by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
<\/em>Tribune Media Services<\/em><\/p>\n The Obama administration is facing scandals everywhere — using the\u00a0IRS\u00a0to punish political enemies, seizing the phone records of\u00a0Associated Press\u00a0and Fox News\u00a0reporters, monitoring phone and email accounts of millions, and making up stories about what happened in Benghazi.<\/p>\n In other words, the sort of government overreach that hardly raises eyebrows in Russia,\u00a0China\u00a0and most of\u00a0Africa\u00a0and\u00a0Latin America\u00a0is felonious here in the freest society in the world. Because of America’s unique Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, for over two centuries Americans have taken as their birthright privacy and free expression, so that even the slightest infringement becomes cause for outrage — and correction.<\/p>\n We also have wide margins of error in energy. President Obama still keeps the Keystone Pipeline on hold. He has frozen almost all new gas and oil leasing on America’s vast public lands. Yet throughout the 2012 campaign, the president also boasted that gas and oil drilling in\u00a0the United States\u00a0had reached all-time highs.<\/p>\n Despite, not because of, the president’s efforts, production rose due to a long history of protecting private property rights and ownership of subterranean resources. The country also inherited a can-do tradition of private enterprise using innovative new technology to cut costs and increase efficiency.<\/p>\n In contrast, much of\u00a0Europe\u00a0has outlawed fracking. Elsewhere there is not the expertise to use sophisticated recovery techniques. Only in\u00a0the United Statescan the private oil and gas sector not so easily be shut down. The result is that the president has the luxury of lauding record production while doing his utmost to stop it.<\/p>\n With the Obama administration’s scheduled Pentagon cuts, on top of the sequester reductions, about\u00a0$1 trillion\u00a0over the next decade will be slashed from the military budget. The president still is fighting a war in\u00a0Afghanistan, has intervened in\u00a0Libya, and for two years has threatened to use force to help topple Bashar Assad\u00a0of\u00a0Syria. Obama can oversee massive military reductions, and yet project force almost anywhere in the world, precisely because he inherited the largest, most potent armed forces in the history of civilization.<\/p>\n Even with budget cuts, the U.S. military will allot more to defense than what the next 10 nations spend on their militaries combined. America manages to do this, while investing less than 5 percent of its GDP, primarily because its economy remains the world’s largest, most productive and most innovative.<\/p>\n Elements of American universities are increasingly subject to global ridicule. Annual tuition customarily soars far beyond the rate of inflation. Aggregate student debt is now unsustainable. A lost generation of unemployed youth fails to translate their questionable degrees into well-paying jobs.<\/p>\n Colleges waste money on the superfluous, from rocking-climbing walls to diversity czars. College catalogs now include offerings such as\u00a0Dartmouth’s “Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes and Will and Grace: Contemporary Issues in LGBT Studies” and\u00a0Harvard’s\u00a0“Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in\u00a0Martin Scorseseand\u00a0Spike Lee.”<\/p>\n American universities have the luxury of offering the inane precisely because their math, science and computer departments, along with their medical and business schools, would never offer such fluff. In other words, the meritocratic protocols of institutions such as Caltech,\u00a0MIT,\u00a0Stanford Medical School\u00a0and Harvard Business School\u00a0are so successful in turning out the world’s most gifted graduates that they can afford to subsidize the widely publicized but otherwise shallow and politically correct nonsense.<\/p>\n The same paradox is true of the green movement.\u00a0The United States\u00a0has the luxury to waste billions of dollars subsidizing a failed Solyndra or insolvent electric car companies because it has the richest coal — and soon, gas and oil — deposits in the world.<\/p>\n Californians have shut down huge swaths of irrigated farmland to save a bait fish in the\u00a0Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta\u00a0and to restore 19th-century salmon runs in the state’s rivers. Sometimes even more radically they dream of blowing up the Hetch Hetchy dam to return to a premodern landscape in the centralSierra Nevada\u00a0mountains.<\/p>\n These realities and fantasies assume that\u00a0California\u00a0farmers will remain the most productive and innovative in the world, and the nation’s food supply both the cheapest and safest. And only because long-forgotten engineers once crafted a brilliant system of dams, canals and hydroelectric projects can the present generation of Californians — well fed, watered and powered — indulge in fantasies about discarding them.<\/p>\n At some point, our margins of error will disappear and with them the indulgent toying with our freedoms, defense, energy, education and food. Americans will then have to reawaken and act more like our no-nonsense predecessors — if our successors are to inherit what we have taken for granted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The Obama administration is facing scandals everywhere — using the\u00a0IRS\u00a0to punish political enemies, seizing the phone records of\u00a0Associated Press\u00a0and Fox News\u00a0reporters, monitoring phone and email accounts of millions, and making up stories about what happened in Benghazi.<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11,47,546],"tags":[12,1045,103,1023,547,357,479,1044,213,552],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1zF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7114,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/following-the-trail-nixon-blazed\/","url_meta":{"origin":6055,"position":0},"title":"Following the Trail Nixon Blazed","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama shows the same Orwellian disregard for the Constitution. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 What would a president do if he were furious over criticism, or felt that his noble aims justified most means of attaining them? Answer that by comparing the behavior of Richard Nixon to that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7556,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/was-benghazi-a-scandal\/","url_meta":{"origin":6055,"position":1},"title":"Was Benghazi a Scandal?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Scandals \u2014 or fundamental transformations? by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review\u00a0Online If the CIA wanted to smuggle guns to Syria or interrogate al-Qaeda suspects in Benghazi, that was its business, not necessarily the administration\u2019s. To the degree Obama was involved in overseeing events in Libya, his involvement was most\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The World"","block_context":{"text":"The World","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"photo by Getty images via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/pic_giant_061014_A_0-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7547,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fictions-as-truth\/","url_meta":{"origin":6055,"position":2},"title":"Fictions as Truth","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"For the Obama administration narrative to be accurate about the swap of five Taliban\/al-Qaeda-related kingpins for Sgt. Bergdahl, we are asked to believe the following: by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media For the Obama administration narrative to be accurate about the swap of five Taliban\/al-Qaeda-related kingpins for Sgt. Bergdahl,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo by eddriscoll.com via PJ Media","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/obama_us_flag_crossed_fingers_6-8-14-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5957,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-the-obama-scandals-reveal-about-progressive-ideology\/","url_meta":{"origin":6055,"position":3},"title":"What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMag.com The three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether or not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country\u2019s downward spiral is the more important question. Benghazi The moment it came\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":5950,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-second-term-embarrassments-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":6055,"position":4},"title":"Obama’s Second-Term Embarrassments","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 16, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Hope and change\" is looking like the 1973 Nixon White House. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In Barack Obama\u2019s 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. 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