Republicans in Chaos

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The GOP’s implosion was entirely avoidable, if anyone had read the signs.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition.

After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so strange candidates who brawled and embarrassed themselves, there had to be some formula to avoid repeating that mob-like mess. Instead, in 2016 there were 17 candidates and 13 debates along with seven forums. There were supposed to be tweaks and repairs that were designed to avoid the clown-like cavalcade of four years ago, but they apparently only ensured a repetition. Continue reading “Republicans in Chaos” →

The Origins of Trump Nihilism

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By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media

mexico_border_trump_supporter_mexico_will_pay_banner_3-6-16-1.sized-770x415xcDuring the most recent Detroit debate, even a reformed “inclusive” and “presidential” Donald Trump still was crass and vulgar. (Has a candidate ever crudely referred to the size of his phallus, and in our sick world is that a Freudian admission of doubt, or a macho reassurance in LBJ fashion?)

Trump gave more than enough evidence that his positions are liquid and change as often his perceptions of his flatterers and critics. Continue reading “The Origins of Trump Nihilism” →

Log Cabin Candidates

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By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services

Which presidential candidate was born the poorest? Whose log cabin birthplace was the most ramshackle?

ChalkBoardLogCabinPresHillary and Bill Clinton are worth well over $100 million, largely due to years of leveraging their government service to pull in astronomical speaking and consulting fees from Wall Street, foreign investors and big banks. Yet Hillary Clinton, a graduate of elite Wellesley College and Yale Law School, often adopts a poor man’s drawl and Southern slang before particular audiences. She has claimed that “all my grandparents” were immigrants. Not true. Only one grandfather immigrated to the United States, from Britain. Hillary herself grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago, in a conservative upper-class household. Continue reading “Log Cabin Candidates” →

Donald Trump: How to Fight Him

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LAS VEGAS, NV - DECEMBER 15: (L to R) Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson, Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) look at their watches during the CNN Republican presidential debate on December 15, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is the last GOP debate of the year, with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gaining in the polls in Iowa and other early voting states and Donald Trump rising in national polls. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

What Cruz and Rubio need to do now.

Both Donald Trump and his opponents are up against the constraints of time.

Trump wants to run out the clock; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want overtime. Trump does not want any more Texas-debate–style fights with Rubio and Cruz, and yet he still has four more debates on his schedule. In each one, we will see a geometric increase in attacks on Trump — all the more so if Carson or Kasich, or both, drop out, and the allotted debate time is split just three ways.
Continue reading “Donald Trump: How to Fight Him” →

Obama: The Lamest Duck

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By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media
Obama Lame Duck

President Obama is boxed in a state of paralysis—more so than typical lame-duck presidents.

His hard-left politics have insidiously eroded the Democratic Party, which has lost both houses of Congress and the vast majority of the state legislatures, state elected offices, and governorships. Obama has redefined the black vote, as a necessary, no-margin-of-error 95% bloc majority to offset his similar creation of an increasingly monolithic 65% bloc white vote. We are no longer individual voters, but, in Chicago-politics style, merely faceless “Latinos,” “Asians,” “African-Americans,” “gays,” “women,” and now “whites.” Continue reading “Obama: The Lamest Duck” →

The Tough Choices of Overseas Intervention

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Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services

The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban.

As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then abruptly left the targeted country, chaos has followed. But when America has followed up its use of force with unpopular peacekeeping, sometimes American interventions have led to something better. Continue reading “The Tough Choices of Overseas Intervention” →

Iraq: The Real Story

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Donald Trump’s account of the Iraq War is all wrong. Why aren’t his Republican opponents saying so?

Donald Trump constantly brings up Iraq to remind voters that Jeb Bush supported his brother’s war, while Trump, alone of the Republican candidates, supposedly opposed it well before it started.

That is a flat-out lie. There is no evidence that Trump opposed the war before the March 20, 2003 invasion. Like most Americans, he supported the invasion and said just that very clearly in interviews. And like most Americans, Trump quickly turned on a once popular intervention — but only when the postwar occupation was beginning to cost too much in blood and treasure. Trump’s serial invocations of the war are good reminders of just how mythical Iraq has now become. Continue reading “Iraq: The Real Story” →

Weimar America

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 By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media
 
obama_fdr_article_banner_2-20-16-2.sized-770x415xc
Image by EdDriscoll.com
 2016 is a pivotal year in which accustomed referents of a stable West are now disappearing. We seem to be living in a chaotic age, akin to the mid-1930s, of cynicism and skepticism. Government, religion, and popular culture are corrupt and irrelevant—and the world order of the last 70 years has all but collapsed.

Neither the president nor his would-be successors talk much about the fact that we are now nearing $20 trillion in debt—in an ossified economy of near-zero interest rates, little if any GDP growth, and record numbers of able-bodied but non-working adults. (The most frequent complaint I hear in my hometown is that the government lags behind in their cost-of-living raises in Social Security disability payments.) Continue reading “Weimar America” →

The Return of Appeasement, Collaboration and Isolationism

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Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services

World War II broke out when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. A once preventable war had become inevitable — and would soon become global — due to three fatal decisions. Most infamously, the Western European democracies had appeased Hitler during the late 1930s in hopes that he would quit gobbling up his neighbors. Unfortunately, the Nazis considered Western appeasement as weakness to be manipulated rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated.After the bloodless annexation of Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Hitler assumed that Britain and France would not go to war at all if he went into Poland. Or, if they did, that they would not fight very seriously.Yet Western appeasement did not alone guarantee the outbreak of World War II.
Continue reading “The Return of Appeasement, Collaboration and Isolationism” →

Venezuela on the Potomac

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Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you’re Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he is perfectly willing to use the federal government’s vast power to go after those he finds politically inconvenient, while exempting those he understands to be sympathetic to his agendas.

In Freudian fashion, Obama has long joked about using the power of government in a personal way. As early as 2009, when he had been invited to give the Arizona State University commencement address but had not been granted an honorary degree, he warned of rogue IRS audits: “I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.” Jesting about politically driven IRS audits is always scary — scarier when life imitates art in the age of Lois Lerner.
Continue reading “Venezuela on the Potomac” →