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The Democrats not so best and not so brightest

by Mojambo ( 156 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Eric Holder, Political Correctness, Politics, Progressives at August 14th, 2012 - 8:00 pm

Elizabeth Warren – falsely claims to be an Indian, Fareed Zakaria – a plagiarer, Eliot Spitzer – client number 9, Nancy Pelosi – a blithering idiot, ditto Joe Biden. These are the faces of today’s Democratic Party.

by Victor Davis Hanson

From Eliot Spitzer to Elizabeth Warren to Fareed Zakaria — what is wrong with our elites? Do they assume that because they are on record for the proverbial people, or because they have been branded with an Ivy League degree, or because they are habitués of the centers of power between New York and Washington, or because they write for the old (but now money-losing) blue-chip brands (Time magazine, the New York Times, etc.), or because we see them on public and cable TV, or because they rule us from the highest echelons of government that they are exempt from the sorts of common ethical constraints that the rest of us must adhere to — at least if a society as sophisticated as ours is to work?

I understand that there is a special genre of conservative Christian hypocrites — a Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, or Ted Haggard — who preach fire and brimstone about the very sins they indulge in. The Republican primary was in some ways a circus as the media had a field day pointing out the ethical inconsistencies of the candidates. But here I am talking about secular elites across the cultural spectrum who simply do not live by their own rules, and yet are often granted exemption for their transgressions because of their own liberal piety — and a more calibrated assumption that the world of blue America (i.e., the media, the government, the arts, the foundations, the legal profession, and Hollywood) will not hold them to account.

Take affirmative action. Over-the-top and crude Ward Churchill at least bought the buckskin and beads to play out his con as an American Indian activist with various other associated academic frauds. But Elizabeth Warren’s “Cherokee”-constructed pedigree was far more subtle — and the sort of lie that Harvard could handle. She more wisely kept to the fast lane of tasteful liberal one-percenters, as she parlayed a false claim of Indian ancestry into a Harvard professorship. So whereas Churchill is now a much-lampooned figure, Warren may be headed to the U.S. Senate. To say that Elizabeth Warren is and was untruthful, and yet was a law professor who was supposed to inculcate respect for our jurisprudence, is to incur the charge of being a right-wing bigot. But reflect: how can someone who faked an entire identity — and one aimed at providing an edge in hiring to the disadvantage of others — not be completely ostracized? Again, Warren was successful precisely because she wore no beads or headband and did not affect a tribal name — the sort of hocus-pocus that makes faculty lounge liberals uncomfortable. It was precisely because she looked exactly like a blond, pink Harvard progressive that Warren’s constructed minority fraud was so effective.

Why would a Fareed Zakaria lift the work of someone else? Time constraints? Carelessness? Amnesia over how and why he reached his present perch? Do such columnists farm out their research or outlines to assistants? Or do they think their liberal credentials outweigh reasonable audit of what they write? Steal from someone else and take a month off work? Even my copper wire thieves out here on the farm would have to pay a bit more if they were caught. Their last theft was about $70 worth of conduit, but I imagine Time pays lots more per Zakaria column.

[……]

Why did Barack Obama think, in Rigoberta Menchu or Greg Mortenson fashion, that he could more or less make up most of the key details in his own autobiography? Again, think of it: the current president of the United States fabricated much of the information about his own life, in ways designed to enhance his self-serving narrative of America’s racial insensitivity. But then again, for over a decade the president allowed his literary biography to claim that he was born in Kenya. His political opponents who claimed just that were written off as unhinged; but are we to think of the president himself as a birther?

I think that I should have boasted that I was born in Lund, Sweden, and dated the insensitive daughter of an agribusiness magnate, to make my past account of small farm life more effective. But then again, Vice President Joe Biden is likewise a plagiarist — who lifted an entire section of a speech from British Laborite Neil Kinnock, a “lapse” that recalled Biden’s earlier plagiarism in law school.

I thought Trent Lott should have stepped down for praising 100-year-old Strom Thurmond at his birthday fest in ways that could have suggested support for Thurmond’s earlier creed of racial segregation. But what does it take for his liberal counterpart — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — to quit? Declare the Iraq war lost in the midst of a surge to save it? Claim that Barack Obama is a light-skinned black who can turn on and off his black accent? Defame an African-American member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a “sh-t stirrer”? Or in McCarthyesque style fantasize that “someone” heard a rumor that Romney did not pay taxes, and hence Romney must release a decade of returns to “prove” that he is not a tax cheat — and this from a man who became a millionaire while in public office and has not released a single year of his own returns?

[……….]

Liberal penance explains why Timothy Geithner apparently thought that he need not pay his full income tax obligations — in a way a CEO of Chick-fil-A or Amway might never dare. If there is a problem with white redneck crime, will a mayor call in the racist Klan in the way Rahm Emanuel welcomed to Chicago Louis Farrakhan? Why worry whether Hilda Solis had a lien on the family business, when she issues a video invitation to illegal aliens to report their unfair employers to the Labor Department? And why did television host Eliot Spitzer, the white-collar crime fighter, think he could employ prostitutes with impunity while governor — and, if caught, expect to end up as a cable TV news host? Or why did John Edwards, of “two Americas” fame, preach populism while enjoying the one-percent lifestyle (well aside from the lies about his campaign-subsidized girlfriend)? Or why did John Kerry both advocate higher taxes and yet seek to avoid them by docking his luxury yacht in a different state?

Or why, more recently, did Obama campaign guru Stephanie Cutter assume that she could simply lie on national television by stating that she did not know the circumstances behind the Joe Soptic “Romney-cancer” ad? She knew that earlier she was on tape outlining the Soptic narrative, so did she think she could claim ignorance on TV, blast her critics in the days to come, and then go back on as usual, given her efforts to extend the Obama agenda? Stranger still, she is probably right about all of those assumptions. I expect her in a week to be on television accusing her opponents of lying, with a press aiding and abetting her. Why does wealthy Andrea Mitchell yell at us for being illiberal, when she could instead yell at her husband, who was far more embedded in Wall Street than any Tea-Party pizza store owner?

[……..]

In most of these cases, the above are servants of the progressive cause. They operate on assumption that they are our self-appointed censors, vigilant to spot class, race, or gender bias and unfairness among those less well-branded. But as our morals police, they do not fear any policing of themselves. Never is there any assumption that John Edwards’s attacks on the wealthy mean that he should not live in a ridiculous, self-indulgent mansion or hire on a groupie with other people’s money. It made perfect sense that the green moralist Al Gore should have enjoyed one of the most energy-guzzling homes in Tennessee, or from time to time played boorish “crazed sex poodle” with his call-up masseuse. Elizabeth Warren is knee-deep in the world of the one-percent, in part because she knows how to work the system of exemption that assumes loud liberal credentials allow one to live a life quite differently from the one professed.

In short, our top pundits, our political elites, our very president all believe that they can blast the unfairness of high capitalism while doing everything in their power to enjoy its dividends — and demand an ethical standard from others that they habitually do not meet themselves. It is as if the more left-wing one sounds, the more anti-left-wing his tastes; the more the ethicist lectures on morality, the more he is likely to be unethical; the more green an advocate, the less likely the 800-square foot cottage replete with recycled water, a solar toilet, and 70-degree hot water. The only mystery here is whether there is some sort of logical connection. Does the profession of cosmic morality by design allow one to enjoy without guilt quite earthly sins? Why do super-rich liberals not like the Tea-Party upper-middle-class entrepreneurs? Are the latter in no need of liberal condescension? Do they not have quite enough money to show exquisite taste? Or are they grubby, too close to the struggle for a buck?

Two final notes on why all this matters. First, when the left-wing media ceases to scrutinize public figures, the latter are emboldened to fabricate, cheat, plagiarize, and flat out lie. It is not that there are not conservative hypocrites, just that the present system makes it far harder for them to get away with these failings. (Imagine the press reaction to a Romney autobiography full of untruths; a Paul Ryan with a yacht docked in a no-tax harbor; a Charles Krauthammer lifting entire paragraphs from the work of others).

Second, all of the above are part of an elite establishment that is supposed to set standards for emulation, but instead only coarsens civilization. Why tell the truth, hoi polloi, when everyone from Bill Clinton to Stephanie Cutter will not? Can we determine what is true and false, when we have no idea in Time magazine or in a presidential memoir whether the sentence is copied from someone else or simply made up? If the governor frequents prostitutes, how can there be a law against prostitution? After Elizabeth Warren, how can there exist such a thing as affirmative action? Cannot every white male in America assert that he has high cheek bones and so deserves a leg up on any other white male stupid enough not to claim his great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee?

Our civilization is under assault. Those who have taken upon themselves to direct it are instead doing their own part to destroy it.

Read the rest – Our not so best and not so brightest

Tags: Elizabeth Warren, Fareed Zakaria, Harry Reid, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Eric Holder, Political Correctness, Politics, Progressives | 156 Comments »

Obama in fantasy land

by Mojambo ( 130 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, government, Health Care, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Iran, Islamists, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood, Poland, Political Correctness, Progressives, Russia, Syria, unemployment, World War II at August 8th, 2012 - 8:00 am

The key sentence is in the very first paragraph (emphasis added) in which VDH not only accurately describes Barack Obama, but the Islamic world as well. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once described negotiating with them (and even though he was talking about Palestinians it is the same as dealing with people such as Obama) as being:

The products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as ‘the truth’.

For post modernists there is no truth.

by Victor Davis Hanson

The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as truth to serve the higher moral narrative: a young biracial idealist searching for his identity in a mostly racist and oppressive America. To the degree that Dreams from My Father enhanced that narrative, then all of what was in it was “true” — even the literary agent’s bio attesting that the exotic author was born in faraway Kenya.

For the fabulist Obama, the past is a vague mess with shifting narratives that can serve noble contemporary causes. Take World War II — the old war that supposedly proves that victory is now an obsolete term, since, as Obama explained, Japanese Emperor Hirohito capitulated to General MacArthur, apparently on the deck of the Missouri, in a rare act never to happen again. Obama’s own grandfather was in the forefront of stopping Nazism, and the more dramatic the circumstances the better — so who cares whether the Russians, and not an American unit, liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka?

Indeed, the war is a sort of a vague haze where Nazi death camps become “Polish” and Pearl Harbor was hit with “the bomb.” If it is useful while speaking in Cairo to pretend that the Islamic world helped to prompt the European Renaissance (which benefitted enormously from the flight of Greek scholars as Constantinople was threatened by the Ottoman Turks) and Enlightenment (which ignited a Romantic interest in freeing Greece from Islam), then so be it. If Córdoba had few, if any, Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition, who cares, if we wish to hold up the Muslims there as beacons of tolerance in comparison to murderous Catholics?

No American has any idea whether recess appointments, executive privilege, executive orders, or filibusters are to be considered good, bad, or indifferent, since Senator/President Obama has damned and embraced them all. I vaguely remember that at one time Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, and preventive detention were either of no value or unconstitutional, and trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court and prosecuting CIA agents for supposedly too harsh interrogations were good. But that was all more than three years in the past, and hundreds of “Make no mistake about it”s and “Let me be perfectly clear”s ago.

[…….]

The Obama health-care plan was once different from Hillary Clinton’s in that it never included an individual mandate, but then it did have a mandate, then it had a tax instead, and it ended up with a penalty. The only constant is that names change as circumstances dictate. Barack Obama does not take money from oil companies, hire lobbyists, approve of earmarks, or raise money from Wall Street, but somebody with that name did. The new civility is “punish our enemies.” Voter intimidation is asking for an ID at the polls — it is not trying to make it more difficult for those in the military to vote. Developing domestic energy means canceling the Keystone pipeline and putting vast areas of federal lands off limits to gas and oil production. If the private sector goes ahead, despite federal regulations and discouragement, with new fracking and horizontal drilling, then the Obama administration achieved record levels of domestic oil and gas production.

Someone said something about cutting the deficit in half within four years and, through borrowing, forcing unemployment under 6 percent, but I am not sure any more who it was — given that that was 42 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment and $5 trillion in borrowed money ago.

No one knows what “reset” with Russia was, or is, or will be; it didn’t so much fail as simply got erased. Nor can anyone figure out whether the dissidents in the streets of Tehran in 2009 were noble or to be ignored, or why exactly we belatedly supported the ouster of Mubarak, or what exactly turned Qaddafi from a monstrous oil exporter who had to be appeased to a really monstrous oil exporter who had to be removed, or why we had to reopen our embassy in Damascus as a gesture to the “reformer” Assad, who is now a murderous non-reformer who must go.

I am sure Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush flip-flopped and did things that they had said they would not, but there was always the clear sense that their hypocrisies were adjudicated by some sort of standard. With President Obama there is neither a reality nor a standard, just words that so often have no connection to the real world, past or present.

Read the rest – Obama in never, never land

Tags: Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, government, Health Care, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Iran, Islamists, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood, Poland, Political Correctness, Progressives, Russia, Syria, unemployment, World War II | 130 Comments »

Barack Obama’s foreign policy

by Mojambo ( 77 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Argentina, Barack Obama, Canada, China, Columbia, Egypt, Elections 2012, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Libya, Mitt Romney, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Syria, Turkey, UK at July 5th, 2012 - 3:30 pm

Snub our friends, appease our enemies, support totalitarians (especially if they are Islamic), grovel before the world, and gut our armed forces. That is the essence of the Pax Obama. I really wish Mitt Romney would speak out more on Obama’s disastrous foreign policy.

by Victor Davis Hanson

The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on U.S. foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis — an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in the current administration’s foreign policy. But Mitt Romney should be careful in critiquing the status quo, given that it is full of paradoxes and contradictions.

The war on terror? Forget the absurd euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” the hypocrisy of railing against waterboarding three known terrorists while blowing up over 2,000 suspected terrorists (and anyone near them), and the half-hearted efforts of both using and trying to close Guantanamo and envisioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court. What Obama said he wanted to do and what he actually did do are quite different things. In truth, he embraced or expanded almost all the Bush-Cheney protocols that he demagogued against as a state legislator, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That he gave George W. Bush absolutely no credit for surging in and saving Iraq, or setting up the procedures for operations like those that killed bin Laden, is again a matter of ingratitude, not foreign policy, given that the war on terror is now a successful eleven-year continuum.

But there is one caveat. Words ultimately have consequences. The constant naïveté from the administration — the characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood as largely “secular,” the mythography of the Cairo speech, the taboo against using the phrase “radical Islam” — may have been designed to offer a politically correct mask for Obama’s continuance of the Bush-Cheney protocols, but it may also have had the effect of suggesting to our enemies that the U.S. is ambiguous about radical Islam and does not necessarily connect it with anti-American terrorism.

In general, given American exhaustion over Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the economic crisis, the Obama administration correctly gauged the public desire for no more interventions, but it finessed that isolationist impulse into its own sense of a multipolar world where America was merely one among many nations.

Aside from the war on terror, then, what are the ten legitimate areas of criticism?

1. Securitygate. The Obama administration has leaked the most intimate secrets about U.S. covert operations — the cyber war against Iran, the Predator-drone assassination program, the Yemeni double agent, the bin Laden raid — in a transparent attempt to chest-thump over the once covert anti-terrorism efforts. This was a shameful thing, and we have not yet felt the full consequences of this disaster.

2. The administration initially did not care much about the Arab Spring, but was dragged into it by the looming fall of Hosni Mubarak. Leading from behind in Libya was incoherent, and what followed Qaddafi was more incoherent. Not going into Syria was wise, even if the reasons for not going in were again muddled. Obama remains ashamed of Iraq and ostracizes it (even as it so far remains the most stable of the new Arab consensual governments), and he makes no distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood and secular democratic movements. In other words, rather than encouraging those who thought the Arab Spring might offer a pluralistic society, Obama stood back as Islamists, Khomeini-style, took control, and he then ex post facto labeled them democrats, even though, as in the case of Hamas and the Iranian theocrats, they favor one free election, just one time.

[……..]

4. Obama has snubbed our closest allies, so much so that should the U.S. ever find itself again in need of a coalition, it is hard to imagine who would join it. Canada got mostly ingratitude for its presence in Afghanistan, and it is still furious over the Keystone Pipeline debacle. Our once closest ally, Great Britain, recognizes that the United States is now neutral on the Falklands (a.k.a. the Maldives), and that if Argentina were to invade again, the U.S. would probably withhold help. Israel knows that the U.S., at best neutral, votes present on the Middle East and does not much worry that Israel may soon be surrounded by Islamist frontline states. Whether we would fully supply Israel in its next war is legitimately in doubt. In contrast, Turkey, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, for the first time in history, believe that America is more sympathetic to their causes than to Israel’s. Anti-democratic Venezuela and Cuba, and their Latin American kindred Communist states, also sense that the U.S. is a friend of such totalitarian movements — a suspicion shared by the vanishing number of regional democrats.

5. President Obama was quiet when nearly 1 million Iranian protesters hit the streets in the spring of 2009, almost as if he felt his own multicultural bona fides should be given a chance to finesse the Khomeinist theocracy — or as if the pro-democracy protesters were some sort of inauthentic neocons. It was a shameful decision at a rare time when the Iranian people were looking for pro-democracy affirmation — offering the last chance to stop the Iranian bomb without some sort of military intervention.

6. The new emphasis on Asia is so far in utter confusion. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are less, not more, assured that a diffident U.S. would come to their defense in case of an existential crisis. Are they still under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or is the umbrella itself shrinking fast? Simultaneously borrowing from and lecturing China leads to the image of U.S. impotence. The timing of looking eastward was terrible, as NATO sinks into irrelevance at precisely the moment when an insolvent southern Europe is waging a propaganda war against an ascendant Germany. As the euro zone unravels, a strong U.S. presence in Europe is needed more than ever.

7. Despite the growing anti-democratic tendencies of the Erdogan government in Turkey, Obama has structured his Middle East policy around that government, unconcerned that its policy of insidious Islamization is a model for slowly subverting what follows from elections.

8. The apologies, contextualizations, and bowing were trivial gestures, but in aggregate they added to the sense of U.S. diffidence and decline. As they became right-wing talking points, they also became rarer — a reflection that Obama’s own advisers understood that the optics of his one-worldism were becoming harmful to U.S. interests.

[……..]

10. With a little deft diplomacy, Obama could have salvaged a vestigial American presence to monitor the security of Iraqi democracy and blunt Iranian subversion. The failure to attempt this was an especially ironic lapse, given that the administration now wants to radically increase U.S. troop levels in nearby monarchical Kuwait.

The key for the Romney campaign is not, in the manner of the anti-Bush unthinking Left, to offer blanket condemnations, given that on many aspects of the war on terror, Obama, to his credit, continued the successful policies that he inherited. In contrast, there are plenty of policies that are Obama’s own — and therefore quite dangerous.

Read the rest – The Obama Foreign Policy

Tags: Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Afghanistan, Argentina, Barack Obama, Canada, China, Columbia, Egypt, Elections 2012, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Libya, Mitt Romney, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Syria, Turkey, UK | 77 Comments »

Essential VDH: Syria is not a winning issue for 2012

by Phantom Ace ( 2 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Elections 2012, Headlines, Hezballah, Iran, Islamists, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Muslim Brotherhood, Syria at June 5th, 2012 - 2:16 pm

For reasons known only to him, Mitt Romney has called for invading Syria. This contradicts his message that he is focused on the economy. An invasion and occupation of Syria will tank the markets, drive up the debt and bring back Democrats to power. The anti-Jihad wing of the Right will permanently split, thus make it impossible for a united Center-Right to ever win an election. The majority of Americans are against intervention. This is not a winning campaign issue.

Victor Davis Hanson clearly realizes that a war in Syria is a waste of time and will make things worse. He warns Romney and the GOP that this is not a winning issue.

But in the case of Syria, the obvious advantages of seeing an end to Assad — offering freedom to the populace, stopping the government killing of its own, ending Syria’s corruption of Lebanon, disrupting the Iran/Hezbollah/Syria nexus — are for now certainly outweighed by a number of factors:

1) We have no reason to believe that minorities will be any better off in the chaos to come.

2) We do not know the composition of the opposition, but can reasonably assume from other recent revolutions that there will be a likelihood of seeing one election one time, in the Gaza model that brings in Islamists.

3) We cannot point to postbellum violence and chaos in Libya as any sort of model.

[….]

Finally, at a time of record budget deficits, 40 months of 8-plus percent unemployment, weak economic growth, defense cuts, and the war in Afghanistan, there is very little, if any, public support for intervening in some manner in Syria. In political terms, there are lots of areas — reset with Russia, distance from Israel, strained relationships with allies, cold/hot/cold attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan — where the Obama administration projects weakness and invites foreign adventurism, but caution in Syria is not an issue that the Romney campaign should use against the president.

Mitt Romney should heed Victor Davis Hanson’s advise. Syria is pissing match between Iran/Assad/Hizb’Allah vs. The Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda. This is a gang street fight and one which we should avoid getting involved. America needs peace and prosperity, not more wars and nation building. The peopel don’t wnat it and we can not afford it.

Tags: Syrian War, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Al Qaeda, Elections 2012, Headlines, Hezballah, Iran, Islamists, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Muslim Brotherhood, Syria | 2 Comments »