California and Conservatism

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

I share some of the sentiments of Jay Nordlinger’s Corner post expressing confidence that some day in the future there may be hope for California conservatism. That’s why I continue to live in the house that I grew up in, despite vast changes in the nature of the rural community I was born into. But I would take sharp issue with Jay’s statement that current critics of the direction of the state are somehow either prejudicial or dispirited:

A lot of us conservatives have long written it off. California is too changed: too brown, too illegal, too bloated, too listless. All the good people have left, and all the bad people have stayed. You know the rap. Usually, we don’t put it this crudely, but this is what it amounts to.

Actually, I don’t believe that conservatives’ worry amounts to any of that at all.

Read the full article here.

The Post-War Order Is Over

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

Take the idea of a Western Turkey, “linchpin of NATO southeastern flank” — an idea about as enduring as the “indomitable” French Army of 1939. For over a decade Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insidiously destroyed Turkey’s once pro-Western and largely secular traditions; he could not have done so without at least majority popular support.

Read the full article here.

The Great German Meltdown

Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution

Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany’s neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939—and increasingly in the present—usually bear the brunt of this national meltdown.

Germany is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of Europe, its financial leader, and its trusted and responsible political center. Often it plays those roles superbly. But recently, it’s been cracking up—in a way that is hauntingly familiar to its European neighbors. On mass immigration, it is beginning to terrify the nearby nations of Eastern Europe. On Brexit, it bullies the British. On finance, it alienates the southern Europeans. On Russia, it irks the Baltic States and makes the Scandinavians uneasy by doing business with the Russian energy interests. And on all matters American, it increasingly seems incensed.

Read the full article here.

U.S. Has Leverage in Dealings with Iran and North Korea

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

America and our allies have several ways to deter the rogue nations.

There has been a lot of misinformation about both getting out of the so-called Iran deal and getting into a new North Korean agreement. The two situations may be connected, but not in the way we are usually told.

Getting out of the Iran deal did not destroy trust in the U.S. government. Our departure from the deal does not mean that North Korea cannot reliably negotiate with America.

Read the full article here.

The Trump Rationale

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

His voters knew what they were getting, and most support him still.

Why exactly did nearly half the country vote for Donald Trump?

Why also did the arguments of Never Trump Republicans and conservatives have marginal effect on voters? Despite vehement denunciations of the Trump candidacy from many pundits on the right and in the media, Trump nonetheless got about the same percentage of Republican voters (88–90 percent) as did McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, who both were handily defeated in the Electoral College.

Here are some of reasons voters knew what they were getting with Trump and yet nevertheless assumed he was preferable to a Clinton presidency.

Read the full article here.

How Democracies End: A Bureaucratic Whimper

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

One strange trait of the die hard NeverTrump Republicans and progressives is their charge that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. Trump, as is his wont, says a lot of outrageous and weird things. But it is hard in his 16 months of rule to find any proof that Trump has subverted the rule of law.

Most of the furor is over what we are told what Trump might do, or what Trump has said, or which unsavory character in Europe likes Trump. These could be legitimate worries if they were followed by Trump’s anti-democratic concrete subversions. But so far, we have not seen them. And there has certainly been nothing yet in this administration comparable to the Obama-era efforts to curb civil liberties.

Read the full article here.

The Miraculous Image Rehabilitation of Former Republican Presidents

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

It’s an evergreen media strategy for disparaging the sitting GOP executive.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, many in the media considered him a dangerous extremist.

Some reporters warned that Reagan courted nuclear war and would tank the economy. He certainly was not like the gentleman Republican and moderate ex-president Gerald Ford.

But by 1989, the media was fond of a new adjective: “Reaganesque.” Reagan in retirement and without power was seen as a senior statesman.

Not so for his once-centrist and better-liked vice president, George H.W. Bush, who suddenly was reinvented as a fool and a ninny in comparison.

Read the full article here.

The Nature of Progressive Insensitivity

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Why do so many famous social-justice crusaders turn out to be racist and sexist?  

Former vice president Joe Biden is back in the news yet again. For a second time, he seems surprised that poor residents of the inner city are capable of doing sophisticated jobs:

We don’t think ordinary people can do things like program, code. It’s not rocket science, guys. So, we went and we hired some folks to go into the neighborhoods and pick 58 women, as it turns out, from the hood, for a 17-week program, if my memory serves me correctly, to learn how to code.

In 2014 Biden had said about the same thing about women from the “hood”:

Read the full article here.

Why Trump Is A President Like No Other

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Read the full article here.

5-09-18 Angry Reader

From An Angry Reader:

Wow. You are a moron. How is it, that Comey’s memos, which were his that he wrote, as an FBI agent, which were still his, once he was fired from his FBI job, by an obstructing president, “leaking of classified material”?? How can the man’s own memos, that he wrote, which were never deemed classified by anyone, certainly NOT the DOJ, be classified that way? Especially when he gave them to the friend as a private citizen passing along his memos to another private citizen. You are just a partisan hack, with no respect for the law. It’s a shame what people like you are doing to our country, over an inept, incompetent, traitor like trump, JUST because he is claiming to be a Republican these last couple years or so. You and others like you, are traitors by your complicit behavior. You should be deported to Siberia, moron.

M. Trajan

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Dear Angry Reader Neo Anderson,

I award you a solid 6 on the Angry Reader Derangement scale. Had you just added obscenity to your other checklists (capital letters, grammatical and syntactical errors, ad hominem smears, lack of facts or an argument, etc.), you would have earned an 8.

Mr. Anderson/Trajan please concentrate on facts and not merely bark at the moon:

1) Comey at the time that he typed his confidential notes, was the Director of the FBI;

2) he typed them on FBI time, on an FBI electronic device, and addressed at least some of them in standard FBI letterhead fashion to fellow FBI officials;

3) he shared the contents of the memos with a private citizen, even though the DOJ later felt that enough of the contents of the memos were classified or confidential enough to warrant redaction before being released to the public; Comey himself characterized them as “secret.” Obviously a top-ranking federal employee should not have a confidential conversation with the President, take notes, leak them to the press, and do so by preplanned intent;

4) at least some of the memos were subsequently felt to be “classified” or “confidential” by the DOJ; if they felt so, surely Comey must have known that as well;

5) Comey was either guilty of violating federal law or FBI administrative codes of behavior; either way had another employee done the same he would likely have been terminated;

6) Comey leaked the memos by his own admission so they would appear in the press without his own fingerprints on such leaking and for the expressed purpose of appointing a special prosecutor, which ironically or by design turned out to be his long-term friend and predecessor at the FBI, Robert Mueller;

7) Comey admitted that he rarely memorialized such private and confidential conversations with other federal officials or President Obama;

8) Comey admitted that he went into the conversation with Trump, knowing that he would memorialize it, and that Trump would not know that he would do so, which suggests an asymmetry in his favor;

9) Comey testified to Congress that he did not leak to the press and objected to such a practice;

10) Comey’s entire credibility is questionable given that he has admitted under oath that he had not written a summary of the email scandal before he interviewed Hillary Clinton, when he, in fact, had; when he again testified he had not leaked to the press; when he misled a FISA court by not informing it that his submitted evidence for a warrant deliberately did not disclose that the Steele dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton, that its contents were not verified by the FBI, that its author was fired as an informant by the FBI, and that independent news accounts presented to the court were, in fact, simply sourced from the dossier.

Mr. Anderson: calling me a moron or a traitor in lieu of an argument does not change the above facts; it only reflects on your own emotional state and limited knowledge of what you write about.

V. Hanson