Links to Victor Davis Hanson's writings from National Review Online

The World Turned Upside Down -- Again 
Amid global upheaval, our leaders have forgotten how strong America really is.

Tough Times for Radical Islam
Osama bin Laden's world of terrorism no longer exists.

A Weird Sort of Hate
I think it is time to move beyond the Pakistani "alliance": quietly and without fanfare cut off all aid, and wish them well as they seek their own path without the United States.

The Wisdoms of VDH

You all know how I like this man's writings.  He has two websites I check regularly;
one is Works and Days , the other is Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers .  He has some real jewels there right now.  Here are links to them.

The Obamaites’ About-Face
2011 Politically-Incorrect Resolutions
Paradoxes of the Present Age, Profound and Trivial
He does share his site with others and this one is by Bruce S. Thornton.
“No Labels,” No Democracy

Go read them all. I think Mr. Hanson is one of our great philosophers.

VDH on Calling a Swede a Swede and the News you Didn't Read in the newspaper or see on TV

Anyone who reads this blog is familiar with my love of what Victor Davis Hanson writes.
Today he has hit it out of the park again.

Calling a Swede a Swede
Imagine an alternate universe where terrorists are Scandinavian — Swedes, to be specific.

Imagine, if you will, an alternative universe where perception is slightly altered to reflect a different reality. In this universe, terrorists are Scandinavian — Swedes, to be specific.

We should not generalize, and it is clear that not all Swedes are terrorists, but all terrorists are Swedes. These radicals have perverted the beautiful Nordic religion of peace and turned it into an ideology of hatred.

The facts clearly show that the men who try to smuggle bombs onto airplanes have blond hair, blue eyes, are between twenty and forty years old, believe in the supreme god Odin, and carry names like Ingmar Johansson.

They talk funny and they love smorgasbord, which is a traditional Nordic meal with lots of raw fish, and every Swede can drink alcohol in amounts that would kill six reindeer within three minutes.

How do we make sure these bomb-laden Swedes don’t board our airplanes? How can we recognize these radical Nordic terrorists? Should we check dark-haired Asians called Honda? Italians called Ferrari?

Would it be acceptable to single out Swedes trying to travel by air? Or should we, trying to avoid offending Swedish sensibilities, check every person with an airline ticket in general and especially focus on inspecting their crotch? After all, Swedes love to wear their bombs in their underwear, so maybe non-Swedes also wear bombs in their underwear, right?

Read the rest here.

And now for the news you didn't read:

When News is No News

Here are a few important developments that remain strangely ignored. I say strangely, but most readers understand why some news becomes news and some does not.

1) Iraq. The United States military between 2007 and 2009 crushed al-Qaeda in Iraq. It destroyed cadres of radical Islamists and Baathists. It stabilized the country. It was one of the most stunning military performances in modern history, and helped to destroy the image of a competent and scary al-Qaeda. Yet everything from the recapture of Fallujah to the sheer number of Islamists that were taken out of Anbar Province was largely ignored. It is as if we went to sleep in 2007 with “Iraq is lost” and then woke up in 2010 with “Of course, it is quiet now. Why wouldn’t it be?” — but with little thought of what transpired in between. We know few names, fewer stories of the heroic Americans who turned Iraq around after 2006 — or kept it from imploding from 2003 onward.

But wait there's more:

2) Chinese Roguery. China’s Communist Party predicates foreign policy on mercantilism — period.
3) The Gulf Oil Hysteria. We were told that aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico would be ruined for generations.
4) The Great Obama Flip-Flop. For over a year of hope and change, we were told by Obama that renditions, preventative detentions, and tribunals were anti-constitutional, that Guantanamo was synonymous with a gulag, that Iraq was lost, that Predators were a sort of airborne terror, that KSM and other terrorist killers should be tried in civilian courts — and what happened? Suddenly the world was turned upside down and what was once bad was now tolerable. And not a whimper about why, just the quiet assumption of “that was then, this is now.”
5) The Europe-America Cool-Off. Europe wanted Obama, got Obama, and now its elites are quietly whispering: “Why did you fulfill our childish wishes?”
6) The EU Meltdown. Surely the great story of the age is the serial meltdown of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece and the furor of Germany and more Protestant northwestern Europe — all at a time when the September 15, 2008 ,Wall Street implosion supposedly had proved the triumph of socialism over the free market system.
7) The Implosion of the Green Movement. (be sure to read all of this one.)
8) The Nexus between California’s Financial Plight and Illegal Immigration. The state has the highest income, sales, and gas taxes and the largest deficits — and the largest number of illegal aliens.
9) The Implosion of Debt. There is very little said about the failure of Keynesian economics to restart the economy.
10) Obama and Race. We read of occasional slips from Obama and his associates, but never of the effect of lots of slips in the aggregate.

Be sure to click this link to read ALL of these listed topics.
If you have not read Victor Davis Hanson before this will show you why I think so highly of his intellect and reasonings.

VDH Explains it all so well

From the Unbelievable to the Passé
From time to time I stop and wonder how the unbelievable can become the accepted. Let me list four arbitrary, but still representative, examples of what I mean.
1) Embracing unworkable statism.
2) Higher education.
3) Technology.
4. The Plutocratic party?

These are just the headings to some very important points.  Read it all.

Thursday morning links August 19th

I have a doctors appointment this morning so most of my day will be in Corpus Christi.  Here are some links for you to read and ponder.  I am planning an essay on a documentary film I watched on Dish Network last night. I will plan that in my mind today and get to it later.  Here's a hint - the Holocaust - we must never forget.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/08/19/france.roma/?hpt=Sbin

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/544231/201008181842/Death-Panels-Begin-As-Reform-Takes-Shape.aspx

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244120/cynical-brilliance-imam-rauf-victor-davis-hanson

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Susan-Estrich-Watch-out-for-Haley-Barbour-101016859.html

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/obamas_point_of_no_return.html

I may write more on some these later today, but for the time being just be sure you read them.

Victor Davis Hanson on our ongoing Revolution

Reflections on the Revolution in America

America’s Extreme Make-over
These are exciting though scary revolutionary times, akin to the constant acrimony in the fourth-century BC polis, mid-nineteenth century revolutionary Europe, or — perhaps in a geriatric replay — the 1960s. This is an era when the fundamental assumptions of the individual and the state are now being redefined, albeit in a weird, high-tech, globalized landscape.

Radical But Well Off

A word of caution: we are not talking about hoi polloi versus hoi oligoi, or the commune on the barricades fighting the estate owners. No, not this time around.

Instead, the present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.

Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.

The Distant Poor

They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid. (The New York Times owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).

Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.

There is much more but he ends with this;

The Mind of the Revolutionary

Where do these ideologies derive? Again, I wish I could say that they are grassroots driven, by the muscular classes who are victimized by business and, in their cry-from-the-heart protests, demand a fairer cutting of the pie. But so often the utopianism is from above, and predicated on abstract education, relative affluence, and little exposure to business or indeed much beyond the metrosexual world in general.

So fascinating these modern revolutionaries. A Buffet does not choose to pay the high income tax rate on his earnings, though he surely could in lieu of lecturing how taxes are too low. A Gates Sr. does not plan for his offspring to pay into the strapped treasury needed inheritance taxes, though he remonstrates that they must be raised on everyone else. A Geithner does not comply with the tax code, though he assumes it should be raised on others. A Gore lectures on honesty and truth and science on his way to a $100 million con that turns him from an affluent ex-politician into a global grandee.

I’m sorry — I don’t take seriously much of anything from this wannabe revolutionary bunch.

Read it all here.

Victor Davis Hanson on Modern Warfare

Tomorrow’s Wars
Enormous, massively destructive engagements may again be on the horizon.

Have we not seen, then, in our lifetime the end of the Western way of war?” Two decades ago, I concluded The Western Way of War with that question. Since Western warfare had become so lethal and included the specter of nuclear escalation, I thought it doubtful that two Western states could any longer wage large head-to-head conventional battles. A decade earlier, John Keegan, in his classic The Face of Battle, had similarly suggested that it would be hard for modern European states to engage in infantry slugfests like the Battle of the Somme. “The suspicion grows,” Keegan argued of a new cohort of affluent and leisured European youth—rebellious in spirit and reluctant to give over the good life to mass conscription—“that battle has already abolished itself.”

Events of the last half-century seem to have confirmed the notion that decisive battles between two large, highly trained, sophisticated Westernized armies, whether on land or on sea, have become increasingly rare. Pentagon war planners now talk more about counterinsurgency training, winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations, and “smart” interrogation techniques—and less about old-fashioned, “blow-’em-up” hardware (like, say, the F-22 Raptor) that proves so advantageous in fighting conventional set battles. But does this mean that the big battle is indeed on its way to extinction?
Much more to read, go here.

City Journal is a quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson

Victor Davis Hanson Couldn't be More Succinct

He always has such a clear way of thinking.  This is from VDH Private Papers:
It is short and to the point so I am printing the whole thing.
The New Commandments on the Animal Farm Barn Wall
by Victor Davis Hanson

1. Savvy Americans always see through the fraud in the end and do the right thing are infantile and don’t know what’s good for them.

2. Democracy is finally working again in decline and the people are ungovernable.

3. The filibuster is a much-needed check on the Bush-Cheney steamrolling nexus evil.

4. Bloggers and pundits overwhelmingly support much-needed progressive change are a D.C. echo chamber we should ignore.

5. Congress has become a Culture of Corruption is full of hard-working servants who more than earn the perks they sometime receive.

6. Americans and their politicians should listen to brave voices of dissent within the intelligence community must support in bipartisan fashion their government’s policies against terrorism.

7. Bipartisanship is simply caving to Republican obstructionism a way to get the country moving again.

8. Trying KSM in New York is proof of the resiliency of the American system problematic.

9. Guantanamo Bay will be shut down a year from the inauguration sometime, perhaps, in the future.

10. Deficits are proof of the reckless Bush-Cheney fiscal policies necessary stimuli designed to move our country in a fairer and more equitable direction.

11. Wall Street bankers are greedy fat cats savvy businessmen whom we don’t begrudge.

12. C-Span should air health-care debates should never be allowed to air insider horse-trading will air bipartisan exchanges with the president.

Like I said, he just couldn't be more succinct, plus he is just so much fun to read.

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.

Victor Davis Hanson Hits it out of the Park Again

You all know how much I admire this man, I guess it's cause we think alike, he just knows how to convey it better than I do.

Confessions of a Cultural Drop-out

I have some confessions to make, not because any of you readers are particularly interested in my views; but rather because I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or popular culture? I am not particularly proud of this quietism (many Athenians did it in the early 4^th century BC and Romans by the late 3^rd AD), but not really ashamed of it either.

Shut up and see a movie?

Take Hollywood protocol—make a big movie, hype it, show it at the mall multiplex. But I went to one movie the last year. Maybe three in the last four years. There is not much choice here—car crashes, evil white men killing the innocent, some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups. Or you can endure the American war-machine kidnapping, torturing, or murdering even more of the helpless abroad—with Robert Redford, glassed down, tweed in display, or snarly George Clooney sermonizing, like the choruses of Euripides’ tragedies.

Go read it all, you will agree and enjoy.

You Know how I Admire Victor Davis Hanson

In fact I admire him so much I am not even going to quote here... I want you to read it all for yourself. This man is very wise. His latest:
What We Are Learning About the Era of Obama
Now, click on it and go read it.

I heart Victor Davis Hanson

On Dishing It Out . . . [Victor Davis Hanson]

Via National Review Online

What is weird about the liberal hysteria to the obstreperous (and occasionally rude) town meetings is the complete amnesia about what constitutes reckless public discourse.

At one time not so long ago, those on the Left, and mainstream Democrats as well, apparently believed inflammatory language, Hitler parallels, and perverse expressions of real hatred were acceptable means to the noble end of discrediting the Bush presidency.

During the bleak days of Iraq, demonstrators carried swastikas and Hitler portraits of Bush habitually. Nicholson Baker wrote a novel in which characters are contemplating killing Bush. Films were praised imagining the assassination of the president. Michael Moore, courted by the Democratic elite, lamented that bin Laden on 9/11 had hit a blue state — and once compared the killers of Americans in Iraq to Minutemen. Go read it all, you'll love him, too.