Free Republic

Suddenly there are no longer any more litmus tests — remember the Democratic primary bickering in autumn 2007? — over who was, and was not, always against the war in Iraq. There are no more hearings in which a Sen. Obama or Clinton seek to outdo each other in grandstanding condemnations of the war effort. We see no more discounted “General Betray-Us” ads in the New York Times. The protestors on our street corners have taken down the “No blood for oil!” signs and replaced them with “Hands off Iran!” placards. A Sen. Durbin or Rep. Murtha is quiet about...

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. "Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to...

Why and how did McCain catch up? The greatest consideration is Obama’s Hellenic hubris, which is different than simple arrogance. Hubris is a sort of fit, a haughtiness steeped in delusions of grandeur and divinity that takes over a weak individual, and soon encourages recklessness and overreaching (atê), all culminating in ruin and divine retribution (nemesis). So he transfers his speech to an outdoor forum, where tens of thousands of raving fans can watch him apotheosize in front of a faux Doric temple and accept nomination...

RUSSIA invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at unimaginable levels. Gulf monar chies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch - all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. "Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from a system of free trade, electronic communications, diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to the extent globalism...

August 21, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Blame Everyone Except Russia!The West seems unable to speak with one voice against Russian aggression. By Victor Davis Hanson Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia. Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but assumed no one in the West did. And he was right. Our pundits and politicians are all over the map...

August 28, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Farewell, NATOAmerica's Cold War alliance with Europe has ceased to be a fruitful one. By Victor Davis Hanson When I was growing up in the 1960s, we had a majestic Santa Rosa plum orchard on my family’s farm. The trees were 40 years old and had grown to over 20 feet high. My grandfather would proudly recall how its once-bumper crops of big, sweet plums had helped him survive the Depression and a postwar fall in agricultural prices. But by the 1960s, the towering, verdant trees were more a park than a profitable orchard....

Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia. Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but assumed no one in the West did. And he was right. Our pundits and politicians are all over the map as Putin is variously portrayed as villain, victim, patriot, tyrant -- and more still. The neoconservatives: We must make Russia pay a terrible price for...

<excerpted>Going through letters and email of the last two weeks, and getting very tired of the supposedly outraged who write in to cry “racist” anytime one worries about the neo-socialist agenda of Barack Obama or his utter lack of experience. We are witnessing a sort of national liberal outrage that, in a year when everything favored the Democrats, Obama is still running near even with McCain—something that therefore must be explained as attributable not to his inexperience, gaffes, inability to speak extemporaneously, and messianic self-image, but instead to American racism.Consider: Obama on several occasions evokes his race in a...

Moscow’s Sinister Brilliance   By Victor Davis HansonVictorHanson.com | Thursday, August 14, 2008 Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia. The Home Front The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a...

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch -- all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. "Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to...

Maureen Dowd recently preened that Obama "didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application." To the extent that her own research led her to believe this, or she would know accurately, one should still wonder why in the world Barack Obama, the child of a white woman and African father, would check the affirmative action box? When he applied to law school, there was nothing in the circumstances of his birth or even his upbringing up to then that located him in the African-American experience. Obama's recent evocation of some sort of reparations, the resurgence...

Hard power trumps soft power — but power power trumps both Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia. The Home FrontThe long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention...

Hillary's Growing Shadow By Victor Davis Hanson Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck. Impossible? It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal. Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and...

Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck. Impossible? It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal. Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal. So, everyone is puzzled why...

THE latest round of global agricultural trade negotiations that began seven years ago in Doha, Qatar, collapsed in acrimony this week in Geneva. While India and China are getting the blame for refusing to reduce import tariffs and farm subsidies, you can assume that trade officials in Europe and the United States are breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t going to have to limit their own protectionism... --snip-- First, they are transparent election-cycle harvests for farm-state politicians, who have small constituencies but exercise outsized national political clout. Second, because such special-interest legislation wins little broad public support, its...

If the press insists on hinging on every word of Obama, can't they at least ask for clarifications and details about his sweeping proclamations? Most are still waiting for the particulars of his idea to create a shadow Pentagon of civilian aid and civil support workers funded to the same tune of $500 billion a year. That seems a big deal that the electorate should ponder? How would it function? Where would the funding come from? What would be the relationship with the Pentagon? And now what does the following mean from Obama: I personally would want to see our...

There is a growing confidence among officers, diplomats and politicians that a constitutional Iraq is going to make it. We don't hear much anymore of trisecting the country, much less pulling all American troops out in defeat. Critics of the war now argue that a victory in Iraq was not worth the costs, not that victory was always impossible. The worst terrorist leaders, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Muqtada al-Sadr, are either dead or in hiding. The 2007 surge, the Anbar Awakening of tribal sheiks against al-Qaida, the change to counterinsurgency tactics, the vast increase in the size and competence...

Why Do Europeans Love Obama? Let us count the ways:1) Obama’s tax code, support of big government programs and redistribution of income, and subservience to UN directives delight the European masses—especially at a time when their own governments are trying to cut taxes, government, seek closer relations with the US, and ask a petulant, pampered public to grow up.2) He offers Euros a sort of cheap assuagement of guilt—in classic liberal style. When Obama says falsely that he does not look like other Americans who have addressed Germans (cf. Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice who have represented US foreign policy...

Two articles in one post discussing the Berlin speech. ‘This Is the Moment’  And now we are loved again? It’s America, ObamaA modest dissent to the citizen of the world July 24, 2008Given the size of the audience in Berlin Thursday, the enthusiastic response, and the standard lines about how we-were-, -are-, and -will-be-friends boilerplate, one wonders whether all it took to win the Euro-hearts and minds was to have a charismatic, multiracial American spice up a standard George W. Bush speech about helping the world, addressing AIDs, more troops in Afghanistan, etc.? So supposedly sophisticated Europeans, who constantly dissect...

The Sixties Won’t Go Away What more can anyone say about the 1960s and all its legacies? By Victor Davis Hanson Those who protested some 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed “change” to America in civil rights, the environment, women’s liberation, and world peace. Maybe. But critics counter that the larger culture that followed was the most self-absorbed in memory. Everyone can at least agree that the spirit of the “Me Generation” is not going quietly into the night — especially since that generation ushered in a certain coarseness and self-righteousness that...

Hillary used to go ballistic in frustration at the latest rather shameless incarnation of Obama, and McCain should not fall into the same malady. He understandably is angry because Obama, whose opposition to the surge and erstwhile desire to be done with Iraq by March 2007 would have lost the war, rode the anti-war wave when it was popular, and now, in his current metamorphosis to centrist, has piggy-backed onto the good news in Iraq as if it had nothing to do with the surge — as if McCain's lonely support for it either never happened or was irrelevant. And...

[note: You won't read this in five minutes] Nile Gardiner, Ph.D.: Good morning. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and the fifth Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture.The Margaret Thatcher Lecture series began in Sep­tember 2006, with a major speech by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky on the subject, "Is Free­dom for Everyone?" It was followed by lectures on economic freedom and religious freedom by Hernan­do de Soto and Michael Novak, and by Ambassador John Bolton's lecture "Does the United Nations Advance the Cause of Freedom?"Our distinguished speaker today is Victor Davis Han­son, who will address the theme, "In Defense of Liberty: The...

“This is our ethanol”So an exasperated Sen. Barbara Boxer screams that the farm-belt senators better support her regional selfishness in opposing California off-shore drilling against the national interest, in the same manner she went along with the ethanol boondoggle. Odd that she was so brazen in her confessional.Jackson’s N-wordI give some credit to Barack Obama. His ‘hope and change’ mantra drives some to near madness and has proved a wrecking ball of liberal careers. First, in 90 days he destroyed the Clinton political machine, leaving Bill’s past 7-year effort at PC rehabilitation, after Monica and the pardons, in shambles. Now...

In the last 20 years, we were lectured constantly about “post-industrial” America. Experts proclaimed that the United States had evolved into an “information society” of “high-tech jobs.” The traditional sources of American strength—manufacturing, the production of food and fuel, and the assembling of cars and trucks—were apparently passé. Instead, others less fortunate abroad were to do those more grubby tasks, while Americans, with their BlackBerrys and laptops, funded, organized, lectured and critiqued them. Illegal aliens might cook our meals or change our children’s diapers to free us up for far more important tasks of litigation, finance and environmental review. The...

There is by now only one constant in the entire sad Iraqi saga since the brilliant three-week victory of 2003, and the subsequent violent reconstruction that followed. In our collective exasperation almost all the bad news from the front is due to someone else’s stupidity; any good reports are always the result of one’s own insight and sobriety. The result is irony, but also amnesia about what was written and said in the recent past. Consider the paradoxes we’ve witnessed. We were paralyzed for a year over Ambassador Joe Wilson’s carnival-like mission, in part due to the prompt of his...

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama’s flip-flops, as the Senate’s most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger. But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts. Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns. The senator,...

A review of Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others by David Day. Oxford University Press, 2008. < ... excerpted ... > While Mr. Day writes well, draws on a great deal of learning, and offers some interesting examples from the Japanese and Chinese colonial experiences, there nevertheless emerges a predictable, and ultimately tiring, repetition of case studies — centered inordinately on the British colonization of Australia, the European conquest of the Americas, Hitler's efforts to incorporate the East, and what he describes as the contemporary expansion of Israel onto Arab lands. The result is that Mr. Day's selections are not...

General Betray Us?Obama said not a word last autumn about the Moveon.org slander of Gen. Petraeus when he was running hard left of Clinton and the Moveon.org crowd was essential to his candidacy. But now? After West Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, etc. he realizes two things: there are no longer any rivals to the left, but quite a lot to the right who are turned off by him. So Moveon.org goes the way of Rev. Wright, while his grandmother, the flag lapel, guns, death penalty, Iraq, FISA, and NAFTA climb back on the bus—until he is elected (when...

On this Fourth of July of our discontent — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises. By almost any barometer, the United States remains the most fortunate country in the world. We continue to be the...

The question is no longer on what has Obama backtracked, but rather on what has he not? The political problems with Obama's flipitis are twofold: one, it's coming late in the season. To defeat Hillary he went hard left in the void left by Edwards. But the primary dragged on so long, that when he recently flipped and flopped to leave the hard left on NAFTA, Trinity Church, Rev. Wright, FISA, gun control, campaign financing, death penalty, Iraq, Iran, Jerusalem, etc. he did so in the summer, not late winter. The result is that his formerly left positions were showcased...

One way to envision the McCain-Obama presidential race is as a boxing match — particularly like the famous Mohammed Ali championship fights. The deliberate McCain is like a Sonny Liston or George Foreman trying to cut the ring in half and force his lighter-footed opponent onto the ropes. For McCain, this comes in the form of numerous proposed town-hall debates, where he hopes that face-to-face questions and answers will fall on his less-seasoned opponent like sudden haymakers. In turn, Obama is like Ali; his style is to keep moving — and stay out of reach of his opponent. Obama does...

It is not hard to see why and how the middle classes, the poor, and the union members would like to see larger government programs and greater taxes on the wealthy, but why are so many in the upper-upper middle classes so vehemently pro-Obama? Are they that confident in the public schools, teachers' unions, swearing off their archaic gasoline engines, wanting restrictions on free trade and globalization, and living in mixed, integrated working-class neighborhoods? One paradox about the Obama campaign is that in terms of aggregate cash, most of his total donations are of the larger sort, and they tend...

I think we are beginning to see the full measure of the Obama general campaign strategy, framed along ten or so key directives that can allow the election of the most leftward candidate in American political history. So far the candidate himself needs no coaching, inasmuch he has proved to be one of the most pragmatic, flexible, and ambitious figures in recent memory, with superb handlers who understand the challenge of getting such a hard leftist past the suspicious American electorate. 1. “Maturing” Views. Move to the center on as many problematic issues as possible — whether FISA, NAFTA, talking...

June 26, 2008, 0:00 a.m. The Can't-Do SocietyWe have become a nation of second-guessing Hamlets. By Victor Davis Hanson Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of “thinking too precisely.� His poor Danish prince lost “the name of action,� as he dithered and sighed that “conscience does make cowards of us all.� With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters, or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil...

We have become a nation of second-guessing Hamlets. Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of "thinking too precisely." His poor Danish prince lost "the name of action," as he dithered and sighed that "conscience does make cowards of us all." With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil -- and that before you can fill your tank, you must take...

By this point in the presidential campaign, the public knows that a charismatic Barack Obama wants sweeping "change." While the national media have often fallen hard for the Illinois senator's rhetoric -- MSNBC's Chris Matthews said he felt a "thrill going up my leg" during an Obama speech -- exactly what kind of change can Obama bring if he's elected in November? FOREIGN POLICY Take Obama's foreign-policy pronouncements, which promise a break with the unhappy past. Two doctrines are most prominent. One is to engage our enemies and be nicer to our allies. The other calls for leaving Iraq on...

Why is the U.N. holding conferences about rising food prices, but not spiraling oil prices that in various ways account for them? Somehow in the globalist mindset the agricultural producing world is more culpable than the non-productive OPEC world. But we should remember that it requires skill, ingenuity, and a certain craft to produce enough food to feed one's country and export the surplus, and none of the above to pump oil, an accident of nature that it is beneath one's feet, and, in the case of most of OPEC, a commodity and infrastructure that someone else found, developed and...

"In dealing with Mr. Buchanan, one must accept at the beginning two caveats. First, as is his style, he will always resort to ad hominem attacks in lieu of an argument." "[I} was appalled by his absence of logic..."

The other day in southwestern Fresno County, a poor part of Central California, I talked with a number of folks at a rural gas station. Most drove second- and third-hand pickups, large cast-off sedans or used SUVs. Their general complaint was twofold: They didn't have the cash to buy a new fuel-efficient Honda or Toyota. And they were now spending a day or two of their wages just to fuel their cars for their long rural commutes. But I also fill up three hours away on the San Francisco peninsula near Stanford University, where I work. High-priced hybrid cars and...

Many commentators on Iraq had no strong ideas about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, but often predicated their evolving views on the basis of whether we were perceived as winning or losing — and later made the necessary and often fluid adjustments. So in light of the changing pulse of the battlefield, it is time once again to examine carefully a few of the now commonplace critiques of the Iraq war. 1. We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan by going into Iraq, thereby allowing the Taliban to regain the advantage. Any two-theater war can result in...

Order of BattleWar and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Douglas FeithHarper. 688 pp. $27.95 "The stupidest f—ing guy on the planet� is how General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, summed up Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Pentagon from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005. Franks was cruder than most, but Feith was under almost continuously hostile scrutiny and controversy throughout his tenure. As the third-highest ranking civilian official in Donald Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon, he oversaw the Defense Department’s relations with foreign governments at...

June 12, 2008, 0:00 a.m. A New Deal on EnergyLiberals who care about their fellow man should rethink U.S. energy policy. By Victor Davis Hanson The other day in southwestern Fresno County, a poor part of Central California, I talked with a number of folks at a rural gas station. Most drove second- and third-hand pickups, large cast-off sedans or used SUVs. Their general complaint was twofold: They didn’t have the cash to buy a new fuel-efficient Honda or Toyota. And they were now spending a day or two of their wages just to fuel their cars for their...

June 10, 2008, 6:00 a.m. Gone, but Not ForgottenBarack Obama and Rev. Wright. By Victor Davis Hanson There is a general sense — after Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana — that the white working class is somehow illiberal, and so now the Obamiacs discuss, ponder, and fret over the “race question� ahead. But the problem is not, and has never really been, race, at least any more than it was in having a black secretary of state or Supreme Court justice or chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but simply the question of grievance. When Obama bought...

There are two disturbing—and now predictable—patterns to Obama's serial distancing from prior intimates. First, the post facto embarrassment is personalized in terms of "I" and "me," as if a Wright or Rezko is somehow doing something out of character aimed at Obama, rather than persisting in entirely predictable behavior that offends society at large. Thus in reaction to the racist Wright, we get "That's a show of disrespect to me," while Pfleger's venom prompts, "I am deeply disappointed in Father's Pfleger." But the issue is racial hatred, not a matter of pleasing or respecting Obama himself. The second reaction is...

NORMANDY, France -- Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits. Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.” Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary...

How odd (or to be expected) that suddenly intelligence agencies, analysts, journalists, and terrorists themselves are attesting that al-Qaeda is in near ruins, that ideologically radical Islam is losing its appeal, and that terrorist incidents against Americans at home and abroad outside the war zones are at an all-time low—and yet few associate the radical change in fortune in Iraq as a contributory cause to our success. But surely the US military contributed a great deal to the humiliation of al-Qaedists and the bankruptcy of their cause, since it has (1) killed thousands of generic jihadists, and to such a...

Autopsy of the Primaries: The only Democratic Candidate who can lose the General Election; the only Republican one who can win it.Both Obama and McCain have pulled off the once unthinkable. The former dethroned some 16 year of Clintonian political hegemony by the sheer force of personality and charisma, when initially all the hierarchy and political machinery were against him. The latter by sheer force of will, stubbornness, and a certain courage, never gave up when most had written him off, and simply out toughed his opponents.There is a certain irony here. In a year that for historical and...

It’s a Euro ThingIf one were to collate European criticisms of Americana and then compare them to reality in Europe, well, sure confusion results. Some random thoughts about another visit these next two weeks in Europe.1. We Americans, we are told, are violators of freedom and have shredded our Western heritage through Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, and detentions.But if one were to assess rationally the degree of privacy and freedom in Europe, by any fair margin it proves far more the police state. There are far more municipal surveillance video cameras. On the highway flashes go off, as computerized...

Victor Davis Hanson, a former classics professor, is a renowned conservative scholar of ancient history and military affairs who's recently become a nationally syndicated columnist and blogger. The author of 17 books with titles like "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War," "An Autumn of War" and "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming," he is the senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus. Hanson, whose scholarship and interest in individual freedom recently earned him a 2008 Bradley Prize worth $250,000 from the Bradley...

Here is how our baby-boom generation solves problems: -- Recently, George Bush went to Saudi Arabia to ask the ruling House of Saud to pump more oil. That request had about as much chance of success as the Democratic-led congressional effort to “sue” the Saudis in American courts for their selfish “price-gouging.” The current debate about energy in the United States has devolved into doing the same old thing—consume, don’t produce and complain—while somehow expecting different results. Congress talks endlessly about the bright future of wind, solar and new fuels, while it stops us from getting through the messy present...