VDH’s Weekly Spot on Garrison
VDH on The John Gibson Show
Al Qaeda: The Defender of Christians?
by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com
Muslim persecution of Christians is the “Achilles Heel” of the global Islamic movement’s 
image—the surest way of exposing its supremacist and intolerant elements and one of the main reasons the major media and establishment rarely report or address it.
The logic (fully explained here) can be summarized as follows:
Islamic and jihadi attacks targeting the West or Israel pose no problem to the image of Islam. No matter how violent or brutal, no matter how many Islamic slogans are shrieked—“Allah commands the subjugation of infidels!”—Muslim violence against the West and Israel will always be dismissed as desperate acts of disempowered, oppressed, and frustrated Muslims—the “underdogs,” which the West tends to romanticize.
And so they will always get a free pass, without further reflection. Continue reading “Al Qaeda: The Defender of Christians?”
Our Icarus-in-Chief
Obama’s global fantasies are falling to earth along with him.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
In the last two weeks, we learned that Bashar Assad has dismantled only 5 percent of his WMD arsenal, despite President Obama’s soaring rhetoric 
to the contrary. Russia violated a long-observed agreement with the U.S. about testing missiles. Iran’s take on the negotiations over its bomb program bears no resemblance to our interpretation. Chinese officials now happily leak fantastic stories about using their military to punish Japan. All that is trumped by veiled threats from the Sunni Gulf monarchies, terrified of Iran, to buy a bomb or two from Pakistan. We hear other rumors that even China thinks the new leadership in North Korea is unhinged and is not worried about friendly warnings from Beijing.
Whether all these incidents are minor or serious, and whether they are random or interconnected and perceived as proof of the loss of U.S. deterrence, depends on which particular bad actor is studying them to try to guess whether the Obama administration will do anything should a provocateur start a war or attempt to redraw a regional map.
In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth. Continue reading “Our Icarus-in-Chief”
Executive Tyranny: The Problem’s Bigger Than Obama
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine
Barack Obama is threatening to bypass Congress and use executive orders to achieve the policy changes he can’t get through legislation. “We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need,” he said during the State of the Union address. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.” Here seemingly is one more item in the indictment of Barack Obama’s arrogant dismissal of the Constitutional order, and his contempt for mixed government. Continue reading “Executive Tyranny: The Problem’s Bigger Than Obama”
A Beat-up, Exhausted, and Terrified Republican Establishment
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
On almost every contemporary issue there is a populist, middle-class argument to be made against elite liberalism. Yet the Republican class in charge seems ossified in its inability to make a counter-argument for the middle class. Never has the liberal agenda been so vulnerable, a logical
development when bad ideas have had five years to prove themselves as very bad ideas. When Obama is all done he will have taken high presidential popularity ratings, a supermajority in the Senate, and a large margin in the House and lost them all — if only the Republicans can make an adequate case that they represent the middle class, the Democrats only the very wealthy and the very dependent.
Illegal Immigration
We know the entry of 11 million illegal aliens depresses the wages of the poor and entry-level working class. Illegal immigration overwhelms state services, and that too hurts citizens most in need of help. The lower-middle classes do not have low-paid nannies, gardeners, and house-keepers. We know the illegal influx pleases La Raza activists, most of them second- and third-generation elites in government, politics, journalism and education, who without illegal immigration would not have much of a moral or legal justification for the continuance of affirmative action and identity politics, given that statistically Latinos would soon follow the pattern of other assimilated groups. (For example, is there affirmative action for Armenian immigrants? An Italian Razza movement? Punjabi Studies?) Continue reading “A Beat-up, Exhausted, and Terrified Republican Establishment”
Hope and Change: Take VI
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
The anemic retread speech was mostly another yearly pep-talk version of the original “summer of recovery”/“millions of new green jobs” boilerplate, “big bank accounts” bad -ich-guy stuff, and “we’re out of Iraq”/close Guantanamo again.” Been there, done that. Continue reading “Hope and Change: Take VI”
The Poison of Postmodern Lying
by Victor David Hanson // Tribune Content Agency
All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore — a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture.
Postmodernism (the cultural fad “after modernism”) went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like “truth” were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society — and now they have.
Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was recently caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals, lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid for her Harvard Law School education. Continue reading “The Poison of Postmodern Lying”
VDH’s Weekly Spot on Garrison
The Death of the Humanities
A liberal arts education was once a gateway to wisdom; now it can breed ignorance and arrogance.
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas
The humanities are in their latest periodic crisis. Though the causes of the
ongoing decline may be debated, everyone accepts the dismal news about eroding university enrollments, ever fewer new faculty positions, the decline in majors, and the lack of jobs for humanities graduates. Less than 8% of current BA degrees are awarded to humanities majors. The New York Times recently reported that while 45% of the undergraduate faculty at Stanford teach in the humanities, only 15% of the students major in them.
Of course, the numbers of humanities majors have been in decline since the 1970s. But what seems different today is that the humanities are less sacrosanct in the university. Literature, philosophy, and art are no longer immune from budget cuts by virtue of their traditional intrinsic value to the university. Either Continue reading “The Death of the Humanities”