VDH UltraAngry Reader #5
by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Angry Reader #5 wrote: Don’t mean to troll here, but for the nth time, what is it about Obama or his agenda that wasn’t conservative mainstream thought even a few years ago?? He’s lowered taxes, been tough on defense, adopted a healthcare plan proposed by the Heritage Foundation
The All-Knowing, All-Powerful UN
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner If the UN now has the right and duty to intervene, in a morally relative manner, in territorial disputes between various groups and grant de factosovereignty, then the sky is the limit. Why go through the motions of two-party discussions at all?
The Rise of Faux Diversity
by Bruce Thornton Defining Ideas In Fisher vs. University of Texas, the Supreme Court heard legal challenges to the University of Texas’s admissions policies, which allow consideration of an applicant’s race in order to promote “diversity” among the school’s students. Such racial preferences are widespread in university admissions. In 80 percent of elite schools, they amount […]
Winning the Latino Vote
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Over the last three weeks, I think I have read most of the post-election op-eds written on the Latino vote. I have studied exit polling, read sophisticated demographic analyses, and talked to as many Latinos in my hometown as I could. The result is that I would not […]
The Confessions of a Confused Misfit
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Rich I confess I never admired John Edwards — and used to argue with the late Christopher Hitchens[1] about the blow-dried lawyer’s suitability for president. I didn’t think much of Al Gore or John Kerry, well before the “he lied!” vein-bulging fits and the wind-surfing spoofs. I was not […]
T-Ball War in the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Classical explanations of conventional wars run something like this: An aggressor state seeks political advantage through military force. It has a hunch that the threatened target will likely either make concessions to avoid losing a war, or, if war breaks out, the resulting political gains will be worth […]
The Ghosts of 1938 Still Haunt Our Foreign Policy
by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine In a story describing President Obama’s six conversations with Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi that led to the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the New York Times summarized Obama’s estimation of Morsi. Obama told his aides “he was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence.
Let Obama Be Obama
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services After his party’s devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama was re-elected earlier this month by painting his Republican opponents as heartless in favoring lower taxes for the rich. They were portrayed as nativists for opposing the Dream Act amnesty for illegal immigrants, and as callous […]
VDH UltraAngry Reader #4
by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Angry Reader #4 wrote: You know, I remember, before Pajamas media, when I respected some of the writers that are now here (such as VDH) — but they’ve all turned into crazy cranks.
The Ahistorical Krugman
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Paul Krugman weaves a fantasy tale of how high taxes, big unions, and government regulations created a booming 1950s economy — the implication being that in reactionary fashion we can now in a second term return to our heyday under Obama’s envisioned union support, growth in government, tax hikes, and […]
Learning from the Election
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media 1. Populism The Republicans have only won the popular vote since Ronald Reagan’s presidency on two occasions: 1988 and 2004. In both instances, even the patrician Bushes were able to paint their liberal opponents as out-of-touch Massachusetts magnificoes. Lee Atwater turned Michael Dukakis, the helmeted tank driver, into a bumbling […]
The Absurdity of Treating a Terrorist Gang Like a State
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The currently suspended missile duel between Israel and Hamas exposes yet again the surreal absurdity of the way the international community handles this conflict between a democratic state and a terrorist gang. Yesterday’s cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas is another example of the folly of treating a bunch of […]
Oh, We Forgot to Tell You . . .
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years — mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane […]
Oh What a Tangled Web
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Supporters of President Obama have dubbed those who question administration statements about Libya as either partisans or conspiracy theorists, on the premise that the administration had no reason to dissimulate. But in fact, it had plenty of political reasons not to be candid, as the following questions make […]
Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted — and Obama operatives have rejoiced in — a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorized, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser extent, how they sound. Republicans, […]
Down from Olympus
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner David Petraeus’s resignation marks the end of one of the great postwar military and government careers — his successful surge in Iraq being analogous to and as impressive as Matthew Ridgway’s salvation of Korea or Sherman’s sudden taking of Atlanta that saved Lincoln’s and the Union cause before the […]
Too Many Narratives to Get Straight?
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner At some point the prurient angle of the Petraeus story that alone enticed a reluctant media into becoming tangentially interested in Benghazi-gate — in the way the deaths of four Americans never did — will die down. Then we are left with largely three unanswered questions of far greater […]
Explaining the Democrats’ Success
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The election postmortem has identified all manner of causes for the Republicans’ defeat, from the “woman problem” and the “Hispanic problem,” as Peggy Noonan put it, to Romney’s fatcat persona and his inept campaign. But there’s a simpler reason, one consistent with the critics of democracy starting in ancient Athens […]
The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism
by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior — whether colonialism, support for […]
World Order, Under Siege?
by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas What seems sometimes incomprehensible in the contemporary world makes perfect sense — if we pause and study a little history.