by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama’s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute. Continue reading “Obama as Chaos”
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
At first glance, the Republicans seemed to be losing the so-called shut-down impasse, inasmuch as Obamacare, as the president termed it, was “settled law” and the Republicans did not have the congressional clout to overturn it. No one likes, after all, to be turned away from Yosemite on a pleasant autumn day, because of Beltway gymnastics.
Yet the politics are likely to change the longer this drags on, and at some point Obama will see the writing on the wall.
First, the legions of federally employed constituents, the lesser Lois Lerners of the bureaucracy, have played the shutdown badly. Like supervisors at the IRS, many want to freelance their pettiness to showcase their Obama fides—and thereby screw up. No one wishes to see veterans turned away from open-air monuments, while illegal aliens are invited into public federal spaces to protest against their supposedly insensitive host whose laws they are daily breaking (at a time of a government shutdown, try protesting en masse in the Zócalo in Mexico City for your inherent rights as an illegal, foreign resident of Mexico). Continue reading “Obama Will Cut a Deal Sooner Rather than Later”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
Barack Obama once had a lot of insightful things to say about the debt ceiling that transcended the usual political game of voting for debt-ceiling increases when your guy was president and against when he was not — and even some things that were quite blunt if not harsh about anyone who would be so reckless as not to address balancing the budget. According to Obama, raising the debt ceiling was a sign of leadership failure (“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure”), and a clear indication that the US was simply incapable of paying what it already owes (“It is a sign that the US government can’t pay its own bills”) — a fact that made us vulnerable to foreign pressures (“It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies”).
Continue reading “Dr. Barack and Mr. Obama on the Debt Ceiling”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
What Is Hip?
America has always been a country of self-invention. Yet there used to be some correlation between the life that one lived and the life that one professed. It was hard to be a phony in the grimy reality of the coal mine, the steel mill, the south 40 acres, or atop a girder over Manhattan. Continue reading “The Hipster Façade”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
Faster or Smarter, Neither, Both?
I am not a Luddite who wants to destroy looms. The modern age has made life comfortable in ways unimaginable just twenty years ago. Continue reading “High-Tech Nothing”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
Barack Obama’s favorability in the polls fell when he acted like himself — overexposed, hard-left in his press conferences, and boastful about legislative achievements like Obamacare and a stimulus of more than $1 trillion. Continue reading “The Un-Obama”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
The presidency of Barack Obama is full of funny things that need not follow any sort of logic. Continue reading “Obama’s Imaginarium”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
“They Did It!”
The president just concluded a frenzied “jobs” bus tour to explain why unemployment is at 9.1% — after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in stimulus the last three years. Continue reading “Atlas Is Sorta Shrugging”
by Bruce S. Thornton
FrontPage Magazine
Given our economic doldrums and the still metastasizing debt, the legislation raising the debt ceiling won’t keep the economy from dominating the nation’s attention until next year’s election. Continue reading “Taking Our Eye Off the Jihadist Ball”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Defining Ideas
President Barack Obama is more exasperated than ever as polls dip, critics multiply, and none of his massive borrowing seems to jump start a stalled economy. Continue reading “Obama Verses Obama”