Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.
The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism.
Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots? What ever happened to the old IRS, GSA, VA, Secret Service, NSA, NASA, EPA, or Justice Department? All seem now mere appendages to a larger agenda of fundamentally transforming America.
Thank all of you so much for your kind messages and thoughts in these difficult times. You are all the only reason that I write, and your comments have brought our family such solace in untold ways.
Susannah Merry Hanson, age 27, passed away suddenly on November 13 in Los Angeles, California after a brief illness.
She was born in Selma, California on December 31, 1986. She is survived by her mother Cara Webb Hanson of Clovis and Santa Cruz; her father Victor Davis Hanson of Selma; her older sister Pauline Davis Hanson Steinback, brother-in-law Shane Steinback and their daughters Maeve and Lila Steinback of Santa Cruz; and her brother William Frank Hanson of Clovis.
She is also survived by her maternal grandparents Armond and Tawana Webb of Coarsegold, and uncles and aunts Alfred and Karen Hanson of Selma, Nels and Vicki Hanson of San Luis Obispo, Maren Nielsen and Rory Robertson of Fresno, Dan and Cheryl Webb of Woodbridge, and Brenda Morton of Madera. Continue reading “Susannah Merry Hanson: Obituary”→
Declaring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization dead has been a pastime of analysts since the end of the Cold War. The alliance, today 28-members strong, has survived 65 years because its glaring contradictions were often overlooked, given the dangers of an expansionist and nuclear Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact subjects.
From its beginning, NATO had billed itself as a democratic Western bastion against Soviet totalitarian aggression—if not always in practice then at least in theory. NATO never had much problem keeping Greece and Turkey in the alliance despite their occasionally oppressive, rightwing military dictatorships, given the strategic location of both and the need to keep the pair’s historical rivalries in-house. If the alliance’s exalted motto “animus inconsulendo liber” (“A free mind in consultation”) was not always applicable, NATO still protected something far better than the alternative.
Immigration reform activists in Washington, D.C., July 7, 2014. (Win McNamee/Getty)
Everyone finds a lesson in the Republican midterm tsunami.
One message was that so-called comprehensive immigration reform and broad amnesty have little national public support. Polls have long shown that, but so do last week’s election results.
Candidates in swing states who promised amnesties got no edge from such opportunistic posturing.
Candidates who pandered to identity groups and played the ethnic card lost in most cases.
Voters in liberal Oregon overwhelmingly rejected driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.
Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who designed the Affordable Care Act, used to be the symbol of the Democrats’ technocratic bona fides, and an example of how big government with its “scientific” experts can solve social and economic problems from health care to a warming planet. Yet a recently publicized video of remarks he made at a panel in 2013, along with 2 other videos in the same vein, has now made him the poster child of the elitist progressives’ contempt for the American people, and their sacrifice of prudence and reason to raw political power.
The news that President Obama has sent a secret letter to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei––apparently promising concessions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for help in defeating ISIS–– is a depressing reminder of how after nearly 40 years our leaders have not understood the Iranian Revolution. During the hostage crisis of 1979, Jimmy Carter sent left-wing former Attorney General Ramsay Clark to Tehran with a letter anxiously assuring the Ayatollah Khomeini that America desired good relations “based upon equality, mutual respect and friendship.” Khomeini refused even to meet with the envoys.
Over the years I’ve debated scholars and pundits on issues ranging from illegal immigration (no to open borders), George Bush’s troop levels in Iraq (don’t add and don’t subtract, but change tactics and force the Iraqis to step up), and World War II (the Red Army, for all the savagery and ordeal on the Eastern front, was not mostly responsible for winning the war, and its soldiers were no more courageous than Americans at Bastogne, Normandy Beach, Iwo Jima or Okinawa).
Race, class, and gender politics are not over, but maybe they are beginning to become just a bit stale.
Part of the progressive problem was the huge disconnect between assimilationist reality and tribal rhetoric. While the president went on the reprobate Al Sharpton’s radio show divisively to gin up the African-American bloc vote, Senator Scott was on the eve of winning an overwhelming Senate victory in South Carolina, with a supermajority that topped even veteran pol Lindsey Graham’s substantial margin of victory. In such a context, Mary Landrieu’s generic whines about gender and racial discrimination in the South are reduced to nonsense — likewise in a former state of the old Confederacy that had elected her twice as well as a governor of color.
Crucified Again; Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians by Raymond Ibrahim. Regnery, 2013. 247 pp.
Throughout the Muslim world from Morocco to Nigeria to Indonesia – and even occasionally in Western Europe and North America, Christians are being harassed, tortured and murdered. As reported by Reuters in January, 2012, some 100 million Christians were then being persecuted while a few years earlier the British Secret Service, M-16, put the number closer to 200 million. German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that Christianity is “the most persecuted religion worldwide.” (A statement that elicited condemnation from many world leaders.) The Organization for Security and Cooperation on Europe estimates that a Christian is killed for his faith every five minutes.
Thank all of you so much for your kind messages and thoughts in these difficult times. You are all the only reason that I write, and your comments have brought our family such solace in untold ways.
Susannah Merry Hanson
Race, class, and gender politics are not over, but maybe they are beginning to become just a bit stale.
Islam: Victors Vanquishing Victims