by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n I\u00a0am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But\u00a0interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a “political philosopher” is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto.<\/p>\n Mao killed anywhere from 50 million to 70 million innocents in the initial cleansing of Nationalists, the scouring of the countryside, the failed Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Tibet, and the internal Chinese gulag. Dunn’s praise of a genocidal monster was no inadvertent slip: She was reading from a written text and went into great detail to give the full context of the remark. Moreover, her comments were not some student outburst from 30 years ago; they were delivered on June\u00a05, 2009. Her praise of Mao’s insight and courage in defeating the Nationalists was offered long after the full extent of Mao’s mass-murdering had been well documented. Mao killed more people than any other single mass killer in the history of civilization.<\/p>\n So where do all these people, so intimate with our president (Dunn is the wife of his personal lawyer), come from? A right-wing attack machine could not make up such statements as those tossed off by a Dunn or a Van Jones. There seems to be neither a moral compass nor even a casual knowledge of history in this administration. And now we have the avatars of the “new politics” claiming it’s okay to praise Mao’s political and philosophical insight and his supposed determination (“You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine.”) because Lee Atwater supposedly once evoked Mao too.<\/p>\n Ms. Dunn should simply duck out of her D.C. suburb and ask any Tibetan or Chinese immigrant in his 70s and 80s what life was really like in Mao’s China.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner I\u00a0am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But\u00a0interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a “political philosopher” is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto.<\/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":[651],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-zu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11806,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/putins-provocations-are-met-with-ridicule-in-ukraine\/","url_meta":{"origin":2200,"position":0},"title":"Putin’s provocations are met with ridicule in Ukraine","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 2, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill Dictators fear being ridiculed with humor. Jokes about Stalin were punished by prison or death. In China, a TV anchor was threatened for\u00a0jokes\u00a0mocking\u00a0Mao Zedong. In Venezuela, the Maduro government counts anti-Chavismo\u00a0satire\u00a0as punishable by censorship, cancellation or even\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Vladimir Putin"","block_context":{"text":"Vladimir Putin","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/vladimir-putin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2194,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-obama-obsession\/","url_meta":{"origin":2200,"position":1},"title":"America’s Obama Obsession","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Anatomy of a passing hysteria. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2009"","block_context":{"text":"October 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/october-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1565,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/twin-disasters\/","url_meta":{"origin":2200,"position":2},"title":"Twin Disasters","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The strange attitude of the administration to immigration and debt. by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The Wages of Multiculturalism How strange that the president of Mexico, while a guest on the lawn of the White House, would attack the laws of a U.S. state, while his own country's immigration\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2010"","block_context":{"text":"June 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/june-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2842,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/president-of-the-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":2200,"position":3},"title":"President of the World","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The globe is hearing a deeply pessimistic view of what America was and is. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Given Obama\u2019s performance on his recent trip, three developments were quite astounding. First, despite this fresh climate of atonement, there was a complete absence of a single apology from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2009"","block_context":{"text":"April 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/april-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1853,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-usual-straw-men\/","url_meta":{"origin":2200,"position":4},"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":6960,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hope-and-change-take-vi\/","url_meta":{"origin":2200,"position":5},"title":"Hope and Change: Take VI","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 30, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 The anemic retread speech was mostly another yearly pep-talk version of the original \u201csummer of recovery\u201d\/\u201cmillions of new green jobs\u201d\u00a0boilerplate,\u00a0\u201cbig bank accounts\u201d\u00a0bad -ich-guy stuff, and\u00a0\u201cwe\u2019re out of Iraq\u201d\/close Guantanamo again.\u201d\u00a0Been there, done that.\u00a0 There is always the usual tics of any Obama speech:\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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200"}],"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=2200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2201,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions\/2201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}