VDH's Blade of Perseus

Obama, a One-Man Revolution

January 7, 2015 victorhanson

In his “fourth quarter,” he feels free to ignore popular opinion, the rule of law, and Congress.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

pic_giant_122514_SM_Barack-Obama-G Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the top down by passing a new agenda. The other was popular-reform pressure, as happened in the 1890s or 1960s, to change public opinion and force government to make new laws or change existing ones.

Barack Obama has introduced a quite different, third sort of revolution. He seeks to enact change that both the majority of Americans and their representatives oppose. And he tries to do it by bypassing Congress through executive orders and presidential memoranda of dubious legality.

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The Timid Generation

January 6, 2015 victorhanson

Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan caving in to North Korea.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Aristotle thought courage the preeminent virtue. Without it, there could be no morality. Virtue becomes a mere abstraction, a high-sounding platitude that is easy to live by in one’s sleep.

The present generation may be the most abjectly cowardly cohort in memory. When the Sony Corporation was victimized by North Korean–sponsored hackers upset over Sony’s new movie The Interview, it caved and withdrew the film. The Obama administration so far has offered no real support. Instead it blamed Sony for its appeasement. By joint inaction both Sony and the United States government sent the message that foreign dictators can determine what Americans see or read, as long as their targets are private citizens.

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Autopilot Nation

January 6, 2015 victorhanson

Conservatives lament, and liberals brag, that Obama has fundamentally transformed America.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Six years of slumber later, a surging America finally is transcending even the effects of hope and change. For the last few years, most Americans have tuned out their president’s no-time-to-profit rhetoric. They just kept slogging away at what they always did as the most productive people in the world, and waited for the natural up-bound of a moribund economy.

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Fantasyland, U.S.A.

January 5, 2015 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Mr. President, honest, I did not write 1984 as a how-to guide.Photo via Eddriscoll.com

One way of reinventing reality is to warp the meaning of words. No president in memory has waged such a war on the English language as has Barack Obama — changing the meaning of vocabulary to hide what he fears might otherwise be unpopular.

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The Seductions of Appeasement

January 5, 2015January 5, 2015 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

download (19) Before World War II appeasement was a good word, reflecting a supposedly wise policy of understanding an enemy’s predicaments. Sober Western democracies would grant tolerable concessions to aggressive dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan to satiate their appetites for more. With such magnanimity everyone would avoid a nightmare like another Somme or Verdun.

Appeasement is always a seductive diplomacy because in the short term a bloody crisis is at least avoided. Hopes then rise that either tensions will cool as aggressors are pacified — or at least the latter won’t start trouble until the appeasers are long out of office. Appeasement is based on the theory that if you give one or two scraps of leftovers under the table to the dog at your feet, he will wag his tail and leave, grateful for such generosity, rather than to prove be even peskier for more.

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Are Drone Strikes More Defensible than Torture?

December 18, 2014December 18, 2014 victorhanson

Democrats are hypocritically silent about Obama’s policy of targeted assassinations.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

MQ-9 Reaper in Afghanistan, 2008 (Staff Sergeant Brian Ferguson)

There are lots of hypocrisies surrounding the recently released executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. But they pale in comparison to the current Democratic silence about President Barack Obama’s policy of targeted drone assassinations.

Since 2004, drones have killed an estimated 2,400 to 3,888 individuals in Pakistan alone, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. An estimated 345 to 553 individuals in Yemen have been killed in drone strikes over the same period. The BIJ reports that the Obama administration has “markedly stepped up the use of drones. Since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the CIA has launched 330 strikes on Pakistan — his predecessor, President George Bush, conducted 51 strikes in four years.”

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Sloppy Thinking About ‘Torture’

December 17, 2014 victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Torture is one of those topics that often overwhelm sober reason with lurid emotion. Even people who usually are clear-eyed and rational sink into sloppy thinking and incoherent argument when it comes to torture. Peggy Noonan’s recentWall Street Journal column about the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation techniques illustrates this phenomenon perfectly.

Noonan is usually an astute analyst, but her column on the report is riddled with received wisdom and unexamined assumptions. For Noonan, the “important lesson” of the report is not that progressives, as usual, are shameful hypocrites and partisan hacks who will damage their country’s interests for ideological or political advantage. It is not that when fighting a brutal enemy who obeys no laws of war, things are done we’d rather not do in order to save lives. No, her “lesson” is that the enhanced interrogation techniques, “torture” in her view, are “not like us” or “part of the American DNA,” and that, quoting John McCain, such techniques damage “our reputation as a force for good in the world.” These assertions, however, are based on simplistic psychology and flawed reasoning.

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Epitaph for Hope and Change

December 16, 2014 victorhanson

Obama has fundamentally transformed America, all right — but not as he intended.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

A perfect storm brought into power Barack Obama, a previously little-known Illinois community organizer. He had at best a mediocre record as a state legislator and rookie senator. Yet he quickly dazzled the liberal establishment. Joe Biden and Harry Reid were wowed by his sounding and behaving like a white liberal, while retaining the ability to turn on his supposedly authentic black persona when needed. That he had no record of achievement was seen as an advantageous clean slate. Teleprompted glibness was preferred to ad hoc repartee, as if an entire presidency could be scripted and Photoshopped with backdrops of Greek columns and Latin mottos.

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The Campus as California

December 15, 2014December 15, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

college_anarchy_graffiti_1-19-14-1 Campuses are becoming the haunts of the very wealthy and the poor, with little regard for any in-between — sort of like California.

Let me explain. Lately lots of strange things have been in the news about college campuses — from the Rolling Stone’s mythography ^[1] of the University of Virginia fraternities to Lena Dunham’s invented charges ^[2] of rape against a supposed Oberlin College Republican to courses on “white privilege” to “hands up; don’t shoot” demonstrations protesting the police shooting of Michael Brown.

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America Continues to Thrive

December 15, 2014 victorhanson

Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”

Apparently, late 19th-century observers could not quite explain how the U.S. thrived when by logic it should not. That paradox has never been more true than today.

The U.S. government now owes more than $18 trillion in long-term debt. Even after recent income-tax hikes for the very wealthy and huge cuts in the defense budget, the Obama administration will still run an annual budget deficit of nearly $500 billion.

Continue reading “America Continues to Thrive” →

VDH's Blade of Perseus

Obama, a One-Man Revolution

In his “fourth quarter,” he feels free to ignore popular opinion, the rule of law, and Congress.

Like this:

The Timid Generation

Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan caving in to North Korea.

Like this:

Autopilot Nation

Conservatives lament, and liberals brag, that Obama has fundamentally transformed America.

Like this:

Fantasyland, U.S.A.

Like this:

The Seductions of Appeasement

Like this:

Are Drone Strikes More Defensible than Torture?

Democrats are hypocritically silent about Obama’s policy of targeted assassinations.

Like this:

Sloppy Thinking About ‘Torture’

Like this:

Epitaph for Hope and Change

Obama has fundamentally transformed America, all right — but not as he intended.

Like this:

The Campus as California

Like this:

America Continues to Thrive

Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition.

Like this:

In his “fourth quarter,” he feels free to ignore popular opinion, the rule of law, and Congress.

Share this:

Like this:

Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan caving in to North Korea.

Share this:

Like this:

Conservatives lament, and liberals brag, that Obama has fundamentally transformed America.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Democrats are hypocritically silent about Obama’s policy of targeted assassinations.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Obama has fundamentally transformed America, all right — but not as he intended.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition.

Share this:

Like this: