wrote<\/a>\u00a0[1] that the Democratic congressional chest-thumping for Afghanistan, as the good war, would cease as soon as Bush left office and that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was always going to be the harder, messier war in the long run.<\/p>\nJust as the John Kerrys of the world lined up on October 10, 2002, to authorize the Iraq war to bolster their security fides in what they then thought would be another walk-through, only to bail with \u201cBush made me vote that way,\u201d so too they sought cover in anti-war protest over Iraq by praising Afghanistan as the good war, thinking it was won, Iraq was lost, and Bush was in power.<\/p>\n
Now Bush is history; Iraq is quieter; Afghanistan is heating up. So? An Obama invasion into Pakistan in \u2018hot pursuit\u2019? I don\u2019t think any of them ever realized that they would own Afghanistan and their own bellicose rhetoric would come back to haunt them. Have there been any\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0exposes about our post-Jan. 20, 2009 Predator assassinations in Pakistan, in which we obliterate houses, families and all, without Miranda rights or habeas corpus (what candidate Obama himself once deplored)? (And if the State Department was supposed to oversee private guards responsible for embassy security in Kabul, and the State Department in turn was responsible to the White House, does the administration have culpability in the fashion that the rogue sex-pervert guards at Abu Ghraib, supposedly reflected the Bush-era military? If we blow up 90 in Afghanistan is it a war crime, or an honest mistake? When you turn the media into Pravda, it becomes impossible to keep the party line straight sometimes.)<\/p>\nBut other than continuing past policy on the two wars, almost everything Obama had done is consistent with his past associates (Pfleger, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), his past vocation (grievance organizing), and his past methodology (most partisan in the Senate, surrealistic Senate campaign in which foes mysteriously dropped out, the Axelrod\/Emanuel Chicago way, etc.).<\/p>\n
Healthcare Grab<\/strong><\/p>\nWe all know that a good healthcare system can be improved by increased competition, tort reform, tax credits for catastrophic insurance plans, deregulation, etc.<\/p>\n
But Obamacare is not really about medicine. It is rather aimed at absorbing more of the private sector \u2014 once more, to create a vast new constituency of government workers and beneficiaries, to ensure an equality of result in treatment and access, and to replace private health insurers with public bureaucrats. (I got a taste of the future of the government octopus when I went last week to a California DMV office, and noticed that all the state employees at the windows had on purple union T-shirts with \u201corganize\u201d and \u201csolidarity\u201d emblazoned across them.)<\/p>\n
In other words, in the Obama mind, would you want an autonomous family practitioner, entrepreneurial, keen to adapt to patient needs and tastes, juggling 10 employees and a 2-million-dollar family practice budget, grossing $400,000 a year in profits, highly opinionated and self-reliant, using his profits once in a while to ski or buy a BMW \u2014 or have him transmogrified into a GS-something, at $100,000 a year, with government benefits, unionized, docile, and waiting to go home when his shift at the dreary government clinic ends, wearing his doctor union T-shirt to work and eager to vote in politicians who ensure him lifetime tenure, generous retirement packages, and guaranteed pay raises?<\/p>\n
The War Against Those Who Want To Get Rich<\/strong><\/p>\nThen we have the \u201cspread the wealth,\u201d \u201credistributive\u201d class warfare rhetoric, demonizing everything from Vegas to those earners who might make over $150,000 (I love the way the President keeps saying that people \u201clike me\u201d should pay more. Actually, few have had access to Tony Rezko\u2019s spread-the-wealth tips, or have wives that get $100,000-plus raises when their husbands become Senators, or have had a lifetime government tenure of some sort). In just nine months, the President has created a near class war \u2014 with one provision: the technocracy like Dodd, Geithner, Murtha, Rangel, etc. are exempt from the high taxes and government monitoring that they feel is critical to inflict on others.<\/p>\n
Debt<\/strong><\/p>\nGorge the Beast is the new philosophy. At a $2 trillion-a-year-deficit clip, and new borrowing for cash for clunkers, health care, cap-and-trade, etc., we will get taxes\u2014federal, state, payroll, and surcharge\u2014that will soon take 65% of the income of the \u201crich.\u201d The IRS will grow and become more intrusive. The point?<\/p>\n
Like it or not, by April 16 of each year we will all make about the same: those who make \u201ctoo much\u201d will return their stolen goods; those who were fleeced and \u201cmake too little\u201d will receive it back through recycled entitlements, with the proper amount skimmed off at the top by the technocracy, immune from the very statutes they craft.<\/p>\n
Fuel and Fiber<\/strong><\/p>\nNearly 50% of our electricity is generated by coal, a critical fuel that will prevent collective bankruptcy until cleaner sources become economical. Obama once promised to \u201cbankrupt\u201d the coal industry. Joe Biden said there would be no more coal plants. The rather strange buffoonish Van (\u201cchange the whole system\u201d) Jones, the environmental czar of some sort, has declared clean coal impossible (and in addition slurred American agriculture, which according to the Energy Secretary Chu will blow away in California [not an unreasonable musing given the Delta smelt]).<\/p>\n
No need to mention that Obama\u2019s campaign deference to offshore drilling, natural gas, and nuclear power were just sops of the moment, quickly to be forgotten once elected. Energy taxes will mean sky-high prices and shortages. Again that is the point: the rambunctious ignorant American should put away his energy-stealing boat, SUV, and snowmobile, and instead live in accordance to the green dictates of an Al Gore, John Kerry, Tom Friedman and others, all once again, properly exempt from the effects of their own \u2018small earth\u2019 advocacies.<\/p>\n
\u201cOooh. Van Jones, Alright! So, Van Jones.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nWell, the post-racial candidate had given us a 95% black monolithic voting pattern in the primaries against a fellow liberal candidate. Add up Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, an exasperated Bill Clinton\u2019s assessment of \u201cplaying the race card on me,\u201d \u201ctypical white person,\u201d \u2018wise Latina\u2019, the Skip Gates mess, the Van Jones\u2019 white polluters, the satraps like Gov. Patterson and Reps. Rangel and Watson reverting to blatantly racist scapegoating, and so on.<\/p>\n
I fear that this is the most polarizing administration we have seen in matters of race since the 1920s. If those around Obama, and his supporters in Congress, had just substituted the word \u201cblack\u201d each time they have angrily invoked the word \u201cwhite,\u201d they would have been branded abject racists.<\/p>\n
How strange that we now learn of Van Jones\u2019s long record of venom, but are told that he did not really mean it, and that the White House was unaware of these statements. Yet we know that Jones was selected because of, not despite, his provocations. Cf. Obama honcho Valerie Jarrett\u2019s ecstasy: \u201cOooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House.\u00a0We were watching him, uh, really, he\u2019s not that old, for as long as he\u2019s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House<\/em>. [emphasis added]\u201d<\/p>\nYour America Then, Mine Now?<\/strong><\/p>\nThen we have the\u00a0Al Arabiya<\/em>\u00a0interview, the Cairo speech, and the \u201cI\u2019m sorry\u201d to everyone from the Europeans to Turks to South Americans. The common denominator has been agreement that the United States has been racist, oppressive, and exploitive rather than far less so than the alternative, given these transgressions of the past are the sins of mankind not those of Americansper se<\/em>.<\/p>\nWhen I heard Obama in the campaign promise reparations (quickly retracted), and more victimization studies, I knew where we were headed: namely, that we have someone like the Chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department or the Head of the Sociology Department now running the country.<\/p>\n
Orwellian<\/strong><\/p>\nIn America of 2009 the following are \u201ctrue\u201d:<\/p>\n
The Arabs invented the printing press, and spurred us on to the Enlightenment and Renaissance. Muslims in Cordoba advised the brutal Christians to show tolerance during the Inquisition. Slavery ended in America without violence. The Berlin Airlift was a worldwide effort. The Americans liberated Auschwitz. There are 57 states. FDR was President in 1929 and gave television addresses. We can either drill offshore or inflate our tires properly.<\/p>\n
There are no terrorists or a war on them, but only overseas contingency operations and man-made catastrophes. Those who object to healthcare are ungodly, and the nation\u2019s children must go to school and see the messiah address them\u00a0en masse<\/em>\u00a0on state-run television screens. Nazis, brown shirts, a mob, insurance lackeys, Brooks brothers elites, etc. all go to town halls. Doctors chop off limbs and gleefully take out tonsils for profit. George Bush is our Emmanuel Goldstein whom we must hate collectively each morning for a couple of minutes.<\/p>\nRather Angry People, Given their Middle-Class Backgrounds and Past Entitlements<\/strong><\/p>\nOur environmentally-correct czar believes that we were behind 9\/11, that whites pollute poor neighborhoods on purpose, that American agriculture is pathological, that Republicans are \u201cassholes\u201d and so on. He is the ideological version of the buffoonish Robert Gibbs. What do they teach at Yale (and Harvard) law school? Is admission there synonymous with graduation?<\/p>\n
The new Supreme Court Justice thinks that some judges are better than others based on their gender and race. The Attorney General (we are \u201ccowards\u201d afraid to talk about race) wants to try agents of the CIA, not hunt down terrorists that plotted to destroy America. No wonder, in a past incarnation he helped to pardon terrorists from Puerto Rico for similarly careerist purposes.<\/p>\n
The Government, All the Time, Everywhere, All of Us\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nIn short, we are now in theory to be governed by enlightened despots and philosopher kings who have never run a business, never understood private enterprise, and never been off the government payroll, but always hypercritical of their opposites. We have suddenly dozens of czars \u2014 how better to avoid Senate confirmation? To sidestep existing checks and balances? To substitute administrative fiat for majority-vote ratifications? To enact hope and change without messy town hall-like recriminations against elected officials?<\/p>\n
Given all this, an unhinged activist like a Van Jones is not the exception, but emblematic of the new frontier. All the old wisdom, the old reverence are going by the wayside, replaced by a brave new world in which we will be the same in spirit and outlook, committed to replace truth with orthodoxy, roughly equal in ability, neither successful nor failures, neither rich nor poor, nothing \u201cexceptional\u201d at all, mere happy cogs in the brotherly redistributive wheel \u2014 mouthing platitudes about diversity and being green, clueless as to their meaning, but clued in to the necessity of chanting such mantras.<\/p>\n
And given the President\u2019s rhetoric, and the media as our new ministry of truth \u2014 we will be more or less happy idiots, as the old fades and the new absorbs us.<\/p>\n
All I can say is\u00a0non hic porcus<\/em>, not yet, not by a long shot.<\/p>\n\n
\u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media And On It Goes I support the President on Afghanistan and am relieved he did not pull out of Iraq as once promised (all combat brigades out by March 1, 2008 \u2014 he said during his initial campaigning).<\/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-Bb","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2238,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-war-in-afghanistan\/","url_meta":{"origin":2305,"position":0},"title":"The War in Afghanistan","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Two-Front Wars \u2014 Theirs and Ours Something is not quite right about the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan war. For nearly eight years, yearly casualties in Afghanistan sometimes were less than a month's losses in the dire days in Iraq (e.g., 98 Americans killed\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":1348,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tale-of-two-surges\/","url_meta":{"origin":2305,"position":1},"title":"A Tale of Two Surges","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services From 2007 to 2009, a surge of 20,000 troops under the generalship of David Petraeus saved a mostly lost war in Iraq. Petraeus\u2019s counterinsurgency doctrine helped win over the population, as the surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq\u2019s government and military.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iraq"","block_context":{"text":"Iraq","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iraq\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2066,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-flip-flopping-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":2305,"position":2},"title":"Our Flip-Flopping Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 21, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We don't hear all that much about Iraq these days, do we? The war at one point almost tore apart this country. Public anger sent George W. Bush's approval ratings plummeting. And the outrage over our losses helped elect vocal anti-Iraq-war candidate Barack\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2009"","block_context":{"text":"December 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/december-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2319,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/war-what-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":2305,"position":3},"title":"War–What War?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan headed to Martha's Vineyard this week, where President Obama is vacationing. Once again she is protesting our two wars abroad. But Sheehan is a media has-been. ABC's Charlie Gibson used to cover her anti-Bush rallies in Crawford, Texas.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2009"","block_context":{"text":"September 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/september-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3794,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-did-we-invade-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":2305,"position":4},"title":"Why Did We Invade Iraq?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the back-and-forth recriminations continue, but in all the \u201cnot me\u201d defenses, we have forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we invaded in the first place. The war was predicated\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iraq"","block_context":{"text":"Iraq","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iraq\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2990,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/phony-war-afghanistan-and-the-democrats\/","url_meta":{"origin":2305,"position":5},"title":"Phony War: Afghanistan and the Democrats","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson World Affairs Most Americans in 2003 thought that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were complementary theaters in the wider war on radical Islamic terrorism and the authoritarian Middle East regimes that aided and abetted it. The anti-Iraq War left agreed that the two fronts were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305"}],"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=2305"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2307,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions\/2307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}