Obama Still Murky on Libya
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner President Obama just gave a weird speech. Part George W. Bush, part trademark Obama — filled with his characteristic split-the-difference, straw-man (“some say, others say”), false-choice tropes.
The Secularist Delusion
by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The dubious received wisdom rationalizing our current intervention in Libya was crystallized in Senator John Kerry’s recent essay for The Wall Street Journal. For Kerry, the rebels in Libya are the same as those in Egypt, “peacefully demanding freedom and dignity.”
A Man-Made Energy Crisis
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California — and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad?
No ‘Revolution’ for Egypt’s Christians
by Raymond Ibrahim FrontPageMagazine.com On March 5, Muslims attacked, plundered, and set ablaze an ancient Coptic church in Sool, a village near Cairo, Egypt. Afterwards, throngs of Muslims gathered around the scorched building and pounded its walls down with sledge hammers — to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Adding insult to injury, the attackersplayed “soccer” with the relic-remains of […]
Our Libyan March Madness
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The prognosis for Libya might be better if our president cared more about it than about the NCAA.
America Through the Looking Glass
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media President Obama yesterday praised Brazil for its new offshore oil industry and said he wants to buy as much oil as possible in this new win-win partnership — although we have piled up $5 trillion in new debt, curtailed new petroleum exploration off shore and in the West, as […]
Foreign Policy as Wishful Thinking
by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The current military intervention in Libya by the West has been marketed with the claim that its purpose, as French President Sarkozy put it, is “to protect the civilian population from the murderous madness of a regime that has forfeited all claim to legitimacy.” Behind this humanitarian […]
America’s Sorta Rescue?
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner What a No-Fly Zone Means Now that we are committed to a no-fly zone (an unwise idea, I think, given the absence of consistent aims or defined objectives), we must support it and ensure its success.
President Hamlet
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services More than 400 years ago, William Shakespeare wrote a riveting tragedy about a young, charismatic Danish prince who vowed to do the right thing in avenging his murdered father. That soon proved easier said than done. As a result, Hamlet couldn’t quite ever act in time — given […]
Libya, What To Do?
by Raymond Ibrahim National Review Online As with Egypt, American sympathies instinctively side with Libya’s oppositional forces as they seek to overthrow the tyrant Qaddafi — and rightfully so. But where US foreign policy is concerned, prudence is in order.
Should We Intervene in Libya?
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There are plenty of good arguments for imposing a no-fly zone in Libya. Without Libyan-government air strikes, the rebels might have a better chance of carving out permanent zones of resistance.
The Fragility of Complex Societies
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Thoughts on Japan There is no more ordered, successful and humane urban society than found in Japan.
Grievance Politics Barks, Kings Hearing Move On
by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The hearings convened by Representative Pete King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, to examine the recruitment of American Muslims as jihadist terrorists revealed all the pathologies of multicultural grievance politics that for decades now has compromised our response to Islamic jihad.
The Put-Off, Postpone and Procrastinate Generation
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The Obama administration figures that it has read the national mood well. This therapeutic generation of Americans loves to talk and worry about problems and then assumes that either someone else will solve them or they will go away on their own.
Put Up or Shut Up: Obama’s Foreign Policy Crossroads
by Victor Davis Hanson Ricochet I don’t often agree with Pat Buchanan and am an occasional target of his magazine, but his ideas (which Peter highlighted in an earlier post on Ricochet) are at least always provocative and he is right that we need a debate on what we can afford and what not, and why we do the things we […]
Caliphate, Jihad, Sharia: Now What?
by Raymond Ibrahim Hudson New York You can sit here and talk about jihad from here to doomsday, what will it do? Suppose you prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Islam is constitutionally violent, where do you go from there?
The Triumph of the Therapeutic Mind
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Beyond the political posturing over state and federal budgets, there looms an age-old philosophical divide over human nature, perhaps defined as the therapeutic versus the tragic view of our existence.
Mosques Flourish While Churches Perish
Western tolerance had no mirror in the Islamic world. by Raymond Ibrahim PJ Media As Muslims prepare to erect a mega-mosque near the site of the 9/11 atrocities, it is well to reflect that the sort of tolerance, or indifference, that allows them to do so, is far from reciprocated to churches in the Muslim […]
Of Hawks and Flies
by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The international order — comprising the United Nations, interstate diplomacy, organizations like NATO, and all the other transnational institutions that are supposed to keep the global peace and deter aggression — reminds me of the Spanish proverb about laws: they catch flies and let the hawk go […]
Some Very Bad American Habits
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The wealthier and more leisured American society has become, the more it has developed some terrible habits that will have to end if we are going to return to fiscal sobriety and a unified culture. I am pessimistic on that count, but here are a few examples: