by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n It All Failed?<\/strong><\/p>\n By Fantasy House I do not mean \u2014 or rather only mean \u2014 Barack Obama\u2019s La-La land in which Austrians speak Austrian, Hawaii is in Asia, Afghans speak Arabic, the Maldives lie off Argentina, there are seven additional states, servicemen are zombie corpse-men, and Kansas twisters kill 10,000 at a time. Rather I refer to the fantasies that Obama employs to deal with a very real world he inhabits. The president just told Univision that you\u00a0\u201ccannot change Washington from the inside.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0[1] In other words, the president just shattered his own four-year fantasy that he, like Lincoln,\u00a0would take the train<\/a>\u00a0[2] from Illinois to DC, not just to remake America, but also to change the very way things are done there. Now Obama accepts that the second coming of an Illinois savior has failed, not because he tried to change the ethics of Washington (he never did), but because upon arrival he almost immediately did in Washington what he was used to doing in Chicago. And so lobbying, insider politics to help campaign bundlers, private deals to pass healthcare, the revolving door, and nonstop campaigning all replaced hope and change. I suppose in place of change from the \u201cinside,\u201d he now envisions more \u201coutside\u201d executive orders like the\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0Dream Act, having the EPA shut down more coal plants, stopping more federal energy leases, granting more recess appointments, and extending more executive privilege. Shattering Glass<\/strong> The president\u2019s illusions about the economy have, one by one, been exploded. Do we even remember\u00a0the 2010 \u201csummer of recovery\u201d?\u00a0<\/a>[3]Or \u201cmillions of new green jobs\u201d that ended in Solyndra-like realties? \u201cGM is alive, Osama bin Laden is dead\u201d \u2014 well, sort of, in the sense that the government can take any insolvent company, inject $25 billion into it, and keep it alive until the next election. Somehow we are to console ourselves that 43 months of 8% plus unemployment is success. The president keeps bragging that he has created 4.6 million new jobs. But who cares about the actual number created, if the number lost is the far greater figure? Do businesses brag that they grossed $4.6 million when their bottom line is a net loss of $500,000? The jobs fantasy has also evaporated in the reality that we have lost more jobs than gained under Obama, millions no longer look for work, and the percentage of adults working is at near-record lows. Where did the fifteen million more on food stamps come from? Check your tire pressure; tune your cars up; \u201cbankrupt\u201d coal companies; \u201cskyrocketing\u201d electricity prices, Steven Chu\u2019s dream of gas prices at \u201cEuropean levels\u201d \u2014 all that only ended up at $4-a-gallon gas. Yet we still don\u2019t know whether that price spike\u00a0is supposed to be welcomed<\/a>\u00a0[4], in the green sense of helping to sell subsidized Volts and \u201ccutting our carbon footprint.\u201d The deficit? What deficit and debt? The president insists to David Letterman that\u00a0he doesn\u2019t know<\/a>\u00a0[5] what the aggregate debt is \u2014 only that whatever it actually is, George Bush caused it! He barnstorms on the idea that ending the war in Afghanistan (where was the supposed \u201cpeace dividend\u201d from Iraq that was supposed to cut the deficit?) will help pay down the $1 trillion-plus he borrows each year. Yet taking 39.5% from top incomes and hiking capital gains taxes will not even give us a 20% reduction in the annual deficit. So after the next tax hike, then what? We go to 50%, 55%, 60% \u2014 to pay our fair share for millions of more green jobs? Passing on This Bunch<\/strong> You can scream at, tax, regulate, and berate an employer, but you cannot force him, not yet anyway, to go out and hire and buy new equipment. Obama tried all that and almost single-handedly has ensured that a weak recovery of June 2009 would become a permanent weaker recovery. All the one-percent rhetoric \u2014 fat cat, pay your fair share, corporate jet owners, now is not the time to profit, spread the wealth, redistribution, you didn\u2019t build that \u2014 did was to terrify the private sector, flush with savings, into paralysis. There are trillions of dollars on the sidelines because employers don\u2019t know what Obamacare will cost them since Obama does not know either, don\u2019t know when the next presidential slur against them will surface, don\u2019t know what new regulation will curtail productivity, don\u2019t know when printing billions in new money will fuel inflation, don\u2019t know which particular company will be shut down, or don\u2019t know what public oil and gas lease will be pulled. The tone Obama has set is also pure fantasy. Bush, we were told,\u00a0was \u201cunpatriotic\u201d<\/a>[6] in running up the debt to $11 trillion, but Obama insists that he has never used the slur \u201cunpatriotic\u201d against anyone. And he has no idea what the debt is after he added $5 trillion to it. \u201cYou didn\u2019t build that\u201d supposedly did not mean that business people should thank government for creating their success, but also that they should thank government for their success. What did Obama\u2019s reference to an imagined son resembling Trayvon Martin mean? Who were the \u201cenemies\u201d Obama and the Latinos were supposed to \u201cpunish\u201d? Whose faces were we supposed to get in, and whose knives were we supposed to bring guns against? Whom did the \u201cstupidly\u201d acting police \u201cstereotype\u201d \u2014 \u201ctypical\u201d white persons\u201d? The World Sized Up Obama<\/strong> In foreign policy, the fantasies proved even scarier. A young, JFKish, Nobel Peace laureate, biracial, hip, cool, and beloved president \u2014 with a Muslim patrimony no less \u2014 would charm the Middle East the way he had mesmerized American with \u201chope and change,\u201d \u201cyes, we can,\u201d and, less grandly, \u201cmake no mistake about it.\u201d Obama assumed that all real problems began with Bush, and would end with Bush gone \u2014 given that he would apologize, bow, and contextualize to the world about the sins of the pre-Obama America, the unexceptional country that did nasty things when \u201cI was three months old.\u201d Once the cooled and now drier continents grasped that American was \u201con their side,\u201d and not entangled with the Brits, the Israelis, the Czechs, the Poles, and all the old staid \u201callies,\u201d new possibilities would become endless. \u201cRadical Islam\u201d would give way to all sorts of euphemisms; terrorists were to be the merely accused and tried in civil courts in New York. Guantanamo would release all its political prisoners. Renditions, tribunals and preventative detention would end. The\u00a0Al-Arabiya<\/em>\u00a0interview, the Cairo speech, and the notorious \u201capology tour\u2019 would win oppressed peoples over, if not to our side, at least over to Obama\u2019s \u2014 given that \u201cthey hate us\u201d not because of who we are (as in vacations to Martha\u2019s Vineyard, golf, prep schools, jet-fueled junkets, and rap and hip-hop music), but because of what we used to do before 2009. Apparently, European socialist models would spring up in the Middle East \u2014 the region a sort of hybridized half-socialist Greece, half-Islamist Turkey. That fantasy cruelly ended with the horrific death of an American ambassador in Libya, the graphic details of which the administration will not disclose, given that the truth would confirm that we were not prepared when we should have been, amid policies towards Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Iran that are imploding. What are we left with? The Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Mr. Morsi, just summed it up when he outlined the conditions under which his country would be willing to accept aid and remain friendly. The State Department is funding apology ads on Islamic television, and we are still using all the rhetorical power of the White House to hound one crude filmmaker, a modern\u00a0Ares<\/a>\u00a0[7] who supposedly had the power to set the Muslim world afire against Barack Obama. A Final Note: Do Not Take Counsel of Your Fears<\/strong> There is much criticism of Romney that, despite all of the above Obama fantasies, he still is only either even or slightly behind in the polls \u2014 and perhaps less well off in the swing states. But what is surprising is not that Romney is not ahead, but that he is even close \u2014 much, much closer than was Reagan in 1980 at a much later time when he ran against an even weaker incumbent and faced far less media bias. On October 26, 1980, a week before the voting, Reagan was worn out from his constant, off-topic gaffes, media hounding, an incumbent president who had dodged two debates, in-fighting among his campaign staff, and a Gallup poll that showed him 8 points down \u2014 with one last chance for a single debate. There is not really any free press anymore, but instead a Ministry of Truth, in which PBS, NPR, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN,\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>,\u00a0Time<\/em>, AP, McClatchy, and Reuters are\u00a0de facto<\/em>extensions of the Obama campaign<\/a>\u00a0[8] \u2014 far more highbrow and adept in disguising their partisanship than an overt Hannity or Limbaugh. Their \u201cjournalists\u201d are fed favorable administration leaks when in the old days they had to sue to publish a hit piece. They care little whether ambassadors are left unguarded, or that the US suffers the most costly attack on its air assets since Vietnam, or that administration officials offer lies about Libya that they know cannot be true. Remember that the grandees of the universities, the foundations, the arts, the unions, and the government employees are all heavily invested in Obama \u2014 the class warrior who assures those of the upper classes that class and racial resentment will be turned against others. Remember the powers of presidential incumbency. Remember that millions are still mesmerized by teleprompted eloquence. Remember that each month thousands more go on food stamps, receive disability insurance, obtain unemployment insurance extensions, and are excused from the federal income tax rolls \u2014 and are loyal to those who enable them and hostile to those who might not. Remember that to criticize Obama still almost immediately earns the charge of \u201cracist.\u201d It is not easy to overcome all that. This is an election of smiley fantasies versus a harsh wakeup call to prevent looming financial and overseas catastrophes in the next year or so. And fantasies, not reality, are what half the population may now live for. That Romney is close is a miracle; that he still can win is beyond a miracle.<\/p>\n URLs in this post: [1] \u201ccannot change Washington from the inside.\u201d:http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/victordavishanson..\/..\/eddriscoll\/2012\/09\/20\/you-cant-change-washington-from-the-inside\/<\/a> [2] would take the train:http:\/\/www.americanthinker.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/obama_whistle_stop_train_ride.html<\/a> [3] the 2010 \u201csummer of recovery\u201d? :\u00a0http:\/\/ace.mu.nu\/archives\/301345.php<\/a> [4] is supposed to be welcomed:http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/corner\/291806\/now-what-victor-davis-hanson<\/a> [5] he doesn\u2019t know:\u00a0http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2012\/09\/19\/video-obama-now-pretending-he-doesnt-know-how-much-the-national-debt-is\/<\/a> [6] was \u201cunpatriotic\u201d:\u00a0http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2012\/07\/03\/video-unpatriotic-debt\/<\/a> [7] Ares:\u00a0http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ares<\/a> [8] extensions of the Obama campaign:http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/victordavishanson..\/..\/eddriscoll\/2012\/09\/06\/hey-the-non-official-campaign-for-obama-needs-its-swag\/<\/a><\/p>\n by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media It All Failed? By Fantasy House I do not mean \u2014 or rather only mean \u2014 Barack Obama\u2019s La-La land in which Austrians speak Austrian, Hawaii is in Asia, Afghans speak Arabic, the Maldives lie off Argentina, there are seven additional states, servicemen are zombie corpse-men, and Kansas twisters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[536],"tags":[12,1026,73,134,32,30,40,1016,1052],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-6S","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7917,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/from-comedy-to-farce\/","url_meta":{"origin":426,"position":0},"title":"From Comedy to Farce","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia It was tragically comical that the commander in chief in just a few weeks could go from referring to ISIS as \u201cjayvee\u201d and a manageable problem to declaring it an existential threat, in the same manner he upgraded the Free Syrian Army from amateurs\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 9 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 9 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/from-comedy-to-farce\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"obama_lies_big_12-4-13-2","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/obama_lies_big_12-4-13-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3336,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dreamland-usa\/","url_meta":{"origin":426,"position":1},"title":"Dreamland, USA","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Barack Obama just gave a belated but stern warning about escalating debt \u2014 a few weeks after he presented a 2011 budget with a $1.6 trillion annual deficit, the largest shortfall in American history. Congressional Republicans are now crowing about reducing Obama's red\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1134,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-fabulists\/","url_meta":{"origin":426,"position":2},"title":"The Obama Fabulists","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was billed as a cool rationalist \u2014 a sober and judicious intellectual so unlike the inattentive and twangy \u201csmoke \u2019em out\u201d George W. Bush, so rational in contrast to the herky-jerky and frenetic John McCain. Like Senator\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2010"","block_context":{"text":"November 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/november-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6614,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-as-chaos\/","url_meta":{"origin":426,"position":3},"title":"Obama as Chaos","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama\u2019s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute. By that I\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":8848,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-has-just-begun\/","url_meta":{"origin":426,"position":4},"title":"Obama Has Just Begun","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 6, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online How much damage can he do in his last year of office? Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Obama_v2_2015-12-03.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6860,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/vdh-quoted-in-barack-obamas-past-as-murky-as-his-word\/","url_meta":{"origin":426,"position":5},"title":"VDH Quoted In, “Barack Obama’s past as murky as his word”","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Jack Kelly \/\/\u00a0The Pittsburgh Press\u00a0 Onyango \u201cOmar\u201d Obama, 69, half-brother of Barack Obama Sr., came to the United States on a student visa in 1963, remained here illegally after it expired, was ordered to leave the U.S. in 1986, 1989 and 1992, but ignored the deportation orders. 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