by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
After the election, dozens of op-eds — I wrote one myself — cautioned the president about second-term overreach, focusing on how either hubris or simple fate has seemed to do in most modern second presidential terms. Continue reading “Obama’s Non-Triangulation”
by Bruce Thornton
Defining Ideas
The biggest political problem the United States faces — runaway entitlement costs on track to bankrupt the treasury — is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Even talking about it can be politically dangerous, as the Republicans learned in November and during the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. They chastised Mitt Romney’s post-election comments about the entitlement “gifts” President Obama promised voters. And the Republican demand that tax-hikes be linked to spending cuts to avoid the “fiscal cliff” was demonized as “holding the middle class hostage.”
Continue reading “Wards of the State”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
There is a new-year stampede developing that we have not seen for a long time.
Gun stores are swamped with panicking customers. They are looking for handguns, semi-automatic rifles and as much ammunition as they can afford. Continue reading “The Great New Year Stampede”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
The year 2012 saw the triumph of cold reality over pie-in-the-sky dreams.
Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change in the hope that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Continue reading “2012: When Dreams Died”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
Who exactly were the rich who, as the president said, were not “paying their fair share”? The rapper Jay-Z (net worth: nearly $500 million)? The actor Johnny Depp (2011 income: $50 million)? Neither seems to have heard the president’s earlier warning that, “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Continue reading “Let the Real Fat Cats Pay Their Fair Share”
by Bruce Thornton
Frontpage Magazine
The on-going negotiations over avoiding the tax hikes and spending cuts we call the “fiscal cliff” are simply the latest act in a farce of self-serving political denial. For decades now both parties have overseen and nurtured the expansion of the entitlement state all the while ignoring the slow-motion economic implosion whose predictable end can be seen today in a bankrupt Greece currently surviving on EU handouts. Continue reading “A Nation of Takers Hurtles Toward the Fiscal Abyss”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
Editor’s Note: These passages are drawn from recent articles on The Corner.
Obama’s Real Legacy
Barack Obama’s cries from the heart as a senator about the possibility of a Bush intervention in Iran being a de facto violation of the War Powers Act have been widely circulated — juxtaposed to his sophistic gymnastics about bombs over Libya not really being much more than “kinetic action” and thus exempt from the Act. Continue reading “The Evidence of a Bankrupt Populism”