euphemisms usually win temporary public support. After all, who wants to be against anything “affordable”? But on examination, such idealistically named legislation usually turns out to […]
Book Review: Intelligent Design or Unintelligent Design?
by Terry Scambray // New Oxford Review, October 2013 Darwin‘s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Stephen C. Meyer. Harper One, 2013. 412 pp. Stephen Meyer has followed his highly acclaimed, Signature in the Cell, with a worthy sequel. The sequel, Darwin’s Doubt, blends the findings from molecular biology found in his first […]