Posted on 06/21/2009 10:16:53 AM PDT by vbmoneyspender
Who’s Victor Davis Hanson and what does he know?
President’s spokesman puts money on Obama speechwriters
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
Robert Gibbs, the spokesman for President Barack Obama, today questioned who is Victor Davis Hanson and what does he know, when WND correspondent Les Kinsolving asked Gibbs about “mistakes” Hanson has pointed out in Obama’s speeches.
Hanson, a nationally syndicated columnist and historian, wrote just one day earlier about “Our Historically Challenged President.”
He noted Obama’s reference during the presidential campaign to when his great-uncle “helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
“Both are impossible. The Americans didn’t free either Nazi death camp,” Hanson said.
Then came Obama’s gaffe during his Victory Column speech in Berlin in 2008.
“He began, ‘I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.’ He apparently forgot that for the prior eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - both African-Americans,” Hanson said.
Hanson continued, citing Obama’s reference to the Berlin airlift, when the “world had come together to save Berlin.”
Only, Hanson pointed out, the fact is that “it was almost an entirely American and British effort - written off by most observers as hopeless and joined only by a handful of Western allies.”
Then in Cairo recently, Obama’s historical allusions “were even more suspect.”
“Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today’s Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies,” Hanson said. “But the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism and Nasserism - largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies - did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than the legacy of European colonialism.
“Obama also claimed that ‘Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,’” In fact, Hanson wrote, medieval Islamic culture “had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values.”
“Obama also insisted that ‘Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.’ Yet the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478; by then Cordoba had long been re-conquered by Spanish Christians, and was governed as a staunchly Christian city,” he said.
And to Obama’s claim that it was “not violence” that ended slavery, Hanson mentioned the Civil War.
In today’s news briefing, Kinsolving asked, “Historian Victor Davis Hanson cites what he terms, ‘The president’s politically correct canard that the Renaissance was fueled by Arab learning, and the president’s statement that abolition of slavery and civil rights in the U.S. were accomplished without violence,’ as two of seven presidential errors. Question: Does the White House believe Dr. Hanson is wrong? Or do you believe your speechwriters and the president made some mistakes?”
Said Gibbs, “Lester, I have to hand it to you that you have in only one question covered some five or six centuries of world history.”
“No. No. Just mistakes … White House mistakes,” said Kinsolving.
“Well I … Should I ask you a question and you respond, or should I give a…,” Gibbs said.
“I’d be delighted anytime,” Kinsolving said.
“At least you’re not leading into where you think the answer to such a historically significant and important question,” Gibbs said. “I’m not familiar with the work of the esteemed historian. I haven’t seen it. I can assure you that not knowing who this historian is, I’ll put my money on our speechwriters.”
At the Washington Times, which publishes Hanson, editorial page editor Richard Miniter told Kinsolving: “To Mr. Gibbs: If you are in need of information about those in positions of higher learning, please write us.”
Oh well….
Incredibly dimwitted.
“Nobody I know reads Hanson”
Problem is, he flunked the class.
Of the past ten guys in this position...I’d rate Gibby a dismal tenth place with them. What will be interesting in two to three years is Gibby leaving the WH and then getting a fine job with ABC news, and then regarded as a great press journalist. The Fox guys will tear him apart at that point.
ZERO needed another person without a brain so he chose Gibbs who needs a teleprompter it seems.
At least McCurry was an adult. Gibbs is 38 going on 18.
He’s the same as Bill Clinton, watching black churches in his town burning on TV, which never happened... etc etc etc
Facts are not important when you’re trying to make a point abotu a factually drivien administration.
You're much too kind to Gibbs, don't you think? How about going on three?
The presswhores whooping it up over Gibbs proves their whoredom (exceptions of Tapper and Garrett and Kinselving and one or two others noted).
Regards . . . Penny
Here’s an analogous statement to help put Gibbs’ utter idiocy in perspective.
Skinny runt with long hair at a bar:
“Who’s this punk Tyson and what does he know about fighting? I’ll step outside with him any time.”
ping
Gibbs probably watched “Animal House” and still believes Germany bombed Pearl Harbor.
Yep, socialist and CAIR history.
Oh, I’m sure Gibbs knows who Hanson is. The money line is where he said he’d put the “speech writers” up against Hanso - he’s pushing the blame for the innacuries and lies off zero and onto the speech writers...
Who cares if Gibbs doesn’t know who Hanson is? Whether or not he knows Hanson has nothing to do with whether the facts are correct. Typical of the White House to focus on the person rather than the facts.
“Nobody I know reads Hanson”
Yep. That’s a huge part of the problem lefties have. They make things up, past, present and with their vision of the future. Gibbs and Obama and the rest of the circus are going to take a hard fall. By the 4th qtr of this year, things should really be in a state of collapse, including the poll numbers.
This is an utter joke....fast and loose with facts, honesty, character, foreign policy, finances, security, etc.
“Typical of the White House to focus on the person rather than the facts.”
That’s 101 in the Saul Alinsky of school of socialist politics and the takeover of society.
The next time we hear that “my uncle liberated Auschwitz and personally ended the Holocaust” line, I’d like to hear some distinguished member of the White House Press ask a question of either Gibbs or the Great Zero Himself:
Does this administration believe that when Mr. 0bama’s uncle took prisoner the SS Death Camp guards, that he should have read them their Miranda warnings?
Meanwhile, they’ll attack Palin for actually seeing Russia from Alaska in reality.
They can do this because over half the country are Jay Leno “jay walkers”. This is funny to rich people like Jay Leno, for now...these enablers that have allowed liberalism to indoctrinate people as opposed to educating them...
but once they have the gestapo knocking down their door for more and more pie, it won’t be so funny anymore.
BZZZZZZT!
VDH IS a registered Democrat.
Cheers!
Of the past ten guys in this position...I’d rate Gibby a dismal tenth place . . .
The earliest of the ten was a 'she-one' - Dee Dee Meyers (in red).
Do not always agree with Hanson, but he has more sense in his little toe than anyone in or connected with the current administration.
He certainly doesn't sound like a Democrat to me and if Gibbs has never heard of him, you'd think he might have a clue who an important historical writer is and what his political affiliation is.
And further more:.......
“Hanson is a registered Democrat, but a conservative who voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections.[5] He has been named a neoconservative by some commentators[6][7], and has stated that: “I came to support neocon approaches first in the wars against the Taliban and Saddam, largely because I saw little alternative.”[8] Feeling that the current Democratic party does not have a morally responsible approach to foreign policy and no longer addresses the concerns of ordinary Americans, Hanson writes: “The Democratic Party reminds me of the Republicans circa 1965 or so – impotent, shrill, no ideas, conspiratorial, reactive, out-of-touch with most Americans, isolationist, and full of embarrassing spokesmen.”[9]
Hanson has been a strong defender of President George W. Bush and his policies[10], especially the Iraq war[11]. He was also a vocal supporter of Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Hanson wrote of Rumsfeld that he was: “a rare sort of secretary of the caliber of George Marshall” and a “proud and honest-speaking visionary” whose “hard work and insight are bringing us ever closer to victory.”[12]
In other words, straight-up liberal orthodoxy: it doesn't matter what was said, what matters is who said it.
I think he flunked all his classes. There is photographic evidence that he smoked pot throughout his high school years. There are great deficits in his knowledge of American History and World History.
To Dumocrats, Doris Kearns Goodwin (the plagiarist) is an important historian.
And I'm not talking about his birth certificate.
He didn't learn about American from his America-hating Communist mother. His primary education was in Indonesia, where he learned to recite the Shahada but did NOT learn that there are 50 states or anything else about America other than possibly that it's the Great Satan. Hawaii is a neat place (I've lived there, briefly), but it is isolated and considerably different from the rest of America. He didn't learn to be an American attending an exclusive Hawaiian private school, even assuming he paid attention. And he went to trendy colleges and a law school where it is all the fashion to bash things American . . . but the professors assume that the students know the basics about America from their earlier education.
That's why he's not an American. He doesn't get it, because he was never taught it.
“That’s why he’s not an American. He doesn’t get it, because he was never taught it.”
Bingo!
Well, it matters because Hanson is one of the smartest and best informed real historians and writers of our lifetime. If Gibbs doesn’t know who he is, it is further proof of the stupidity of zero and his thugocracy.
As to the rest of your post, I agree 100%.
I’ve mentioned this to family members. I’ve asked them if they could imagine taking enemy prisoners on Iwo Jima or at the Battle of the Bulge and being required to read them their Miranda rights.
To Dumocrats, Doris Kearns Goodwin (the plagiarist) is an important historian.
I certainly know that Goodwin was a leftie, but I enjoyed Team of Rivals.It illuminates the history of the Civil War by giving the political background without which the military strategies are hard to understand.
Kingsolving should have asked exactly how much of HIS money Gibbs was willing to put on the WH speechwriters, and made a real bet.
Actually, I’d place Scott McClellan 10th. He did more harm to the Bush White House than anyone can calculate .. and that was before he wrote his book.
Gibbs almost makes Scott McClellan look like Tony Snow by comparison.
You are right and I didn’t think anyone could make McClellan look good but Gibbs has managed. He is one dumb individual that keeps laughing at the oddest times. I swear he has “WE WON” on the palm of his hand as a reminder.
Which makes VDH all the more fascinating. The first time I heard of him was a speech aired on C-Span after 9/11 about the attacks and our own defense. Been listening to him ever since.
BUMP
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.