by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n A Plodding Goddess<\/strong><\/p>\n Like a broken record, for the last five years\u00a0I have invoked<\/a>\u00a0the Greek concept of Nemesis, or divine retribution for unchecked hubris, to explain what was in store for the Obama administration.<\/p>\n Most readers have sighed, \u201cOK already, but where\u2019s the divine retribution, given this president\u2019s overweening arrogance and the damage that he\u2019s doing to the economy, our social fabric, and foreign policy?\u201d<\/p>\n Patience \u2014 Nemesis takes her time surveying human kind before figuring out the properly ironic punishment.<\/p>\n She must\u00a0soak in\u00a0vero possumus<\/i><\/a>, the fake Greek colonnade, the \u201cwe are the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for\u201d narcissism, the cooling the planet and lowering the rising seas riffs,\u00a0the tingling legs<\/a>, the \u201cperfectly creased pant<\/a>,\u201d the\u00a0Obama \u201cas god,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the smartest president ever, and the Obama who is by\u00a0his own admission<\/a>\u00a0better at each of the crafts of his specialized staff.<\/p>\n Then she must consider \u201cpunish our enemies<\/a>,\u201d \u201cfat cat bankers<\/a>,\u201d \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that<\/a>,\u201d \u201cbitter clingers,\u201d \u201cspread the wealth around,\u201d and dozens of additional slurs and banalities. To digest all that takes even the goddess some time.<\/p>\n The Non-Olympian<\/strong><\/p>\n The young, inexperienced, but haughty Obama is a stereotypical figure right out of Greek mythology. Sometimes he is poor arrogant Icarus \u2014 flying too high on his frail and melting waxen wings. Or is he arrogant young Phaethon? The latter demanded the reins of his father\u2019s sun chariot \u2014 only to end up in flames as his out-of-control divine car scorched the earth (unfortunately we are the earth). Often Obama seems a know-it-all Oedipus who believed that he was so smart that the far older world of chance and fate had to yield to his superior reason. Or is he vain Narcissus, so taken with his image in the reflecting pool that Nemesis allowed him to stare forever transfixed at himself?<\/p>\n Do we remember the bloody battle over health care in 2009: the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the war against Catholic institutions, the advice to pass the bill unconditionally to learn what was in it \u2014 all at a time of massive deficits and high unemployment, when we could ill afford such a divisive and costly boondoggle?<\/p>\n Obama in hubristic fashion got his wish, as he sought his own \u201clegacy\u201d or \u201csignature achievement\u201d over what was good for the country. \u00a0Obamacare became the law of the land. Its freebies of wider coverage supposedly at first came at no cost.<\/p>\n Obama vs. Obama<\/strong><\/p>\n Who, after all, was against putting their 24-year-old kid back on the family health plan? Then started the insidious new taxes, then the planned diversions from Medicare to pay for new humane coverage. Now looms the awful reality of its 2014 enactment and the burdens to come on small businesses that are desperately preempting the law by converting full-time positions into part-time jobs.<\/p>\n Once again comes the ancient warning: beware of what you wish for. Suddenly the 2014 election looms. Democrats in mixed districts are anxious. The new Obamacare rules are slated to hit voters right before most of the Congress seeks reelection. The signature achievement of the Obama administration is ending up as the proverbial albatross around its neck. When the author of the bill, Sen. Max Baucus, dubbed his own creation\u00a0\u201ca train wreck,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the description stuck.<\/p>\n Then Nemesis struck. Not Republicans in the House, not right-wing judges, but Obama himself tabled much of the most important parts in the implementation of the bill. For now he has almost killed off his own offspring, not in the promised most transparent fashion in the history of the presidency, but cheaply and perhaps cowardly on a little read website at the start of a long holiday. It is as if the president can pick and choose which laws he administers and which he simply ignores, but is terribly ashamed to admit such.<\/p>\n Nemesis warns us on the eve of the immigration debate that if Obama will ignore the legal requirements of his own bill, then he surely will be even bolder in\u00a0subverting the legislative work of others<\/a>. When shortly he will again lament that he is not a king or tyrant, remember that the disclaimer usually presages his attempt to act like one. Also remember that the best warning about Obama always comes from Obama: when he sermonizes to us about cheap photo-ops, endless campaigning and fund-raising, spiking the football, going after enemies, etc., then we expect that he is shortly to do all that and more.<\/p>\n The Whole World Is Watching<\/strong><\/p>\n Abroad it was more ironic still. Bashar Assad, we were reassured, was a \u201creformer\u201d whom Bush had unfortunately alienated. Bush\u2019s neocons had emboldened Israel to be obstructive, and thereby sabotaged peace in the Middle East. Leading from behind, dialogue, reset, soft power, the Nobel Peace Prize \u2014 all that and more would make the world love us.<\/p>\n Those abroad wanted in on the giddy American experience that Obama had ushered in. Balance of power, deterrence, alliances, notions of good and bad, and military readiness belonged to the ossified world of the past, the Risk board games that our fancy-pants elites played so \u00a0distant from the hearts and minds of foreigners on the ground. It was as if the very little our Phaethon president knew about foreign affairs, so the more he boasted about his soon-to-be successes.<\/p>\n Then Iran ignored five deadlines. Syria thought our red lines were pinkish. Russia dubbed reset a cruel joke, as Putin played with Obama as a spider does a fly. China was bewildered about whether their good fortune in having Obama as president had to be some sort of American preplanned trick.<\/p>\n Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, North Korea? The more we reached out, the more these corrupt nations thought us weak and guilty rather than formidable and proud. Turkey was no more a new nexus of American interests in the Muslim world than had been Pakistan. The best way to create a nuclear tinderbox in the Pacific was to assure Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines that we already had too many deployable nukes. The more Obama talked about the new American morality, the more our allies were puzzled that such abdication of responsibility seemed to them immoral.<\/p>\n So Nemesis proved even busier, as Obama\u2019s polls dived abroad, as he expanded or embraced the very protocols he had once derided, as he saw his own reset\u00a0reset by others<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nemesis Is Also Busy Elsewhere<\/strong><\/p>\n John Kerry in 2004 railed about the need for high taxes to prevent the rich and greedy from having too large a slice of the pie. Nemesis struck a bit then, too. We learned that the multi-billionaire, redistributionist Kerry was not much of a redistributionist himself \u2014 not when he docked his multimillion-dollar new yacht off Rhode Island to avoid paying the high sales and excise taxes on yachts that his beloved high-tax Massachusetts levied.<\/p>\n Now when the Arab world from Syria to Egypt is going up in flames, Kerry either is irrelevantly hectoring Israel or\u00a0back on his infamous yacht<\/a>, as a coup takes out the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo. The secretary of State serially jets to Israel, the one stable oasis that is not the problem of unrest, while at home his sailing reinforces the image of privilege, tax avoidance, and escapism.<\/p>\n If a right-wing critic lambasted Kerry as a hypocritical na\u00eff about the Middle East, more interested in yachting than the dirty work of dealing with an explosive crisis in Egypt, he could level no better cheap shot than what Kerry has leveled at himself. Nemesis so often allows the hubristic to craft a divine punishment all their own. Ask liberal and green Al Gore. The former vice president somehow, in vain hopes of avoiding new higher capital gains taxes that he supports, managed to rush the sale of his failed left-wing cable channel to an anti-Semitic news agency, which is funded by a zillionaire authoritarian sheikdom that was enriched by trafficking in planet-heating fossil fuels (which he opposes). Only Nemesis could pull off\u00a0those myriad hypocrisies<\/a>.<\/p>\n That Was Then, But This Is Now<\/strong><\/p>\n When a newly inaugurated president stays fixated on his predecessor, trashing him for endangering civil liberties, for waging a hyped-up war on terror, for bogging us down in a no-win bad war in Iraq while neglecting the good war in Afghanistan, he should beware of Nemesis. Again, if in 2009 a reactionary critic had written that Obama was an abject hypocrite who would keep Guantanamo open, expand renditions and tribunals, protect preventative detention, keep the Patriot Act intact, up the drone assassinations by a factor of ten, and lose the inherited peace in Iraq while suffering more casualties in Afghanistan in four years than Bush had in seven, he would have been considered a cheap partisan hack. All that, however, Obama did to himself, as he became the anti-Obama no opponent could.<\/p>\n Do we remember when Obama soared about an end to lobbyists in government, the cessation of the revolving door, or the new transparency?<\/p>\n Imagine if a skeptic in 2009 had rejoined: \u201cNo, your IRS will ruin its reputation by crude efforts to punish enemies and ensure you reelection. No, your State Department will lie about four American deaths to ensure that a silly fiction about a video preserves the re-election myth of al-Qaeda on the run and Libya on the mend. No, your NSA will be exposed as a vast spying octopus, as the most delicate national security secrets are revealed abroad, and by a two-bit, high-school dropout hacker who earned six figures as he outsmarted the NSA\u2019s best and brightest. No, your own Justice Department will monitor the private communications of the Associated Press, as your attorney general lies about such surveillance in the manner that your director of national intelligence lies while under oath about the activities of the NSA.\u201d Barack Obama, not Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, engineered all that.<\/p>\n Leopards and Spots<\/strong><\/p>\n If five years ago some pundit or some politico had predicted that Chicago conmen do not change when they come to Washington, that ends-justifying-the-means radicals never become across-the-aisle moderates, surely we would have dubbed him unhinged, delusional, a racist, and a hater. Yet Obama\u2019s own hubris accomplished all that and more \u2014 in a way that his most vehement critics could never have imagined.<\/p>\n So there is a Nemesis, after all.<\/p>\n Omnipotent and omniscient, she watches all of us to ensure that we do not fancy ourselves gods rather than mere humans who are no better and no worse than those around us.<\/p>\n Keep humble and avoid Nemesis.<\/p>\n News Update<\/strong><\/p>\n Our annual PJ public Sierra hike is this Saturday, July 13, starting at 8:00 AM, from the Badger Flat Trailhead on the Kaiser Pass Road. We are hiking again to Twin Lakes, about 4 hours round trip of moderate hiking. All are welcome. (In the past, about 30 have participated.) More details are at my\u00a0Private Papers<\/em>\u00a0personal Website<\/a>.<\/p>\n Also, try having a look at\u00a0Strategika<\/i>, a new online military history\/foreign affairs magazine that I am editing along with Bruce Thornton and David Berkey under Hoover Institution auspices. It takes a current issue of war and peace, and offers two diametrically opposed positions on it, as well as an historical background essay, commentary, and a reader poll.\u00a0We are now in issue #3<\/a>, in which we discuss women in the military.<\/p>\n Finally, I want to thank readers for comments on and support for\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>which\u00a0has now been out 8 weeks. When a historian also offers political commentary, then the latter sometimes means the former is looked upon differently. So thanks again for showing support. In the book I argue,\u00a0inter alia<\/i>, that Belisarius was both a military genius and a rare moralist, that William T. Sherman knew how to save Lincoln the election of 1864 and did just that, and that Matthew Ridgway is one of America\u2019s great unsung heroes. (Click here<\/a>\u00a0for my recent audio interview on\u00a0The Savior Generals\u00a0<\/i>with PJM\u2019s Ed Driscoll.)<\/p>\n I am working on a new book of military history,\u00a0The End of All Things. When Wars Become Armageddon<\/i>, about the rare occasions in history when defeat leads to utter annihilation and the end of a civilization \u2014 and why and how these rarer tragedies come to pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media A Plodding Goddess Like a broken record, for the last five years\u00a0I have invoked\u00a0the Greek concept of Nemesis, or divine retribution for unchecked hubris, to explain what was in store for the Obama administration.<\/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":[196,136],"tags":[12,106,105,1055,886,660,67],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1BK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1531,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/saving-obama-from-himself\/","url_meta":{"origin":6184,"position":0},"title":"Saving Obama From Himself","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Do you remember candidate Barack Obama offering his hope-and-change platitudes in front of the fake Greek columns during the Democratic convention? Or earlier pontificating at the Victory Monument in Berlin? Why didn't an old cigar-chomping Democratic pro take him aside and warn him\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2010"","block_context":{"text":"June 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/june-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9919,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ancient-laws-of-unintended-consequences\/","url_meta":{"origin":6184,"position":1},"title":"The Ancient Laws of Unintended Consequences","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Eight years of a fawning press have made the Left reckless. The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (\u201creckoning\u201d or \u201cdownfall\u201d) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that there are certain laws of the universe that operated independently\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":2222,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-power-of-payback\/","url_meta":{"origin":6184,"position":2},"title":"The Power of Payback","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Nemesis Everywhere I have believed in the power of the goddess Nemesis (\u201cdispenser of dues\u201d) ever since I was introduced to the concept as a teenager studying classics, especially in the texts of Hesiod, Herodotus, and Sophocles. Some of you know her also as\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":8693,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-hope-and-change-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":6184,"position":3},"title":"Obama\u2019s Hope-and-Change Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 29, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"President Obama applies the same principles abroad that he does at home. by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online At home President Obama is well known for his preference for perceived parity over liberty. Most of his domestic agenda \u2014Obamacare, executive-order amnesties, open borders, near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Obama Administration"","block_context":{"text":"Obama Administration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/whats-the-three-headed-monster-challenging-obamas-foreign-policy.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1912,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-as-greek-tragedy-part-one\/","url_meta":{"origin":6184,"position":4},"title":"Obama as Greek Tragedy–Part One","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Self-centered Protagonist The blueprint of a Sophoclean or even Euripidean tragedy is pretty straightforward. A confident, cocky tragic hero for about the first 600 lines of the play exhibits unconstrained exuberance as he takes on the world. For an ancient fawning, first-half-of-the-play Greek\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2773,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ways-of-the-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":6184,"position":5},"title":"The Ways of the Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 22, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Yes, Nancy, There Really Is a God Nemesis There is an odd sense among Democrats that nemesis simply does not exist. A once-vein-bulging Al Gore who barnstormed the country slurring President Bush by calling him a liar now seems baffled about the precedent he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2009"","block_context":{"text":"May 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/may-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6184"}],"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=6184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6185,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6184\/revisions\/6185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}