by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Says It All<\/strong><\/p>\n 1) a new poll revealing a vast majority of investors see Obama as anti-business<\/p>\n 2) Obama declaiming on what he has done and what he will do to create jobs<\/p>\n 3) After a year Obama still has not yet figured out that his promiscuous talk of higher income, payroll, healthcare, and inheritance taxes, serial demonization of finance and business, and all sorts of new regulations, create a psychological climate in which the employer pulls in his horns and decides to ride things out\u2014and this individual reaction is being repeated millions of times over, energized by the pique at everything trivial from Van Jones to apologies abroad to \u201cBush did it.\u201d<\/p>\n What Did They Expect?<\/strong><\/p>\n Now that the voters of Massachusetts have splashed our hypnotized young god back into his own reflecting pool, it is almost surreal to follow the left\u2019s sudden petulance and occasional hysteria \u2014 akin to the climate of 2005-6 among some of the right when the once pro-Iraq War neocons began bailing and heading for the exits.<\/p>\n Then some of the most vehement pro-war sounding zealots suddenly swore that they had never supported the invasion at all. I think I called it at the time \u201cmy victory; your defeat\u201d to explain their chameleonism between 2003 and 2006.<\/p>\n This present liberal bloodletting will continue, as Obama\u2019s polls dip even more, and the next liberal Coakley appears in the political cross-hairs. The left neither quite understands the populist outrage nor would have a clue how to deflate if it did. (One of the most painful things to watch was Obama\u2019s anti-Scott Brown stump speech: a perfect storm of gaffes in which he showed no knowledge of Brown\u2019s record, slipped into his faux-black-pulpit cadences, did the old \u201cBush did it\u201d whine, made silly jokes about pick-up trucks (can one imagine Obama driving up and down Illinois in one?), and reflected once again the Obama brand of thinking that the people are deluded and must be warned by a philosopher-king not to do what is not good for them.)<\/p>\n There is a pent-up fury that is a dividend of a year\u2019s bad economic news, the constant presidential condescension, and the hubris of false hope and change\u2014and we have not seen the extent of it yet. The people are weary of being talked down to as if they don\u2019t understand climate change, as if they don\u2019t get the inside scoop on deficit spending, as if they can\u2019t appreciate the brilliance of massive new government entitlements, as if they need moral sermons hourly on their race\/class\/gender shortcomings, and as if they can\u2019t quite fathom why KSM, the terrorist warrior who planned the killing of 3,000 Americans and declared al Qaeda at war with us, must be tried like a bank robber in New York. (Perhaps during the Battle of the Bulge we should have shipped back captured German saboteurs to New York for trials.)<\/p>\n We, the Ignorant<\/strong><\/p>\n Meanwhile on planet earth I was thinking of Secretary\u2019s Chu\u2019s warning that our farms in California would \u201cdry up and blow away\u201d as today I chain sawed limbs from a week of horrific storms and flooding, and prepare tomorrow to go to Huntington Lake to dig out 10 feet of snow from the house.<\/p>\n Our populists seem to be shouting back at Washington, \u201cWe\u2019re tired of you\u2014at least we don\u2019t cheat on our taxes, at least we pay our bills and don\u2019t call maxing out the charge card \u2018stimulus,\u2019 and at least when we say we are going to do something, we do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Republicans must be gleeful as an inept Obama in some sort of delusion now claims that the prairie-fire pushback dovetails with his own Ascension in 2008. Oh yes, Barack\u2014those who voted for a conservative in Massachusetts surely are the same sort of angry voters who turned out in droves for your hope and change mantra?<\/p>\n And, therefore, of course, fresh new liberal mavericks in places like Utah and Alabama will soon be leading grass-roots rebellions against entrenched conservative incumbents to emulate Massachusetts. And, yes, we are to believe that Obama himself never used the term \u201ctea-bagger\u201d, and warmly embraced the Town-hallers, as he had the rural folk of Pennsylvania?<\/p>\n And, yes, Barack, the reason that you are experiencing an historic crash in the polls and your coattails are radioactive is, as you said, because you did not speak often enough to the American people \u2014 not enough interviews, cover stories, photo-ops, presidential addresses, staged press conferences, and perpetual campaign teleprompted stump speeches.<\/p>\n This sort of unreality will ensure that the Obama flame continues to engulf the congress of liberal moths that swarm to it. Did Obama really think the laws of physics did not apply to him \u2014 that one can in a year and a half run up over $3 trillion without consequences or nominate a nut like Van Jones or bow to a Saudi royal or denigrate the police or serially break his promises or attempt to socialize medicine or that employment comes as manna from heaven once a rhetorician calls for so many billions to be borrowed for so many millions of jobs?<\/p>\n Fodder for Conspiracists<\/strong><\/p>\n The Left cannot face the truth that this is for a generation or so longer a center-right country that in defiance is rejecting the statism of Obama\u2014and therefore it will construct a ludicrous hypothesis that Obama\u2019s failure is predicated on his being too centrist. That way, they can disguise their own desire to distance themselves from an unpopular, and, for now, losing cause, by some sort of adherence to a higher principle.<\/p>\n Obama, again for now, will blame congressional candidates, subordinates, the media (yes, imagine that), all for matters of poor tactics and communication that prevented us dunces from appreciating the Obama godhead. In truth, he must be some sort of Manchurian candidate working under deep cover for the Republican Party, since his first year has translated into tens of millions of dollars in free conservative advertising, proselytizing, and public relations.<\/p>\n Politically-correctness on the Richter Scale Metaphor<\/strong><\/p>\n I confess I have no apologies to critics over my using the Richter scale metaphor in the last blog. I live in California and work in the seismically-active Bay Area. In the last 50 years I can recall dozens of major earthquakes and aftershocks, and they are a way of life here. I cannot monitor my speech because of the deadly nature of such realities in Haiti, any more than I would because a city in Iran or thousands in China are leveled, and many have been in this millennium. To do so, would mean because of Hiroshima we can\u2019t use the \u201cnuclear option\u201d to describe congressional action, or a \u201cpolitical tsunami\u201d or a \u201cpresidential hurricane\u201d or \u201c perfect storm\u201d.<\/p>\n Serious readers know well enough not to confuse metaphorical usage of the \u201cRichter scale\u201d and \u201caftershocks\u201d with insensitivity toward Haiti. I don\u2019t think we want to set rules that require suspension of metaphorical and allegorical evocation of particular natural disasters every time one strikes.<\/p>\n We also see the pernicious effects of PC in the latest Pentagon white paper on the Ft. Hood massacres, in which Hasan is not identified as an Islamic zealot acting out religiously-driven extremism. PC (which serves a variety of purposes from stifling free expression to claiming some mythical higher moral ground through gratuitous censure) ends only when we collectively shrug, and sigh, \u201cLinguistic extortion has zero influence on me.\u201d I went through all that in 2003 with Mexifornia, when I was scolded in debates and reviews for the use of \u201cillegal alien\u201d instead of the more ideologically correct, but imprecise \u201cundocumented workers\u201d\u2014despite the fact that at least 25% of illegal aliens in California themselves were not employed and very few had documents in the first place that could become un- anything.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Says It All 1) a new poll revealing a vast majority of investors see Obama as anti-business 2) Obama declaiming on what he has done and what he will do to create jobs 3) After a year Obama still has not yet figured out that his promiscuous talk of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-up","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2985,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/time-to-beam-down-to-earth\/","url_meta":{"origin":1885,"position":0},"title":"Time to Beam Down to Earth","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Last week the United States got lucky again and took out several suspected terrorists by Predator drone attacks over Pakistan. Anti-war critics prior to Jan. 20 used to decry \"collateral damage\" from such controversial strikes. But there was a weird silence here about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2451,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-verses-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":1885,"position":1},"title":"Obama Verses Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"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. He seems bewildered that House Republicans did not immediately agree to his tax increases proposals, and confused over\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "First Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"First Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/first-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":362,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-3\/","url_meta":{"origin":1885,"position":2},"title":"Angry Reader #3","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Angry Reader #3 writes: I won\u2019t take the time to deconstruct your little essay line by line but trust me, almost everything you post is pure, unadulterated, kool-aid-inspired nonsense straight from the fever-swamp of the Reich-wing disinformation echo-chamber, all of it intended to create\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1853,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-usual-straw-men\/","url_meta":{"origin":1885,"position":3},"title":"The Usual Straw Men","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Cap-and-trade, statist healthcare, and an end to \u201cdon\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell\u201d for thee. And for thou, Obama the tax cutter, Obama the gas-and-oil driller, Obama the budget freezer, Obama the anti-lobbyist reformer, Obama the bipartisan healer? This half-hearted pivoting was quite transparent: Obama made\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2010"","block_context":{"text":"February 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/february-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1211,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-rope-a-dope\/","url_meta":{"origin":1885,"position":4},"title":"The Obama Rope-a-dope","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services After 2010, will he be Carter or Clinton? That is the ongoing parlor game now played among pundits over how President Obama will react to a probable shellacking of the Democrats in midterm elections next month. Jimmy Carter stuck to his liberal agenda\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2010"","block_context":{"text":"October 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/october-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9165,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-buck-never-stops-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":1885,"position":5},"title":"The Buck Never Stops Here","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 17, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services In a cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, President Obama offers astonishing scapegoating for his own foreign policy disasters.According to Obama, the deterioration of the ISIS wasteland that is now Libya was not due to improvident administration bombing followed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1886,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions\/1886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}