Victor Davis Hanson has some Advice for President Obama

But first he has some good reading for you.

The Way Our World Works
The Strange Thing About Nemesis…

…is that the deity picks its victims on the basis of irony and arrogance. For every media-frenzy about ethical lapses of columnist Armstrong Williams taking Bush administration money for hawking No Child Left Behind, there is a Jonathan Gruber, the MIT go-to pundit on health care, who raked in $400,000 from the Obama administration for?—hawking Obamacare.

For every racially insensitive Trent Lott, Senate party leader, there is a racially insensitive Harry Reid, Senate party leader. For every illegitimacy story about Levi Johnston and Sarah Palin’s daughter, there is a John Edwards’ love child. For every supposed Bush fabrication, there is Barack Obama on You Tube swearing he will air all the health care debate on C-Span (sort of like his old public campaign financing promises, or closing Gitmo within a year, or getting out of Iraq by March, 2008, or …).

There is a lot of good reading between the above and below this, so read it all if you can. If not here are the suggestions:
 
Modest Suggestions for Obama

1) Each time you invoke Bush and proceed to trash him, just substitute al Qaeda. Try it today or tomorrow. Or better yet, close your eyes, take a deep breath and envision Sarah Palin, and as your blood pressure rises, say “Bin Laden”. Then go out to address the country on anti-terrorism. Your credentials as a mean SOB anti-terrorist fighter would soar.

2) In the long promised spirit of bipartisanship, each time you think of a new strange way of praising the Islamic world, just substitute Bush. Your “there is no purple state America” credentials would be reestablished.

3) Instead of talking about all the uninsured and exploited, try suggesting that millions of Americans should buy catastrophic health care plans and pass on big-screen TVs, I-phones, and DVD players. And why not tax at 10% (since we now are in the age of taxes) all remittances sent back to Latin America ($50 billion last year). Not all of that sum is sent by impoverished illegal immigrants, but much of it is, and ensures that workers here will have less disposable money to pay for their own health care. We could set up plans with the $5 billion in revenue and send a message to cover one’s own expenses before sending money to family back home.

4) Do not hire any more cabinet officials or government agency heads with Ivy League degrees. Enough already. Nothing had destroyed the reputation of Yale-Harvard-Princeton more than the present administration. Geithner did not learn how to pay his taxes. Summers sleeps through meetings and has contradicted almost all that he used to believe in; Holder wants to accommodate the architect of 9/11 with a show trial in New York, but try the CIA agents who interrogated him. The old Yalie Van Jones thinks Bush was in on 9/11. And Barack Obama of Harvard Law Review believes the Muslims gave us everything from the printing press to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. One contractor, surgeon, engineer, or pilot is worth five lawyers and academics. The Ivy League seminar explains a lot of the problems with the now imploding Obama administration—so much self-referential talk of elite standards, so little actual proof of any at all.

5) Get ready and brace yourself. 2009 was spent sowing the seeds of foreign adventurism through apology, kowtowing, trashing the prior administration, reaching out to thugs, neglecting allies, and talking up the corrupt UN. 2010 will be spent reacting to the harvests of that bitter investment. Right now we are down at the OK corral, with a lot of seedy gunmen looking sideways to see who fires the first shot in expectation that he can get what he wants with a little flashy holster work. If he gets away with his threats and braggadocio, down the road a real shoot-out will follow.