{"id":9295,"date":"2016-05-12T11:37:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T18:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9295"},"modified":"2016-05-12T11:37:06","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T18:37:06","slug":"why-we-are-sick-of-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-we-are-sick-of-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Are Sick of Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"article_title\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"blog_author\">By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ <em>National Review Online<\/em><\/div>\n<div class=\"blog_author\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"blog_author\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"blog_author\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"print_text\">\n<p>John Kerry just announced to the graduating class at Northeastern University: \u201cYou\u2019re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.\u201d Of course, Kerry himself never believed in a \u201cborderless world\u201d \u2014 any more than when, in Trump-style, he once ripped President Bush for allowing \u201cunpatriotic\u201d outsourcing. Given the global range and production of Heinz, Inc. (where his wife has a multibillion-dollar stake), Kerry certainly believes in borders and <em>diff\u00e9rence<\/em>; otherwise he would never have moved his 76-foot luxury yacht from Boston Harbor across the state border to Rhode Island to enjoy how a political boundary can create a different cultural landscape \u2014 and avoid $500,000 in sales taxes and assorted state and local taxes.<\/p>\n<p>Former novelist and current presidential advisor Ben Rhodes recently was interviewed by the <em>New York Times<\/em> where he offered a quite smug takedown of what he calls the \u201cBlob\u201d, the supposedly ossified Washington beltway foreign-policy establishment. Due to his self-described stealth and cunning characteristic of a fiction writer, the lame-duck Rhodes could at last brag of his legacy and how he outwitted the \u201cBlob.\u201d But, of course, Rhodes himself (whose title is right out of the 16th-century Spanish imperial court at El Escorial: \u201cAssistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting\u201d) is the embodiment of the insider establishment. Rhodes leveraged his family ties and D.C. contacts for a hook up at the Woodrow Wilson Center under Lee Hamilton, then a staff position on the Iraq Study Group, and then a move to presidential candidate Obama\u2019s team in 2007. All that seems quite blobby \u2014 as does his brother\u2019s presidency of CBS News.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Nor does the Obama administration take seriously its apparently newfound idea that individual states or municipalities cannot craft laws in defiance of federal statutes or court rulings. The Obama Justice Department has used linguistic gymnastics to reinterpret the Civil Rights statutes on gender to ensure that the transgendered can use any public restroom they feel most comfortable with. Thus it is now suing North Carolina for passing laws aligning the use of facilities with biological fact rather than self-selected gender identity. But, of course, the administration believes in no such federal supremacy of laws, given that it has green-lighted, in neo-Confederate style, over 300 local and state jurisdictions to nullify federal immigration law and declare themselves \u201csanctuary cities\u201d and \u201csanctuary states.\u201d All this in a manner that the administration would never tolerate if we were talking about restroom, school prayer, gun registration, or Endangered Species Act \u201csanctuary cities.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>People do not so much tire of the posing and hypocrisies of the elites in Washington as they have become utterly disgusted by them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online John Kerry just announced to the graduating class at Northeastern University: \u201cYou\u2019re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.\u201d Of course, Kerry himself never believed in a \u201cborderless world\u201d \u2014 any more than when, in Trump-style, he once ripped President Bush for allowing \u201cunpatriotic\u201d outsourcing. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":[11,23,495,187,46,262],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2pV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1383,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democratic-leadership\/","url_meta":{"origin":9295,"position":0},"title":"Democratic Leadership?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's The Corner Not Quite the Clinton Solution In all the talk about returning to the Clinton income-tax tables, I have been confused on one small point: As I remember the Gingrich-Clinton years, the tax raises were followed by spending freezes and caps, and some time\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;August 2010&quot;","block_context":{"text":"August 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/august-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5320,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/four-months-in-vietnam\/","url_meta":{"origin":9295,"position":1},"title":"Four Months in Vietnam","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Or how to misdirect public attention. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Everyone knows magicians use misdirection to make their illusions work. While one hand distracts us the other is pulling the egg or coin from its hiding place. Politics is no different, as the Kerry campaign and its shills\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Bruce S. Thornton&quot;","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":4567,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/kerrys-dilemma\/","url_meta":{"origin":9295,"position":2},"title":"Kerry&#8217;s Dilemma","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Or, how to lose and election by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is a good chance that no matter what Kerry says or does in the final two weeks of this election \u2014 barring some major catastrophe in Iraq, a presidential gaffe, or massive voting irregularity \u2014 he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;October 2004&quot;","block_context":{"text":"October 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/october-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4616,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-fog-of-battle\/","url_meta":{"origin":9295,"position":3},"title":"The Fog of Battle","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"What comes around, goes... by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Even in daytime fighters do not perceive anything; indeed, nobody knows anything more than what is going on right around himself. So the fifth-century B.C. military historian Thucydides commented on the confusion of battle on the heights above Syracuse\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;August 2004&quot;","block_context":{"text":"August 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/august-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4560,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-real-divide-is-online-in-elitist-minds\/","url_meta":{"origin":9295,"position":4},"title":"The Real Divide is Online in Elitist Minds","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 27, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson San Francisco Chronicle Are things really as ghastly as they appear this election year? President Bush is derided as a liar, brain-dead and a coward, not just by fringe groups but by prominent members of the Democratic establishment. Major intellectuals and artists lament that John Kerry\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;October 2004&quot;","block_context":{"text":"October 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/october-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3407,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-secularist-delusion\/","url_meta":{"origin":9295,"position":5},"title":"The Secularist Delusion","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The dubious received wisdom rationalizing our current intervention in Libya was crystallized in Senator John Kerry\u2019s recent\u00a0essay\u00a0for\u00a0The Wall Street Journal. For Kerry, the rebels in Libya are the same as those in Egypt, \u201cpeacefully demanding freedom and dignity.\u201d Long oppressed by tyrants\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Islam&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9295"}],"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=9295"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9298,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9295\/revisions\/9298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}