by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n Ayersism<\/strong><\/p>\n As Hugo Chavez continues to shut down the media and silence critics, Oliver Stone \u2014 who would never be allowed, if he were a Venezuelan filmmaker, to direct as he does in the states \u2014 praises Chavez’s coerced socialism.<\/p>\n Michael Moore, known for hard-nosed distribution and profit-making, announces, again like Stone in conjunction with hyping a profit-making movie, that capitalism (for others) is dead.<\/p>\n Van Jones, solidly middle class and Yale-educated, among other things, pontificated about revolution, an apartheid America, redistributing wealth, a**hole Republicans and George Bush’s involvement in 9\/11, in between jetting between conferences, espousing his green jobs promotion that hyped book sales and his own career.<\/p>\n What is strange about all this chic-radicalism is how would-be revolutionaries that wish to dismantle America as we know it and\/or emulate failed systems abroad, always do so from comfort, security, affluence, and freedom of choice unique to America and Europe, suggesting that radical politics and those who agitate for them are sort of a fashion statement, aimed to resonate among particular elite leftist audiences and to bring dividends from them, but not to be taken too seriously as guides in their own lives.<\/p>\n Obama’s Madness<\/strong><\/p>\n Obama’s problem is more fundamental than his healthcare mess. He campaigned on a no more red state\/blue state, white\/black, rich\/poor polarity, and offered a sort of transcendence that was used to make up for his prior dubious relationships with the likes of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers.<\/p>\n When governing, his supporters liked to think that he would have to rein in extremists like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to gravitate to the center and work in “bipartisan fashion.”\u00a0But that was never in the cards. The problem is that beneath Obama’s hope-and-change veneer, his past legislative and vocal record (cf. his Senate partisanship, his statements in his memoirs, his spread-the-wealth, clingers, typical-white-person gaffes, his talk of single-payer healthcare and reparations, etc) were hard left, left even of Pelosi and Reid. The Van Jones appointment was logical, not an aberration. So to save his presidency, since the hope-and-change hocus-pocus has become old and trite, Obama would have to become an un-Obama, and do a 1995 Clinton switcheroo.<\/p>\n We have elected the most left-wing president in our history, apparently to many an unappreciated fact given the Bush unpopularity, the wars, the so-so McCain candidacy, and the September 2008 meltdown, but one that now, through a variety of minor and major incidents (from the apologies abroad and the cap-and-trade zealotry to the Gates incident to Van Jones), is being revealed to the American people \u2014 and they are not comfortable with it.<\/p>\n His supporters can charge “racism” or go back to the “this is our moment” tropes, or try to reexamine the crazies more carefully before appointing them, but the problem remains that the Obama worldview, one that he embraced at an early age and deliberately sought to enhance through his education and work in Chicago, is simply not one that most Americans feel comfortable with.<\/p>\n So we are in a race \u2014 will a majority of the American people wake up from their past anger at Bush and subsequent hypnotism by Obama before he pushes through and institutionalizes an agenda to the left of what we see in Europe?<\/p>\n Should be interesting, and tonight should be a preview of more frantic, hurried efforts to come.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner Ayersism As Hugo Chavez continues to shut down the media and silence critics, Oliver Stone \u2014 who would never be allowed, if he were a Venezuelan filmmaker, to direct as he does in the states \u2014 praises Chavez’s coerced socialism.<\/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":[652],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-AN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1408,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-not-the-great-stone-face\/","url_meta":{"origin":2281,"position":0},"title":"Obama: Not the Great Stone Face","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 8, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an allegory about a series of small-town would-be heroes who the gullible public claimed resembled the Great Stone Face on the side of a New Hampshire mountain. The citizens assumed that these men would have a granite-like ability\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2010"","block_context":{"text":"August 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/august-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8953,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/one-left-wing-ring-to-rule-them-all\/","url_meta":{"origin":2281,"position":1},"title":"One Left-Wing Ring to Rule Them All","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Proper liberal credentials trump all the usual forms of identity politics. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online In the 21st century, doctrinaire liberalism is synonymous with hypocrisy. Or maybe it is better seen as career insurance, providing exemption from all the many paradoxes of a leftist worldview. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2228,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lefts-selective-outrage\/","url_meta":{"origin":2281,"position":2},"title":"The Left’s Selective Outrage","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine You know liberals are edging toward a full Jonestown-style meltdown when someone as smart as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman starts losing it. Last week Friedman worked himself up into a paranoiac frenzy over the tone of some of the criticism Obama and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/so-much-lost-and-little-gained\/","url_meta":{"origin":2281,"position":3},"title":"So Much Lost and Little Gained","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 5, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Stone's leftist agenda robs\u00a0Alexander\u00a0of authenticity. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers A\u00a0movie as bad as Oliver Stone's\u00a0Alexander\u00a0usually would not be worth notice, but Stone has indulged several cinematic and political pathologies that are illuminating. Some of the film's flaws are curiously old-fashioned, redolent of studio schlock of the 1950s--the bombastic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2166,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-discreet-charm-of-the-left-wing-plutocracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":2281,"position":4},"title":"The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Gorism The news of this week made mention of Al Gore as our soon-to-be, first carbon billionaire. Accounts included both his earlier and contemporary angry denials that he was greedy, or had used his vast network of government contacts to influence public loans, contracts,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6931,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-eternal-darkness-of-the-progressive-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":2281,"position":5},"title":"The Eternal Darkness of the Progressive Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The attacks on\u00a0Lone Survivor, the movie about 4 Navy Seals caught in an operation gone lethally wrong in Afghanistan, illustrate once again the fossilized orthodoxy of the left. The L.A. Weekly\u2019s Amy Nicholson called the movie a \u201cjingoistic snuff film\u201d that \u201cbleeds blood red,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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