VDH's Blade of Perseus

Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas

December 10, 2014 victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Once again Hillary Clinton has given the Republicans some suicidal soundbites they should stash away for 2016 in the likely event she is the Democratic candidate for president. A review of some of her recent statements reveals that Clinton is not just entitled, money-grubbing, unlikeable, unpleasant, and unaccomplished. Nor do they just show that she is a political dunce who has obviously learned nothing from her politically brilliant husband. More seriously, they expose her commitment to failed ideas and dangerous delusions.

First there was the “What difference at this point does it make!” she practically shrieked to Senator Ron Johnson during a January 2013 hearing on the Benghazi debacle that unfolded on September 11, 2012. Clinton had told the grieving parents of the victims during the transfer of remains ceremony at Andrews Air Force base that they died because of “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Four Americans, including an ambassador, had been murdered on her watch, but she refused to explain to the Senate why she blamed the hapless maker of a YouTube video, who spent a year in jail.

Continue reading “Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas” →

Lying for the Cause

December 9, 2014December 9, 2014 victorhanson

If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true.

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Ripples of Ferguson

December 8, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Police tape in front of smoldering remains of Prime Beauty Supply in Ferguson in the aftermath of riots. Photo taken on 11/25/14 by R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com.

There is some blame to go around in nearly all racial confrontations. Why the body of Michael Brown was left in the street for hours seems inexplicable. The apparent chokehold that contributed to the death of Eric Garner, with the benefit of video hindsight, does not seem to square with the de facto exoneration of the officer involved. In contrast, there has been absolutely no credible evidence that the unfortunate shooting of Michael Brown was not in self-defense.

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The End of Feminism

December 5, 2014 victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas

California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.” Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that wish to receive state funds or financial aid must adhere to this standard when investigating charges of “sexual assault,” a phrase redefined to include behaviors once considered boorish or insensitive, but not legally actionable. The California law follows on the 2011 Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’s “dear colleague”letter that instructed schools investigating sexual assault complaints to use the “more likely than not” or “preponderance of the evidence” standard of evidence rather than the “clear and convincing” one.

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War Clouds on the Horizon?

December 4, 2014 victorhanson

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors (Photo: Senior Master Sergeant Thomas Meneguin)

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before.

In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored.

The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power shifted, decline for some nations seemed like opportunity for others.

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Liberalism in Ruins

December 3, 2014 victorhanson

Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Continue reading “Liberalism in Ruins” →

When the Law Is a Drag

December 2, 2014December 2, 2014 victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

In the Ferguson disaster ^[1], the law was the greatest casualty. Civilization cannot long work if youths strong-arm shop owners and take what they want. Or walk down the middle of highways high on illicit drugs. Or attack police officers and seek to grab their weapons. Or fail to obey an officer’s command to halt. Or deliberately give false testimonies to authorities. Or riot, burn, and loot. Or, in the more abstract sense, simply ignore the legal findings of a grand jury; or, in critical legal theory fashion, seek to dismiss the authority of the law because it is not deemed useful to some preconceived theory of social justice. Do that and society crumbles.

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For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law

December 1, 2014 victorhanson

The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.

Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls.

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The Forgotten Americans

November 26, 2014 victorhanson

Obama’s coalition is held together only by his personal mythography.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

President Obama rallies the faithful in Wisconsin, November 2012. (Scott Olseon/Getty)

Political analysts still are arguing over why the Democratic party was washed away in the midterm election. Since 2008, ascendant progressives had been crowing over a fresh mosaic of energized minorities, newly franchised immigrants, single young urban women, greens, gays, and — less often mentioned — upscale professionals and the 1-percenter super-wealthy.

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Meet the Snobocrats

November 25, 2014 victorhanson

Jonathan Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses is thematic of the last six years.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.

Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.

Gruber apparently thinks such deception is okay because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.

Continue reading “Meet the Snobocrats” →

VDH's Blade of Perseus

Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas

Like this:

Lying for the Cause

If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry?

Like this:

Ripples of Ferguson

Like this:

The End of Feminism

Like this:

War Clouds on the Horizon?

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance.

Like this:

Liberalism in Ruins

Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

Like this:

When the Law Is a Drag

Like this:

For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law

The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.

Like this:

The Forgotten Americans

Obama’s coalition is held together only by his personal mythography.

Like this:

Meet the Snobocrats

Jonathan Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses is thematic of the last six years.

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance.

Share this:

Like this:

Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.

Share this:

Like this:

Obama’s coalition is held together only by his personal mythography.

Share this:

Like this:

Jonathan Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses is thematic of the last six years.

Share this:

Like this: