by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Not in Good Form<\/strong><\/p>\n Based on a few of President Obama\u2019s statements, this was not a particularly good week for the administration. In a disturbing pattern, we are beginning to learn far more about Obama in his impromptu moments, in periods of national crisis, or in off-the-record reported bantering, than in his set teleprompted speeches. Consider some of the things the President said the past week \u2014 and then imagine what he might have said.<\/p>\n A Little More Spirit, a Little Less Cool<\/strong><\/p>\n In his reaction to the horror at Fort Hood, Obama, in detached fashion, urged Americans not to rush to judgment about the motives of the killer Major Nidal Malik Hasan \u2014 despite immediate reports that Hasan had screamed out \u201cAllahu Akabar,\u201d as well as been known to post on the Internet inflammatory anti-American, and radical Islamic messages. Each day more incriminating information is released about a clear past record of inflammatory hate speech directed at the U.S. military.<\/p>\n What if the President had said something quite different? \u2014 something a little bit more angry like, \u201cAll Americans have had it with these mass murderers, whether formal terrorist plotters or individual assassins. I promise you we will find out what motivates a Major Hasan \u2014 and do my best to ensure that there are no more Major Hasans in our future.\u201d<\/p>\n We are not asking Obama to rush to judgment before the facts are in (e.g., in the manner of the Professor Gates mess, in which he, in Pavlovian fashion, immediately condemned the Cambridge police as acting \u201cstupidly\u201d through stereotyped racial profiling) \u2014 only that he express some sort of visceral outrage at this serial killing of innocent Americans.<\/p>\n Dumb Analogies<\/strong><\/p>\n President Obama also reportedly gave a pep talk to Democratic legislators on the eve of last Saturday night\u2019s successful passage of the House version of his government medical plan. According to Rep. Robert Andrews, D-NJ, Obama at this juncture referenced the Fort Hood massacres. His \u201cremarks put in perspective that the hardships soldiers endure for the country are \u2018what sacrifice really is,\u2019 as opposed to \u2018casting a vote that might lose an election for you.\u2019\u201d (This from a politician who voted \u201cpresent\u201d for political reasons as a matter of habit, and compiled the most partisan voting record in the U.S. Senate.)<\/p>\n And according to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, President Obama also quipped, \u201cDoes anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down healthcare? All it will do is confuse and dispirit.\u201d \u2026 \u201cand it will encourage the extremists.\u201d<\/p>\n Surely the President has learned that \u201ctea-bag\u201d has become a derogatory sexual slur, used by those on the Left to deride any who attend the so-called Tea-parties \u2014 the vast majority of whom are neither \u201cextremists\u201d nor intrinsically \u201canti-government people.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of all this, what if the President of the United States had not called for a Saturday night vote on healthcare, in which he used the outrage over the Fort Hood horror to win back wavering votes, while slurring his enemies. What if instead he had said something like, \u201cLet\u2019s have the debate and vote take place in prime afternoon time, to encourage the American people to follow the proceedings. And let us conduct the entire process without calling each other names.\u201d<\/p>\n Has Robert Gibbs Been on Mars?<\/strong><\/p>\n Speaking of alluding to terrorist violence for partisan political purposes, recently the anguished Press Secretary Robert Gibbs complained of the sad state of partisan debate over healthcare.<\/p>\n \u201cImagine five years ago somebody comparing healthcare reform to 9\/11,\u201d Gibbs lamented. \u201cImagine just a few years ago, had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n Is this man sane?<\/p>\n \u201cImagine?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHitler\u201d? You think?<\/p>\n For the last eight years, it was considered good liberal politics to evoke Hitler in smearing George Bush. In fact, just about that time in question \u2014 when in 2003-5 the then silent Robert Gibbs had resigned as the then press secretary to presidential candidate John Kerry and had helped form a political group to attack Howard Dean and then later joined the Obama Senate campaign that was a beneficiary of the leaked divorced records of\u00a0mirabile dictu<\/em>\u00a0both his primary and general election opponents \u2014 I wrote an article precisely about Gibbs\u2019 present worries: the evocation of Hitler to demonize political opponents (but I don\u2019t remember any Gibbs outrage at the time \u201cfive years ago\u201d):<\/p>\n Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.) more recently likened President George W. Bush\u2019s political methodology to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Earlier during the run-up to the Iraqi war, German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin smeared Bush with a similar Hitlerian analogy\u2026<\/p>\n In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler\u2019s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan\u2026. But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities (e.g., Jonathan Chait\u2019s embarrassing rant in the\u00a0New Republic<\/em>\u00a0on why \u201cI hate George W. Bush\u201d or Garrison Keillor\u2019s infantile slurs about Bush\u2019s Republicans: \u201cbrown shirts in pinstripes\u201d), but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: \u201cIt\u2019s the old Hitler business.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, if former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore breezily castigates Bush\u2019s Internet supporters as \u201cdigital brownshirts\u201d; if current Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean says publicly, \u201cI hate the Republicans and everything they stand for\u201d \u2014 or, \u201cThis is a struggle of good and evil. And we\u2019re the good\u201d; or if NAACP chairman Julian Bond screams of the Bush administration that, \u201cTheir idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side,\u201d the bar of public dissent has so fallen that it is easy to descend a tad closer to the bottom to compare a horrific killer to an American president. \u2026 Finally, in such a debased climate, it was no accident that Alfred A. Knopf published a novel,\u00a0Checkpoint\u00a0<\/em>[1], about musing how to kill Bush. Nor was it odd to hear of a New York play, \u201cI\u2019m Gonna Kill the President,\u201d apparently centered around killing Bush. Late last year, a columnist in the Guardian, Charles Brooker, wrote to his British readers on the eve of the election:<\/p>\n On November 2, the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod\u2019s law dictates he\u2019ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. \u2014 where are you now that we need you?<\/p>\n So again, what if, Mr. President, you had instructed Robert Gibbs instead to issue something like the following warning, \u201cWe saw this polarization five years ago with George Bush when he was unfairly demonized by the Left with unmentionable slurs and smears, so let\u2019s not repeat that tawdry chapter in American political history in the present debate.\u201d<\/p>\n Blacklisted<\/strong><\/p>\n About the same time as the healthcare debate, the press reported that an unnamed Democratic strategist who had appeared on Fox News got a taste of Chicago muscle. Accordingly to the Chicago Tribune:<\/p>\n At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration. The Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox, he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said. The message was, \u201cWe better not see you on again,\u201d said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that \u201cclients might stop using you if you continue.<\/p>\n Instead, what if the President had told his staff, \u201cI disagree with much of what airs on Fox News, but no one in this administration is going to strong-arm anyone from appearing on it. We believe in freedom of expression and are not about to start blacklisting those who associate with a news organization.\u201d<\/p>\n Forgotten at Columbia and Harvard?<\/strong><\/p>\n At about the time of the Fort Hood terrorist attack, the President was hosting a \u201cTribal Nations Conference.\u201d At one point in his remarks, he confessed, \u201cI know what it means to feel ignored and forgotten, and what it means to struggle. So you will not be forgotten as long as I\u2019m in this White House.\u201d<\/p>\n What does \u201cignored\u201d and \u201cforgotten\u201d actually mean in this particular context (I do not think it is a reference to his father\u2019s absence or his grandparents careful custodianship)? President Obama went to prep school, the elite and pricey private Occidental College, the Ivy League Columbia University, and Harvard Law School \u2014 no doubt thanks either to grants and scholarships or government-subsidized loans [2]. Forgotten and ignored at prep school or Harvard Law Review? If so, what does that make the working classes at Cal State Bakersfield, or those who went into the Marines at 18, or those who began driving a semi at 19? In comparison to the wretched lonely ordeal at Harvard and Columbia, not forgotten and not ignored by American society?<\/p>\n What if instead Barack Obama had said, \u201cWe will try to do our best in government to partner with you. I know that I was not forgotten or ignored, but instead was given all sorts of private, state, and federal financial help to ensure that I could attend the most prestigious prep, undergraduate, and graduate schools in the nation. I want to ensure that all others so qualified get the same wonderful opportunities that I enjoyed.\u201d<\/p>\n Ergo?<\/strong><\/p>\n What emerges from this week\u2019s presidential observations is a troubling image of a highly partisan, often disingenuous President \u2014 who, for some strange reason, is far more eager to castigate political enemies than he is a terrorist who inflicted mayhem against our own American soldiers.*<\/p>\n Update: an earlier rough draft of this essay was mistakenly posted without editing; this latest, longer version incorporates a number of changes and additions.<\/p>\n * If one thinks that is too harsh an assessment, consider this flash news release: No doubt her agency can consult The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) that established the Presidential Transition Task Force, which counted among its expert panelists one \u201cNidal Hasan, Uniformed Services University School of Medicine\u201d \u2014 I suppose temporarily on sick leave. (Should we take bets that Hasan will return to some sort of quasi-official advisory role as part of the government\u2019s ongoing efforts to keep us safe?)<\/p>\n When the entire story emerges of Hasan\u2019s prior clear record of demonstrable hate and venom, and when such transgression is collated with the military\u2019s inaction, and when all that is juxtaposed to the tepid, appeasing response of the Obama administration, I predict that there will be a firestorm that we have not yet witnessed. What we are enduring is surreal \u2014 have we lost our collective minds?<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Not in Good Form Based on a few of President Obama\u2019s statements, this was not a particularly good week for the administration.<\/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":[647],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-yU","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5939,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/terrorism-as-therapy\/","url_meta":{"origin":2164,"position":0},"title":"Terrorism as Therapy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Obama administration is intent on downplaying the Islamic roots of contemporary terrorism. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online One common theme emerges from the hearings over the Benghazi disaster: The Obama administration is intent on downplaying the Islamic roots of terrorists who harbor an existential hatred of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":945,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-son-of-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":2164,"position":1},"title":"Obama, ‘Son of Islam’?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Stonegate Institute Many in the media are indignant with Reverend Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Invited on \"Morning Joe\" last Tuesday to discuss Christian persecution, the hosts turned the focus to interrogating Graham on whether he thought President Barack Obama was Christian or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5911,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-borg\/","url_meta":{"origin":2164,"position":2},"title":"The Obama Borg","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"How \"man-caused disasters\" replaced Islamist terrorism in the Obama lexicon. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0lore, the Borg\u00a0was a collective of servile drone operatives that sought to assimilate other species into\u00a0its \u201chive mind.\u201d Something akin to that creepy groupthink arose when the Obama administration took power and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4069,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-mandela-moment\/","url_meta":{"origin":2164,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s Mandela Moment","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Anatomy of an Obama Moment In a news-obsessed culture, sometimes the media simply ignores profound stories, such as the cause of the almost inexplicable \u2014 and quite brilliantly constructed \u2014 recovery of Obama\u2019s poll ratings. Just a few weeks ago, the negative impressions of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1910,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/who-is-the-enemy\/","url_meta":{"origin":2164,"position":4},"title":"Who Is the Enemy?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner I\u00a0don't think anyone knows quite what this administration's anti-terrorism policy is. Last August, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, lambasted the Bush administration, citing \"the inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole and intellectual narrowness that has often characterized the debate over the president's national security policies\" and criticizing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1915,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/chickens-and-their-2010-roost\/","url_meta":{"origin":2164,"position":5},"title":"Chickens and Their 2010 Roost","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In the coming year, plenty of our chickens will be coming home to roost. Take foreign relations. 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As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164"}],"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=2164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2165,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates \u2014 The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas. Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday\u2019s rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n