Tag: Presidential Elections

2017 and the End of Ethics

victorhanson

Will the Obama-era hypocrisy continue with the next president takes office?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

Photo Credit: NS Newsflash via FlickrWill there be a scandal if the new political appointees at the IRS sic their auditors on Moveon.org? What will the Washington Post say should the new president keep Guantanamo Bay open for five more years, quadruple the number of drone missions, or decide to double renditions? Will it say that he was shredding the Constitution, or that he found the terror threat too great to honor past promises?

Will NPR run an exposé on our next president should she tap into Angela Merkel’s cell phone, or monitor the communications of Associated Press reporters — and their parents? Will investigative reporters go after the president should he falsely claim that an ambassador and three other U.S. personnel died in the Middle East during a video-sparked spontaneous riot? Or if he then jails the filmmaker for a year on a trumped-up parole-violation charge? Continue reading “2017 and the End of Ethics” →

Needed: A Different Sort of President

victorhanson

Charismatic career politicians don’t make the best commanders-in-chief.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

The second terms of the latest three presidents have not been successful. Bill Clinton was impeached after his infamous lie to Americans, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Photo Credit: Loomingy1 via FlickrGeorge W. Bush was blamed for the postwar violence in Iraq.

Barack Obama’s scandals — with his accompanying “limited hangout” denials — are ruining his second term: the growing IRS messes, the Associated Press monitoring, the NSA embarrassments, the Benghazi killings, the Syria bluster and backdown, and, of course, the Obamacare fiasco and the misleading statements about it.

What are other common denominators of this collective tenure of our recent presidents?

After popular first terms and reelection, they seemed to have lost public confidence and the ability to continue an agenda.

Do two terms wear out a president?

Maybe the hubris of getting reelected convinces our commanders-in-chief that they are mostly beyond reproach. Overreach ensues. Then the goddess Nemesis descends in destructive fashion to remind them that they are mere mortals. Continue reading “Needed: A Different Sort of President” →

Vote for Me Or Else: Patterns between Egypt and Pakistan

victorhanson

by Raymond Ibrahim // Gatestone Institute 

In what seems to be a pattern in many Muslim nations of finding new pretexts to justify anti-Christian—and “anti-Other”—behavior, Egypt’s Christians and their churches are under attack, ostensibly because Christians joined the June 30 Revolution, which led to the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lesser known is that, even before the revolution back during the 2012 presidential elections, Christians were often threatened and sometimes attacked simply for not voting for the Muslim Brotherhood—an absurd expectation considering that it has long been the Brotherhood and its many Islamist/jihadi offshoots that have terrorized Egypt’s Christians for decades. Continue reading “Vote for Me Or Else: Patterns between Egypt and Pakistan” →