by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Democrats in Congress recently went all-out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll \u2014 and stay \u2014 in college. Most of those who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California \u2014 still struggling with its $15 billion budget shortfall \u2014 is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions of dollars.<\/p>\n At around the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding. Highly taxed Californians can borrow money to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.<\/p>\n Americans still seethe about the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. But the \u201cfat-cat bankers,\u201d in fact, were players in a far larger fraud made possible by liberal executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bill Clinton\u2019s appointees and insider friends such as Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, and Robert Rubin made millions, while the agencies and banks they oversaw lost billions.<\/p>\n It was just disclosed that Rep. Barney Frank helped land a job at Fannie Mae for his then live-in boyfriend, Herb Moses \u2014 despite at the time sitting on a House oversight committee that monitored the federally regulated agency. Fannie Mae went belly up. Moses made a lot of money. And Frank kept assuring the public in hearings that the nearly insolvent agency was in no financial danger.<\/p>\n When news surfaced about Frank\u2019s conflict of interest, he scoffed, \u201cThere is no rule against it at all,\u201d and predicted the story would die. He was right: It did. But substitute scary names like Dick Cheney or Halliburton and it would not have.<\/p>\n Last week, President Obama quietly signed a renewal of the once-hated Patriot Act \u2014 rather nonchalantly from the United Kingdom via mechanical autopen. There was no media outrage, there were no hyperbolic campus protests, no juvenile outbursts from a Hollywood celebrity about shredding the Constitution. Most even forgot that senatorial candidate Barack Obama had once promised to help repeal the Patriot Act.<\/p>\n But then, such moral outrage belongs to the now fossilized age of George W. Bush\u2019s presidency, when the exalted goal of stopping a conservative Texan justified any means of opposition necessary. We may continue almost all of his antiterrorism protocols, but they no longer earn elite outrage.<\/p>\n The same holds true of the ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have somehow reverted to back-page news. MoveOn.org could not care less about the new involvement in Libya, and the media now could not care less about MoveOn.org \u2014 in the same manner that Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore are now no more than extinct dinosaurs of a forgotten Jurassic age. After all, Iraq magically went from the \u201cworst\u201d mistake in US foreign-policy history to one of the Obama administration\u2019s \u201cgreatest achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n Social Security and Medicare are nearing implosion. The aging baby boomers are about to retire en masse<\/em>. They have no reputation for either stoic acceptance or self-sacrifice. The people are overtaxed, and the government is running a $1.6 trillion annual deficit. So either the retirement age must be upped, benefits cut, high payroll taxes further increased, or portions of the entitlements privatized to spur competition and efficiency.<\/p>\n And the progressive response to these proposed remedies? Instead of a detailed plan of salvation, we see ads portraying a Rep. Paul Ryan look-alike who is not just throwing an elderly woman out of her wheelchair, but sending her over a cliff as well.<\/p>\n There is a vast machinery of selective liberal outrage, fueled and lubricated by the media, universities, and celebrity entertainment. When the redistributive welfare state starts to run out of money, the gears and pulleys are flipped on and shrill charges of greed, cruelty, nativism, and racism spew out of the production line. The machine sputters and shuts down when an aggrieved liberal suddenly must either make cuts or adapt the very policies that he used to damn.<\/p>\n Understand the mechanics of selective outrage, and our upside-down politics become comprehensible: A state suing to enforce immigration law is tantamount to a racist intrusion on federal jurisdiction, but a state openly flouting federal statutes for the Dream Act is acting in enlightened, humanitarian fashion.<\/p>\n Greedy Wall Street insiders at the center of the 2008 meltdown could not possibly include progressive bureaucrats and their liberal enablers in Congress, who are interested in people first, profits last. Everything in 2006 that we were told was near fascistic about national security suddenly evolved into what is wonderful and necessary.<\/p>\n Heck, General \u201cBetray-Us\u201d is now Obama\u2019s pick to run the CIA!<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Democrats in Congress recently went all-out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll \u2014 and stay \u2014 in college. Most of those who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse.<\/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":[11],"tags":[12,1014,411,165,105,656,1080,238,440,131,1016,592],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Im","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11587,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/it-was-always-about-the-wall\/","url_meta":{"origin":2750,"position":0},"title":"It Was Always about the Wall","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 21, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review There was likely never going to be \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d or any deal amnestying the DACA recipients in exchange for building the wall. Democrats in the present political landscape will not consent to a wall. For them, a successful border wall is now considered\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "George W. Bush"","block_context":{"text":"George W. Bush","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/george-w-bush\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9832,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/californias-polarization\/","url_meta":{"origin":2750,"position":1},"title":"California\u2019s Polarization","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 7, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Richard Sousa Monday, February 6, 2017 With all due respect, I believe my colleague Sam Abrams has it all wrong. He argues that when examining California voter registration data at the county level, the polarization along party lines and the partisanship in the state are not as deep as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Democrats"","block_context":{"text":"Democrats","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/democrats\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12094,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democrats-cannibalistic-ideology\/","url_meta":{"origin":2750,"position":2},"title":"Democrats\u2019 Cannibalistic Ideology","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 13, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Once liberalism and progressivism give way to Jacobinism \u2014 and they often do, as we have seen in revolutionary France, China, and Russia \u2014 no leftist is safe from the downward spiral to ideological cannibalism. Yesterday\u2019s true believer is today\u2019s counterrevolutionary and tomorrow\u2019s enemy\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7022,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lets-save-california-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":2750,"position":3},"title":"Let’s Save California Now!","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Just a handful of legislative acts might still save California. Here are 12 brief examples: 1.\u00a0The Hetch Hetchy Smelt and Salmon Act This so-called \u201cSkip a Shower, Save a Smelt Act\u201d would transfer control of the\u00a0Hetch Hetchy reservoir\u00a0releases from the San Francisco Public Utilities\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12693,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/interview-with-victor-davis-hanson-democrats-want-to-recalibrate-america\/","url_meta":{"origin":2750,"position":4},"title":"Interview with Victor Davis Hanson: \u201cDemocrats want to recalibrate America\u201d","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 29, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump promised an end to neo-con adventurism in the Middle East and to shift greater global responsibility to America\u2019s NATO allies. Supporters and critics alike agree that, as president, Trump has followed through. Arguably, his \u201cAmerica first\u201d strategy has brought greater stability even as it\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8742,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/can-california-be-saved\/","url_meta":{"origin":2750,"position":5},"title":"Can California Be Saved?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Crime is back up in California. Los Angeles reported a 20.6 percent increase in violent crimes over the first half of 2015 and nearly an 11 percent increase in property crimes. 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