by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years — mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina. Continue reading “Oh, We Forgot to Tell You . . .”
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Supporters of President Obama have dubbed those who question administration statements about Libya as either partisans or conspiracy theorists, on the premise that the administration had no reason to dissimulate. But in fact, it had plenty of political reasons not to be candid, as the following questions make clear. Continue reading “Oh What a Tangled Web”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
David Petraeus’s resignation marks the end of one of the great postwar military and government careers — his successful surge in Iraq being analogous to and as impressive as Matthew Ridgway’s salvation of Korea or Sherman’s sudden taking of Atlanta that saved Lincoln’s and the Union cause before the 1864 elections. In a book due out in late spring, The Savior Generals, I argue that his achievements were comparable to those of the best of history’s maverick commanders who were asked to save wars deemed lost — and did. But for now, the explanation of Petraeus’s resignation unfortunately raises more questions than it answers, in a number of significant ways: Continue reading “Down from Olympus”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
At some point the prurient angle of the Petraeus story that alone enticed a reluctant media into becoming tangentially interested in Benghazi-gate — in the way the deaths of four Americans never did — will die down. Then we are left with largely three unanswered questions of far greater importance that will probably not be answered. Continue reading “Too Many Narratives to Get Straight?”
by Bruce Thornton
FrontPage Magazine
The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior — whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad — is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now. Continue reading “The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
In the last week, it is almost as if the entire American moral landscape has been turned upside down in eerie fashion — in matters that vastly transcend fornication and adultery. The Petraeus-gate matter is the stuff of tabloids now; but soon the real issues relating to when and what Eric Holder knew, and by extension the president, and how exactly Benghazi (the crime of indifference to the besieged, the cover-up of the truth, the actual mission of our consulate and annex) fits into this labyrinth of deceit, both petty and fundamental, may overshadow the present sensationalism. Continue reading “A Country Unhinged”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
“Gonna be some hard times coming down.”
—Kris Kristofferson, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
One way of making sense out of nonsense in this new age is simply to believe the opposite of what you read. I have been doing that and it often works. Continue reading “Anatomies of Electoral Madness”
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
We have had ambassadors murdered abroad before, but we have never seen anything quite like the tragic fate of Chris Stevens. Amid all the controversy over Libya, we have lost sight of the human — and often horrific — story of Benghazi: a US ambassador attacked, cut off and killed alone, after being abused by frenzied terrorists, and a Continue reading “The Wages of Libya”
by Bruce Thornton
FrontPage Magazine
Foreign policy, the topic of tonight’s debate, was suddenly thrust into the voters’ consciousness by the murder of 4 Americans, including our ambassador, in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11. Intensifying the fallout of this event has been the Obama administration’s incoherent, clumsy, duplicitous, and rapidly unraveling attempt to blame the terrorist murders on a YouTube movie trailer lampooning Mohammed, in order to downplay the strength of the heavily armed jihadist outfits, some connected to al Qaeda, now swarming in Libya as a result of our overthrow of Muammar Gadhafi. Continue reading “The Stakes in Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
In the past — in Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, etc. — the murder of an American ambassador sparked immediate debates over security lapses, but in the Libyan case the media seems to be doing its best not to investigate the circumstances around the murders. Continue reading “The Ever-Stranger Case of a Murdered US Ambassador”