The New Left Trumps the Old Right

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Anti-Semitism, racism, deception, and dirty tricks: For progressives, the ends justify the means.

‘White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through.”

So spoke recently our Nietzschean Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

There is almost nothing new in his latest hate-filled accusations. Farrakhan in the past has praised Hitler and derided Judaism as a gutter religion. Yet I say “almost nothing new” because the 84-year-old Farrakhan is now empowered by a new generation of leftist, minority, and feminist activists such as Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour, who coordinate marches with Farrakhan or ardently praise him.

Not long ago, Representative Danny Davis (D., Ill.) spoke up in behalf of Farrakhan, calling him  “an outstanding human being.” Davis went on to use an unfortunate choice of words: “The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question.”

“The Jewish question”?

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The Rapid ‘Progress’ of Progressivism

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

It leads to an endless race for equality and erodes prior rules.Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. There were only two attendants to accommodate eleven passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance.

Such growing efforts to ensure that the physically challenged can easily fly are certainly welcome. But when our plane landed — late and in danger of causing many passengers to miss their connecting flights — most of the eleven wheelchair-bound passengers left their seats unassisted and hurried out. It was almost as if newfound concerns about making connections had somehow improved their health during the flight.  

Two passengers had boarded with two dogs each. No doubt the airlines’ policy of allowing an occasional dog on a flight is understandable. But now planes are starting to sound and smell like kennels.

Putin’s nuclear posturing part of effort to win back displeased public

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This article is by a colleague of mine: Dr. Paul Gregory // The Hill

Vladimir Putin served up his election platform for his perfunctory March 18 re-election in his annual address to the two houses of Russia’s parliament on Thursday. Putin addressed two audiences — the Russian people and his external enemies, namely the U.S. and NATO.

Putin promised his domestic audience that, with him in the Kremlin, they can enjoy both guns and butter. He will maintain a strong military that can withstand any threat from the West, which Putin’s propaganda has convinced the Russian people is real.

Some three-quarters of Russians consider the U.S. a threat, and almost 60 percent fear NATO. True, military spending is up, but, with Putin’s wise leadership, living standards will rise, inflation will be dampened and poverty rates will fall.

Russia voters should be thankful to their president (according to him) for restoring Russia to its rightful status as a superpower, even though it meant a cost in terms of living standards…

Read more here

Strategika Issue 48: U.S. Military Policy in Afghanistan

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Since the war in Afghanistan began in late 2001, three successive presidential administrations have claimed that the Taliban are on the verge of collapse, the Afghan military is close to securing the country, and Afghan leaders in Kabul are just one step away from providing legitimate governance.

Click here to read more at the Hoover Institution

Trump Syndromes

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Trump creates hysteria, both rabid antipathies and fervent support.

General chaos surrounds President Trump. Few dispute that. All argue over the origins, causes, and nature of these wild reactions to our president.

The Left’s Hatred

Take the Left’s loathing of Trump that arises from three sources.

First, Trump supposedly has no shame. The traditional leftist use of invectives such as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” and “nativist” appears to have had little effect on Trump — as it seems to have done on McCain (who in 2008 ruled out attacks on Obama’s personal pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright) and Romney (who passed on standing down debate moderator and rank partisan Candy Crowley).

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Trump’s Generals Are Too Valuable to Be Dismissed

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Victor Davis Hanson // Town Hall

Near-daily gossip surrounds Donald Trump’s three marquee generals.

The media sometimes blare out rumors that Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, is proving to be a loose cannon and might soon be fired.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, is occasionally rumored to be a robotic PowerPoint wonk and hawkish interventionist who soon might be terminated.

Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis is purportedly too much the centrist Democrat, and embarrassed by Trump’s antics, and thus might be leaving.

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The Real Russian Disaster

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Donald Trump has said a lot of silly stuff about Russia, from joking about Vladimir Putin helping to find Hillary’s deleted emails, to naïve musings about the extent of Russian interference into Western democratic elections. But far more important than what he has said is what Trump has done. That same caveat applies to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Start with two givens: Vladimir Putin is neither stupid nor content to watch an aging, shrinking, corrupt, and dysfunctional — but still large and nuclear — Russia recede to second- or third-power status. From 2009 to 2015, in one of the most remarkable and Machiavellian efforts in recent strategic history, Putin almost single-handedly parlayed a deserved losing hand into a winning one. He pulled this off by flattering, manipulating, threatening, and outsmarting an inept and politically obsessed Obama administration.

Under the Obama presidency and the tenures of Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, Russia made astounding strategic gains — given its intrinsic economic, social, and military weaknesses. The Obama reaction was usually incoherent (Putin was caricatured as a “bored kid in the back of the classroom” or as captive of a macho shtick). After each aggressive Russian act, the administration lectured that “it is not in Russia’s interest to . . . ” — as if Obama knew better than a thuggish Putin what was best for autocratic Russia.

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The Labyrinth of Oppressions

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

When the human experience is simplistically divided into two worlds, then things increasingly do not easily fit.

Specifically, what happens when the number of victims begins to outnumber the pool of oppressors? At that point can the oppressed become victims of the oppressed?

The following news stories illustrate the increasingly incoherent world of the aggrieved and their aggressors:

Item: Nancy Pelosi is on a tour to blast the new tax reform and reduction law, whose savings often will result in $1,000 or more per annum to families. The law already had encouraged private enterprise bonuses to employees due to employer savings. Pelosi habitually scoffs that such savings are “crumbs.” At a recent speech, after she intoned that income inequality would be exacerbated, a woman in the audience shouted out, “How much are you worth, Nancy?”

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Rethinking Watergate

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Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution

The Watergate break-in is now 45 years old. The scandal is as distant from our own time as it was once from 1928. The median age of Americans is about 38 years old. Half of all Americans were likely born after the break-in. But Watergate is hardly ancient history.

The fumes of Watergate waft around the current FISA-gate scandal. The now septuagenarians Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, of All the President’s Men fame, are back in the news. As seasoned crusading reporters, they currently offer admonitions that Donald Trump is replaying the role of a supposedly paranoid and imperious Richard Nixon.

But is he? The two investigative journalists who first brought Watergate to public attention are certainly not wrong about parallels—but not in the way they imagine. FISA-gate is becoming Watergate turned upside down. The respective roles of the government, liberal Democrats, civil libertarians, and the White House are now reversed—and this turnaround is, in a strange way, redefining Watergate itself.

In 1973-74, civil libertarians were shocked at White House efforts to use the CIA to suppress information about the break-in at the Watergate complex and the subsequent efforts to hide or misrepresent it. They were rightly outraged that the Nixon reelection campaign broke the law in efforts to find dirt on Democrats. They were incredulous that the White House used hush money to silence those charged with the crime, and to hide the origins and transference of such payments.

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The Paradoxes of the Mueller Investigation

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

They are numerous, and none of them are good news for President Trump’s opponents.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is zero.

Some of the Russians’ Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller’s team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election’s outcome.

But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes, and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does.

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