The Unforgiving Moment

Photo of Genuino Ferreira Madruga via JPP Photography

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Life is turned upside down in a nanosecond.

This weekend I missed my first posting at PJ Media since beginning in 2006.

Why? Let me briefly explain the lapse — if I can be forgiven for comparing a bike accident with what I have seen on the farm the last 50 years (sliced off fingers, crushed legs, herbicide poisonings, manifold burns, etc.).

I was going on a usual morning bike ride — safe stuff with like-minded older folks. I’m 60; so is my biking partner and fellow Hoover Institution associate Bruce Thornton. We are hardly reckless. (Not like sulfuring at midnight recklessly in one’s 20s in the old days without goggles or mask.)

We usually go deliberately during off-traffic hours when cars are rare, on little-traveled roads and bike paths. We always follow the same direction over the same 32-mile route. After nine years we have memorized every bump, cracked bit of pavement, bad stop light, etc. We bike slowly, about 14-15 mph, always in single file.  We are, after all, 60 and hear daily horrific stories of injured and dead bikers.

Continue reading “The Unforgiving Moment”

An Immigration Morality Tale

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 

If there are executive orders overriding federal immigration law to extend amnesty to foreign nationals, without legal residence, and to continue their educations, there are also de facto all sorts of un-Dream Acts that simply allow anyone wishing to enter the United States without much audit. In other words, one of the strangest things about illegal immigration is that a nation that is monitored, taped, videoed, and bugged, that is struggling now with the AP, IRS, and NSA scandals whose common theme is excessive government intrusions in our private lives, knows absolutely nothing about those who arrive illegally into the U.S. Continue reading “An Immigration Morality Tale”

The Obamacare Generation

The ACA depends on Millennials picking up the tab — as they already are for other entitlements — in the midst of a bad economy.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

There are all sorts of time bombs embedded within Obamacare.

Will we force doctors to treat the millions of new Medicaid patients who are signing up for services that can be only partially reimbursed? How exactly will the IRS collect penalties from millions of off-the-books youth who choose not to buy coverage? Continue reading “The Obamacare Generation”

Obama and the Suspension of Disbelief

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 

Adding straws of scandal — Fast and Furious, the Associated Press monitoring, the IRS fiasco, and the NSA spying — on any presidential back except Barack Obama’s would have long ago broken it. Watergate ruined Richard Nixon. Iran-Contra earned a special prosecutor and nearly destroyed the Reagan second term. Katrina’s incompetent local and state reactions, coupled with a tardy federal effort — and the insurgency in postwar Iraq — ended the viability of George W. Bush in his second term. Continue reading “Obama and the Suspension of Disbelief”

Affordable Care or Patient Protection or Obamacare?

by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

There are some rumors that the administration wants to distance itself from the slang “Obamacare,” a term the president embraced in the 2012 campaign but now finds hurtful to his polls and his colleagues in the Congress. Continue reading “Affordable Care or Patient Protection or Obamacare?”

Obama’s Noble Lies

Stop worrying whether the president’s statements conform to ossified standards if truth.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

What is the common denominator of the Obama administration’s serial scandals — the Justice Department’s spying on AP, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the NSA surveillance, the lies about Benghazi and the ACA — and much of the White House damage-control rhetoric? In a word: the advancement of postmodern notions of justice at the expense of traditional truth.Photo Credit: Jason Borneman via Flickr

By the 1980s, in law schools, university social-science departments, and the humanities in general, the old relativist idea of Plato’s noble lies was given a new French facelift. Traditional morality and ethics were dismissed as arbitrary constructs, predicated on privileged notions of race, class, and gender. The new moral architecture did not rely on archaic abidance by the niceties of “truth,” which simply reinforced traditional oppressive hierarchies.

Instead, social justice by definition transcended the sham of traditional ideas of truth and falsity. The true became the advocacy of fairness, while the real lie was the reactionary adherence to a set of oppressive norms. All this was faculty-lounge fluff, but soon it filtered out into the larger culture.

In this regard, it was understandable that the New York Times characterized the president’s not telling the truth on over 20 occasions as cases of “misspeaking.” Continue reading “Obama’s Noble Lies”

Obamacare Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare!

by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

In the next 90 days, the Obama administration will have to declare victory and then abandon most Photo Credit: Tabitha Kaylee Hawk via Flickrof Obamacare.

The legislation defies the laws of physics—more and broader coverage for more people at less cost—as well as logic: Young people, on average as a cohort with higher debt and less employment, will pay more for coverage they do not use much to subsidize others, often better off, to pay less for coverage they use a lot. It will be interesting how the administration pulls it off, given its past record of often being successful at this sort of dissimulation.

The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”—despite the euphemistic name, the legislation has caused millions to lose their coverage and upped the costs for millions more—is a stone around the necks of Democratic congressional candidates, and something political will have to be done within the next year to address it. Continue reading “Obamacare Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare!”

The Obamacare Ten-Step Self-Help Program

by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner

As all the still underappreciated contours of Obamacare become known, and as those who hold employer-provided plans will soon discover their existing “scams” also do not pass ACA muster, the public will begin to understand that Obamacare is another redistributive zero-sum plan to transfer wealth from one segment of the less-deserving population to another more deserving.

Like most other Obama policies, there are the usual footprints and assumptions that accompany the too-clever-by-half redistribution.  Continue reading “The Obamacare Ten-Step Self-Help Program”

Questions Rarely Asked–and Never Answered

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 

It Can’t Happen Here?

What does it take to warn Americans about unchecked pension growth, socialized medicine, vast increases in Photo Credit: Lester Public Library via Flickrentitlements, higher taxes, and steady expansion of government? In other words, what is it about DetroitItaly, or Greece that we do not understand?

In the last five years, the Obama administration has raised taxes on the top income rates, implemented Obamacare, added millions to the disability and food stamp roles, grown the size of the federal work force, run up the national debt, and vastly expanded the money supply, along with insuring near zero interest rates. Are there any historical examples where these redistributive efforts have brought long-term tranquility and prosperity?

To put it another way, does anyone ask basic questions about human nature anymore? If one gives more incentives to obtain government support while unemployed, why would not fewer people be working? If the food stamp, unemployment, and disability rolls are markedly up, and if it is almost impossible to verify that recipients are also not working for unreported cash wages (we hear mostly of government efforts to add more to these programs, rather than to audit those already on them), why would one seek a “regular” job that would lose such subsidies and make all one’s income reportable? (We know two basic truths about the IRS in the age of Obama: first, it goes after political opponents in partisan fashion, and second, it gives away billions of dollars in federal income tax rebate credits to those who did not deserve them.) Continue reading “Questions Rarely Asked–and Never Answered”

ObamaCare and the Techocratic Abyss

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

The continuing disaster of the Obamacare website, like the law itself, illustrates one of the biggest bad ideas of the Progressive movement, one that reflects a central assumption of modernity: that new knowledge is now available that will allow an elite of technicians to order society more justly and efficiently, and eliminate the tragic realities of existence. Progressives bought into this idea wholesale, and ever since have wanted to expand the scope and reach of the state in order to empower those technocrats so they can lead Americans into a world of justice, equality, prosperity, and universal happiness. The metastasizing federal government now bankrupting the country is the creation of this dubious proposition. Continue reading “ObamaCare and the Techocratic Abyss”