Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The attacks on the US embassy yesterday in Cairo and the storming of the American consulate in Libya, where the US ambassador was murdered along with three staff members — and the initial official American reaction to the mayhem — are all reprehensible, each in their own way. […]
Why Is Obama Still Likable?
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The Democrats’ convention was the public coming-out bash for the party whose political clock stopped in 1972. Every speaker and speech celebrated the musty left-wing ideology and smug arrogance of those who idolize big government because it gives them the power to tell everybody else what to do and how […]
Obama the Hare, Romney the Tortoise
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The 2012 race has turned into one of Aesop’s classic fables. After each new media blitz against the no-frills Mitt Romney, a far cooler President Obama races ahead three or four points in the polls — only to fall back to about even as the attention fades.
The Terrifying New Normal
by Victor Davis Hanson PJMedia The World We Don’t Question I’ve witnessed two of the most radical developments in my lifetime the last four years — changes far greater than those brought on by the massive new increases in the national debt, the soaring gas costs, the radical decrease in average family income, the insolvent […]
The New Reactionaries
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Starting in the 1930s and continuing after the war, the Democrats offered a liberal critique of, or perhaps enhancement to, the Republican vision of rugged individualism. A modern American state now had the capital and the moral ambition to smooth the rougher edges of capitalism by insisting on […]
The Humpty-Dumpty Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The United States is backing off from the Middle East — and the Middle East from the United States.
It’s All Violence on Copts: From Sex Slavery to Calls of Genocide in Egypt
by Raymond Ibrahim Posts from Jihad Watch Egypt’s Salafi Party Objects to Banning Sex Slavery Considering that the abduction, enslavement, rape, and trafficking of Coptic Christian girls, especially minors, in Egypt is at an all time high — according to US lawyers, 550 such cases have been documented in the last five years — Egypt’s Constituent Assembly to […]
The Academic Establishment Goes After Bruce Bawer
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Bruce Bawer, the intrepid international journalist and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, has just published The Victims’ Revolution, an expose of “Identity Studies” in American universities. These are the programs predicated on the allegation that certain minorities in America, mainly women, gays, blacks, and Latinos, are victims of continuing prejudice, bigotry, sexism, […]
Liberal Chickens
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for hard-core progressivism as […]
Eating America’s Seed Corn
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services As gas prices climb back toward $4 a gallon, the Obama administration — facing a tough re-election campaign and rising Middle East tensions — is once again considering tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For years, administrations have bought and stored oil for emergencies, in fear of a cutoff […]
Three Democrat Women for Dependency
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The Democrats have announced that Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren and Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke will be on hand at the Democratic National Convention to hype the alleged Republican “War on Women” and promote “Julia,” the cartoon character that touts the numerous boons Democrats supposedly provide women. The Dems’ […]
Graffiti on Trees, High-Speed Rail to Nowhere: The Wages of Liberalism
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Last week, while reading about an insolvent California’s insistence on going ahead with the first leg of a proposed high-speed rail line (total cost of the system: an estimated $100-$300 billion), I heard the following story on a local ABC news affiliate about a nearby low-Sierra lake:
Islam’s ‘Holy Month’ of Christian Oppression
by Raymond Ibrahim Investigative Project on Terrorism The month of Ramadan, which ended earlier this week, proved to be a month of renewed Muslim piety on the one hand, and renewed oppression of non-Muslim minorities on the other. In Nigeria, for example, Islamic militants are living up to the assertion that “Ramadan is a month […]
Before the Culture Fades
by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal A review of The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia by Roger Kimball (St. Augustine’s Press, 2012) Roger Kimball has long been one of America’s most learned commentators on intellectual history, contemporary politics, fine art, and architecture.
‘White’ on the Brain–II
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner Every now and then someone sends me an incoherent blog posting by someone named Conor Friedersdorf, who attacks a column I’ve written — usually in a way that reveals his inability to follow a simple argument. In the latest case of “‘White’ on the Brain,” he alleges that my piece was aimed […]
Are We Doomed?
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Sometimes societies find themselves in pernicious cycles in which the perceived medicine seems worse than the known disease. The Roman satirist Juvenal lamented the ill effects of free food and free entertainment for the masses (“bread and circuses”) in part because he knew there was no remedy for […]
When Land Is History
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media This winter I watched a new owner of the farm parcel next to mine bring in enormous Caterpillar equipment and land-levelers. He ripped out every living tree and bush. He changed the very contours of the land, flattening even the once rolling hills. Within days, arose a postmodern almond […]
Our Not So Best and Not So Brightest
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media From Eliot Spitzer to Elizabeth Warren to Fareed Zakaria — what is wrong with our elites?
There Is No California
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line.
Time for ‘Liberals’ and ‘Progressives’ to Get New Labels
by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine We need to find a new label for the ideology espoused by leftist Democrats. “Liberal” doesn’t accurately describe the party of blinkered intolerance, fanatical certainty, and an eagerness to destroy freedom in order to achieve some dubious utopia.