Tag Archives: Victor Davis Hanson

The impeachment express trundles along

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Vote Opens Intense Public Phase of Inquiry...
HOUSE DIVIDED ON PARTY LINES...
Only 2 Dems Vote Against...
Nasty floor fight sets baseline...
Senate Republicans shift tone...
White House lawyer moved transcript to classified server...
Questions over 'edits'...
Russia Director Corroborates Quid Pro Quo...
I Wasn't Worried Trump Broke Law With Call...
But Was 'Concerning'...
REPORT: 'Whistleblower' Exposed...
MAG: How Rudy May Cost President Dearly...
State Dept. turning over Giuliani docs...
Campaign Holds 'Witch Hunt' Party...

The Democrats are full-on totalitarian socialists, would appear willing to use any means they can find to overturn the democratic process. The most astonishing part of the past three years has been the revelation how corrupt the left in the United States is, having commenced their efforts to spy on the Republican candidate while Obama was still president, and then cobble together absolutely anything to find some, any, justification to overturn the election result. Impeachment does not of course mean that the president will leave office but that he will go to trial in the Senate where it requires a two-thirds majority vote to remove the President. That will never happen.

The left has descended into madness, but that is no excuse for any of it. Not an ounce of principle on the left, while the most astonishing part of all of it has been how unblemished Donald Trump is, both in what he has done and in his basic personal integrity. Not to mention how positive every one of his policies have been.

Two bits to help you see where we are at. This is Conrad Black – who knows a thing about corrupt prosecutions – discussing The Impeachment Farce Limps Along to Its Anticlimax. Which begins:

This sordid, contemptible impeachment ruse is finally disintegrating. It was another fraud, and I predict that this time the polls will move clearly in the president’s favor. There are limits to how often his enemies can get the public and the world to the edges of their chairs with their fantastic accusations. The Economist, a long-respected magazine in earlier times, told us a year ago that the Trump presidency was hanging on the thread of Michael Cohen’s testimony. Most of the U.S. media gave the public to understand for two years that there was a high chance that he would be thrown out once the Mueller investigation established his “treasonous” links to the Russians. Trump appalls many reasonable people by some of his antics and utterances, but his supporters are rock-solid at only slightly less than half the country, and enough to have got him elected. But the vitriolic antagonism of about 90 percent of the media, and the fear and loathing of the political class, which he assaulted in its entirety, have sustained an artificial levitation of morbid expectation that he will be overthrown and removed.

And then there is hour-long interview with Victor Davis Hanson who has just published a book on The Case for Trump which he discusses in the video. He is by no means a partisan but he does at least establish just how sordid and diseased the opposition to the president is.

Iran as understood by Obama as understood by VDH

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Here is the conclusion of an article by Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s Iran strategy which is near enough to my own. Yet once again he won’t say what he obviously thinks, that Obama is an agent for the Iranians and hopes to see them succeed and the West lose. His entire article is as good a short summary as you will find, but this is how it ends. He is explaining how things look from Obama’s perspective:

The Middle East is not a mess, but a place in a needed stage of transition as it frees itself from Western domination and a new order slowly emerges. To the degree that we need a large military, it is preferable to envision it as an executive agency for enacting social change without the clumsy impediment of Congress, especially in terms of race, women’s issues, and gender preferences. It can do the best work for stability abroad by shrinking itself. Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder and always a relative concept that Westerners pathologically insist is absolute. As far as the world abroad goes, China is a more authentic enterprise than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which are the products of U.S. Cold War nation-building in our own image, not of indigenous revolutionary self-creation. U.S. Cold War culpability — in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, South America, Cuba — is a burden that must be addressed through various means. The rules of nuclear proliferation are a Western construct. Israel is an abnormality, a Western outpost of capitalism and privilege where it has never really belonged, an irritant that should be treated like any other country as much as politically possible. Latin American grass-roots socialism is not Stalinism, but rather an extension of what Obama is trying to do at home.

I think the world now seems a chaotic place only if you assume that the Obama administration wished to be like its predecessors.

It is a largely politically ignorant constituency fed by a media actively hostile to America’s traditional interests. This is the coming of a dark age.

A round-up of the usual suspects and others less usual

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From Kathy Shaidle: If you can read this, I guess I didn’t block you yesterday during #JeSuisCharlie.

From Mark Steyn: The Fire Rages and “I’d Rather Die Standing Than Live on My Knees”.

From Jay Curry: Useful Horror.

From Frank Pledge: The Left’s Unholy Alliance.

From Peter Smith, On Making Hatred Disappear.

From Paul Mirengoff: Four observations prompted by the Paris attack.

From Anjem Choudary: Why did France allow the tabloid to provoke Muslims?

From Stacey McCain: On Anjem Choudary

From Pam Geller: Jihad in America 2014

From Ezra Levant: Slams Media’s #JeSuisCharlie Phonies with must-see video

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Charlie Hebdo: West must stop appeasing Islamic purveyors of hatred

From Roger Simon: 2016 and Paris. It’s the jihad, stupid

From Brendon Bordelon: I am not Charlie: Leaked Newsroom Emails Reveal al Jazeera Fury over Global Support

Peter Hitchens: The sinister, screeching mob who want to kill free speech (And no, I DON’T mean the Islamist terrorists in our midst)

Robert Crumb: Legendary Cartoonist Robert Crumb on the Massacre in Paris

From Henry Ergas: Eyes wide shut to Islamist threat

From Clarice Feldman: Je Suis Sick and Tired of Cant

Pope Francis: Pope condemns ‘deviant forms of religion’ in the wake of French massacre, accusing them of causing ‘the breakdown of society and spawning violence and death’

From Victor Davis Hanson: Multicultural Suicide

From Marine Le Pen: To Call This Threat by Its Name: France Was Attacked by Islamic Fundamentalism

The Obama Doctrine

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This is from Victor Davis Hanson in what he calls, Obama’s Recessional. There’s nothing about this I find exceptional other than no one seems to care. It ought to frighten the daylights out of Australians sitting out here in the South Pacific but life does seem to go on. This is Hanson summing up Obama’s foreign policy strategy.

The Obama Doctrine is a gradual retreat of the American presence worldwide — on the theory that our absence will lead to a vacuum better occupied by regional powers that know how to manage their neighborhood’s affairs and have greater legitimacy in their own spheres of influence. Any damage that might occur with the loss of the American omnipresence does not approximate the harm already done by American intrusiveness. The current global maladies — Islamist terrorism, Middle Eastern tensions, Chinese muscle-flexing, Russian obstructionism, resurgence of Communist autocracy in Latin America — will fade once the United States lowers its profile and keeps out of other nations’ business.

There is always a balance of forces that asserts itself. It’s basically, you’re on your own except that with Obama, his foreign policy is essentially to support America’s former ideological enemies and abandon its friends. Where, then, do you suppose that leaves Australia? But Hanson also transfers the Obama Doctrine to domestic policy as well.

For Obama, America abroad is analogous to the 1 percent at home. We need not squabble over the reasons why the wealthiest Americans enjoy unequal access to the things money can buy, or why America, of all nations, finds itself with unmatched global clout and influence. The concern is only that such privilege exists; that it is unfair; that it has led to injustice for the majority; and that it must be changed.

Obama, of course, cannot issue a global tax aimed at the United States. He cannot easily expand U.S. foreign aid as a sort of reparations. And he cannot craft the international equivalent of Obamacare. But he does seek the same sort of redistributive readjustment to America’s presence abroad that he does to some Americans at home — in the interests of fairness, equality, and social justice.

Just as the United States would be a lot better place if a few million were not so rich, so too the world would be better off if the United States — and to a lesser extent Europe — were not so powerful and interventionist.

Obama is a man of shallow thoughts and great hatreds. Describing anything that Obama does as a “doctrine” gives it more credit than it deserves. But there are no doubt instinctual attitudes and reactions to specific events and they are more than evident, and if you want to call them a doctrine, be my guest. But whatever you call the structure of America’s foreign and economic policies, they are re-shaping the world. Time moves more rapidly than you think. In this century 911 and the Global Financial Crises are the two most momentous events. In their wake, the world is different now and if we are thinking either who will be the most powerful nation on the planet or where will wealth creation be at its most rapid twenty years from now, what’s your guess? That things will be as they are today is nowhere near even a fifty per cent chance.

The end of civilisation as we know it

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Civilsation as we know it is always ending. But some endings look worse than others and we are in such a new world that it is hard not to be pessimistic. What is needed to keep things turning over are disappearing at an astounding rate. This is from Victor Davis Hanson in a post he titles, The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization. There have been forecasts like this before, and maybe this too will pass. But it seems to me as well that we are entering a new more barbarous world about which it is hard to be optimistic. This is how it ends, that is, this is how the article ends. You can then go back and read it all for yourself from the beginning.

What do I mean about the “thinning strand of civilization”?

A shrinking percentage of our population feeds us, finds our energy, protects us, and builds things we count on. They get up each morning to do these things, in part in quest for the good life, in part out of a sense of social obligation and basic humanity, in part because they know they will die if idle and thrive only when busy, and in part simply because “they like it.”

We can stack the deck against them with ever higher taxes, ever more regulations, ever more obligations to others, and they may well continue. But not if we also damn them as the “1%” and call them the agents of inequality and the fat cats who did not build what they built or who profited when they should not have.

You cannot expect the military to protect us, and then continually order it to reflect every aspect of postmodern American sensitivity in a risky premodern world. Filing a lawsuit to divert a river’s water to the sea during a drought is a lot easier and cleaner than welding together well-casings at sea. Last week, an off-duty armed correctional officer in Fresno intervened in a wild carjacking, shooting and killing the gang-member killer and thus limiting his carnage to one death and two woundings rather than five or six killings — at the very moment Harvey Weinstein — of guns-blazing Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction fame and profits — promised to destroy the NRA. These contrasts say everything about the premodern, the postmodern and the innocent who pay the tab in-between.

Each day when I drive to work I try to look at the surrounding communities, and count how many are working and how many of the able-bodied are not. I listen to the car radio and tally up how many stories, both in their subject matter and method of presentation, seem to preserve civilization, or how many seem to tear it down. I try to assess how many drivers stay between the lines, how many weave while texting or zoom in and out of traffic at 90mph or honk and flip off drivers.

Today, as the reader can note from the tone of this apocalyptic essay, civilization seemed to be losing.

And not a whit less momentous is this, which opens an article titled, The Humanities and Us:

In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles decimated its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

Are these not barbarians? They are, and if they are, then we all are. What will pull us back from the edge this time? More high tech than before but a Dark Age coming all the same.

Colleges have gone rogue

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This is about the US, of course, and i is a disgrace. By Victor Davis Hanson, The Outlaw Campus. He begins:

Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.

Amongst his recommendations, what in particular appeals to me is this:

The old notion that a peer-reviewed article in a particular journal or a university-press monograph is the key to tenure has become antiquated in the age of the World Wide Web and the ubiquitous electronic audit of just about everything we do. Faculty are terrified of a future where one’s life’s work can be instantly accessed, and where its usefulness can be assessed by the number of scholars who consult it, footnote it, or buy it.