2012: When Dreams Died
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The year 2012 saw the triumph of cold reality over pie-in-the-sky dreams. Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change in the hope that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history.
The Orientalism of Barack Obama
by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review Of course the documentary movie, 2016: Obama’s America, was timed by the conservative, Dinesh D’Souza, to discredit the president. Nonetheless, there can’t be much doubt that the president’s vision of America is driven by his attitude toward the perceived sins of European colonialism and his fear that America has now […]
An Anatomy of a Most Peculiar Institution
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media A Campus Full of Contradictions Almost everything about the modern university is a paradox. It has become a sort of industry gone rogue that embraces practices that a Wal-Mart or Halliburton would never get away with. It is exempt from scrutiny in the fashion that the Left ceased talking […]
Ripples from the Election
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Now that the election is over, we are starting to see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years. Here are some likely consequences from the Obama victory.
The New Racial Derangement Syndrome
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services There is a different sort of racialist derangement spreading in the country — and it is getting ugly.
A Short History of Amorous Generals
by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas Many were as pursuant of women as they were of the enemy — and the former rarely impaired the latter. “You’re a very bad man.” So yelled Dorothy at the Wizard of Oz, once the imposing, larger-than-life face on the screen was revealed to be a mere projection of […]
Conservative Populism
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The conservative failure in 2012 was not an inability to appeal to hyphenated groups on the basis of ethnic, gender, and age identification. Instead, there was a general cluelessness about how to reach the middle and working classes of all races and ethnicities by explaining how conservative principles […]
Modern Wisdom from Ancient Minds
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Tragic View Of course we can acquire a sense of man’s predictable fragilities from religion, the Judeo-Christian view in particular, or from the school of hard knocks. Losing a grape crop to rain a day before harvest, or seeing a warehouse full of goods go up in smoke […]
Let the Real Fat Cats Pay Their Fair Share
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Who exactly were the rich who, as the president said, were not “paying their fair share”? The rapper Jay-Z (net worth: nearly $500 million)? The actor Johnny Depp (2011 income: $50 million)? Neither seems to have heard the president’s earlier warning that, “at a certain point you’ve made […]
It’s Hard to Screw Up California–But We Try Our Best
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner There is a sort of upbeat New York Timesarticle arguing that California — in part, thanks to passing the highest sales and income taxes in the nation — might be coming back, a sort of recovery that can guide the rest of the US to a renewed faith in the Obama/EU/blue-state […]
Race Matters, Actually
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Lots of public officials and Washington, DC, insiders do not want UN Ambassador Susan Rice to be nominated as secretary of state. Most of these critics think she irrevocably lost credibility by going on five Sunday-morning television shows on September 16 to deny any connection between radical Islamic […]
A Nation of Takers Hurtles Toward the Fiscal Abyss
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The on-going negotiations over avoiding the tax hikes and spending cuts we call the “fiscal cliff” are simply the latest act in a farce of self-serving political denial. For decades now both parties have overseen and nurtured the expansion of the entitlement state all the while ignoring the slow-motion economic […]
War’s Paradoxes: From Pearl Harbor to the Russian Front to the 38th Parallel
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media From time to time, I take a break from opinion writing here at Works and Days [1] and turn to history — on this occasion, I am prompted by the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here are a few of the most common questions that I have […]
Democracy Promotion or Islamist Promotion?
by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine The hope that democracy would bloom in Egypt following our collusion in removing Hosni Mubarak looks more and more delusional every day. Even our foreign policy wishful thinkers are no longer peddling the canard that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood is “secular” and “moderate,” thus proving that Muslims devoted to the […]
The Kingdom of Fairness
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We are still borrowing more than $1 trillion a year. Barack Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt in just his first term alone. Such massive borrowing is unsustainable. Someone somehow at some time has to pay it back.
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 […]