by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Let us start our grand tour of an increasingly out-of-control world in Russia. Putin plays a two-bit Hitler in trying to gobble up his neighbors. The West responds with a one-bit imitation of 1930s Britain and France. ISIS reminds us that beheading and human incineration are contemporary, not premodern, practices. The only difference is that we video them on iPhones now [1] rather hear rumors about them by word of mouth a year later.
President Obama claims he inherited a mess in the Middle East. Not so.
Fracking and horizontal drilling on private lands in the U.S. had taken off in the last years of the Bush administration and by 2009 were set to revolutionize America’s energy future. By 2011, the U.S. had cut way back its dependence on Middle Eastern gas and oil imports, which in turn gave American diplomats a measure of immunity from petro-blackmail, and therefore far more clout in the region. Iraq was mostly stable; in Anbar Province tens of thousands of jihadists had been killed by U.S. troops and their tribal allies. Iran’s scope was limited by a new moderate axis of Sunni states, Israel, and the United States. A bruised Hezbollah faced a huge rebuilding tab in southern Lebanon. Libya was beginning to shed at least some of its bizarre past. The Palestinians had no desire for another Intifada. The Middle East was looking to the U.S. for leadership, inasmuch as the surge in Iraq had regained respect for American arms and determination.
All that now is ancient history. In five critical areas, the U.S. blew it.
NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina.
Williams always plays the hero in his yarns, braving natural and hostile human enemies to deliver us the truth on the evening news.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
The United States can be quite an incoherent place at times. Here are a few examples.
Diversity
Sometime in the 1990s the growing contradictions of affirmative action in a multiracial society became problematic. Ethnic ancestry was often neither easily identifiable nor readily commensurate with class status, and so gave way to a more popular term: “diversity.”
Continue reading “How to Make Sense of an Incoherent America”
Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.
by Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal
In mid-December, the first large storms in three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In the 1970s, coastal elites squelched California’s near-century-long commitment to building dams, reservoirs, and canals, even as the Golden State’s population ballooned. Court-ordered drainage of man-made lakes, meant to restore fish to the 1,100-square-mile Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, partly caused central California’s reservoir water to dry up. Not content with preventing construction of new water infrastructure, environmentalists reverse-engineered existing projects to divert precious water away from agriculture, privileging the needs of fish over the needs of people. Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies, had caused the current crisis.
By Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas
In December, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, had to explain to Congress several remarks he had made about the “stupidity of the American voter,” as he put it in one speech. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh frequently uses the more diplomatic phrase “low-information voter” to explain why bad policies or incompetent politicians succeed. And numerous polls of respondents’ knowledge of history and current events repeatedly imply the same conclusion––that the American people are not informed or smart enough for democracy.
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner
President Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, said:
Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
This is banal.
Continue reading “Still More of President Obama’s Moral Equivalence”
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.
What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner
I know that it’s shooting whales in a barrel to point out Michael Moore’s — once a guest in the Carter presidential box at the 2004 Democratic Convention — continued displays of ignorance. Nonetheless, the latest example is Moore’s lingering hurt because years ago Clint Eastwood once deadpanned that should Moore show up with his camera at Eastwood’s door (in the fashion that Moore himself had once attempted to ambush and embarrass actor Charlton Heston), Eastwood then might shoot him.
I suppose Moore was trying to suggest that the director of American Sniper logically transposed his own innate murderous instincts onto his movie, which Moore alone sensed.
But given that Moore is both stupid and a hypocrite, almost everything he says is either incoherent or a projection of his own pathologies. After all, he slammed sniping, then backtracked and said sniping was okay if used on the defensive by the invaded. In doing so, he nullified his own point that his uncle who invaded foreign ground was killed by a cowardly sniper — who apparently must have also had good reason to take to sniping against such foreign invaders on Asian ground.