Free Republic

Why does President Obama want to implement all at once radical changes in American foreign policy, environmental policy, education, health care and the tax code? The answer is easy: If he does not achieve these initiatives soon, he never will. Almost none of Obama's proposed policies any longer enjoy majority support among voters -- and many of them were not clearly outlined to voters during the campaign. Current polls show more Americans are against than in favor of his version of health-care reform. Nearly seven in 10 are wary of government takeovers of the economy, like the bank and car...

Scolding Americans for our various sins is proving popular among an elite group of self-appointed moralists. Take well-meaning environmentalists who warn us that our plush lifestyles heat up and pollute the planet. To listen to former Vice President Al Gore or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, we must immediately curtail our carbon emissions -- or face planetary destruction. Yet these influential prophets of doom do not have lives remotely similar to the lesser folk they lecture. From time to time, Mr. Gore hops on a private jet - and purchases "carbon offsets" penances for the privilege. His mansion not...

With our national debt at $11 trillion and climbing at a projected rate of $1 to $2 trillion a year, examine the brilliant manner in which Americans justify borrowing much of this money from abroad, particularly from the Chinese. Precise figures on how much the United States owes China are hard to come by. China is secretive about where it invests its vast surpluses, and even about how gargantuan they have become. Perhaps they are afraid that if such data become widely known, Chinese reformers will start questioning state financial policy — and specifically how, why, and where such national...

Italy…I have been traveling as a lecturer on a Hillsdale College Byzantium Cruise (from Venice to Athens, with several stops in the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Aegean) for the last few days, and here are some eccentric reflections on civilizations of the past. VeniceI spent yesterday in Venice—hot, humid, and crowded, as I had never quite seen it before. So much for the global recession that has supposedly curtailed world tourism.Venice was not a classical city, and one can see why. It was malarial, without natural harbors or any readily identifiable deep ports or surrounding cliffs. It is instead a conglomeration of...

Scolding Americans for our various sins is proving popular among an elite group of self-appointed moralists. Take well-meaning environmentalists who warn us that our plush lifestyles heat up and pollute the planet. To listen to former vice president Al Gore or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, we must immediately curtail our carbon emissions — or face planetary destruction. Yet these influential prophets of doom do not have lives remotely similar to the lesser folk they lecture. From time to time, Al Gore hops on a private jet — and purchases “carbon offsets” as penances for the privilege. His mansion...

  Obama has unwittingly made his real beliefs clear. From time to time, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have naturally talked about growing up African-American under far less tolerant conditions than those we take for granted today. Yet their biggest contributions to American race relations have been their admirable abilities to transcend such racial intolerance — to make being black incidental, not essential, at least in public, to their sterling characters and impressive achievements. They all paid a price for emphasizing individuality rather than adhering to identity politics. Those on the left often criticized them as somehow inauthentic,...

Imagine not that in his first six months Obama had acted like a conservative (he could not since he won on a liberal agenda), but simply as a more moderate Clinton-like Democrat, albeit with more humility and skepticism: 1) Financial. Barack Obama rallies the nation in January to hang tough and await the natural upswing after the bust that followed an unusual boom period of a near decade. There is no wasted stimulus. There is no $2 trillion deficit. Instead, he promises to hold spending to an annual rise of 2%, and reassures the country that balanced budgets are on...

What Might Have HappenedRemember Obama’s initial signature speech (e.g., “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America”), and all the subsequent conciliatory talk of no blue state, no red state America? Obama won, of course, because he captivated the tiny, but influential left, registered vast numbers of new minority voters, raised a billion dollars, and reconstituted the liberal base. But the key margin that got him from 45 to 53% were the independents and old Reagan Democrats. And what put them on board was not just their weariness with George...

July 23, 2009, 0:00 a.m. Big-Government MedicineEven after the financial meltdown, history is still running against collectivism. By Victor Davis Hanson Big new taxes. Big new spending. Big new government. This seems to be the proposed cure for the Wall Street–inspired recession. The government now runs major banks and companies, and plans to take control of the American health-care system. And it aims to tax energy use in the United States to reduce production of carbon dioxide. But wait! Recent financial rescue and stimulus plans, together with other new government initiatives, have already led to the largest dollar deficits...

Right now various members of the Obama team promiscuously toss out ideas like lifting the income caps on payroll FICA tax, or adjusting the brackets up to nearly 40 percent, or adding a 2-4 percent surcharge on the “wealthy” — all on top of increases recently in state income and sales taxes. Do the math — as are small businesses that are putting off hiring and purchasing in fear that they may well be subject to an aggregate state and federal rate of nearly 70 percent on their income. Obama acts as if business has nowhere else to go, as...

Debt MattersOver the last two decades it became an article of popular faith that budget deficits did not matter that much. Conservatives began to talk of annual red-ink in vague terms of percentages of the gross domestic product rather than in real billions of dollars — as in “Don’t worry about the 2004 shortfall of $605 billion; it’s still only 5.3 percent of GDP.”Ronald Reagan ran large deficits; so for a while did Bill Clinton. Both Bushes did every year. And Barack Obama, who admittedly came to office amid a liquidity crisis that called for fiscal stimulus, trumped them all...

You don’t produce wool by skinning the sheep. But that seems to be the present strategy to get small businesses to begin hiring, buying, and expanding. There is apparent surprise among Obamians that unemployment has soared the last six months. The much-anticipated stimulus sputtered, and there is a sense of bewilderment in the administration about why joblessness and economic growth are stagnant after the government injected trillions of dollars into the system. Perhaps the Obama administration needs to remember the psychology of business. After the shock of the September meltdowns, the natural reaction of anyone whose livelihood relied directly on...

Stimulus, stimulus and not a drop…A “stimulus” of nearly a trillion dollars was proposed, without which we were told, unemployment would skyrocket and credit would tighten further. Six months later — unemployment having risen even higher than the administration’s forecast of what would have been the case had their stimulus package not been implemented — now the same proponents of massive borrowing demand a second stimulus to accomplish what the first ’successful’ borrowing apparently did not. If you fail, then try the same thing to fail even bigger the second time — while calling for more success to follow the...

Much has been said about Maureen “I wanted to weave the idea into my column” Dowd’s latest take-down of Sarah Palin (“Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.”) Her hit-piece is a self-parody. Instead, of seriously critiquing the wisdom or folly of Palin’s controversial decision to step down from the governorship, we get child-like sentences on spec like this: "On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an...

July 10, 2009, 4:00 a.m. Growing Worries about Our Pied PiperAmericans are catching on to Obama’s fiscal sins and rhetorical devices. By Victor Davis Hanson Recent news that President Obama’s approval ratings are beginning to slip is understandable. Even popular leaders lose appeal once they have to govern, and therefore offend, rather than merely promise and please. And so far, these fairly modest declines in popularity are not resulting in much Republican traction. Few opposition leaders have presented systematic, clear alternatives to the Obama agenda, and even fewer have been knowledgeable and charismatic in voicing them. All that being...

hey Say/We Say The debate over Palin is sort of ossified. The Left continues to ridicule her accent, family, and middling roots. The Right enjoys such authenticity-but enjoys even more the hysteria it incurs in liberals. Will it Be Politics or Money? But lost in all of this is whether she is up to national politics, or simply wishes to capitalize (an Oprah-like talk show?) on her sizable financial potential. On the one hand, Palin is obviously bright. Few could raise a family without capital in Wasilla, and within a decade end up as Governor of a large state-whose protocols...

July 06, 2009, 4:00 a.m. A Thug’s PrimerHow to win liberal friends and oppress your people. By Victor Davis Hanson How strange that our rather nondescript, sober friends abroad do not garner attention from the current administration, yet overt enemies in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Venezuela, and the West Bank most certainly do. Is there some covert code of conduct known to these dictators that allows them to win a pass from supposedly liberal Americans, who profess to value human rights, religious tolerance, and consensual government? Here’s a tutorial for up-and-coming thugs abroad, who wish to ingratiate themselves with Western...

Conventional wisdom suggests that short-term the Palin decision was unwise — e.g., "quitter," unpredictable, sulking, etc. But what else are her critics really going to say? It's not like a Letterman can trump laughing at her on late-night television as he puns that a Yankees star had sex in a dugout with her 14-year old daughter. Can Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic website go beyond his slurs that she did not deliver her own child? How much more cleverly can N.Y. feminist pundits tsk-tsk her that she's a Wasilla trailer-park retread? In other words, it doesn't matter that much what...

Obama’s policy is a lose/lose proposition that will please neither side Last month, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest a rigged presidential election. Our president was extremely cautious in his initial criticism of the Iranian government’s fierce crackdown against the protestors. At first, President Obama said that the United States — given our history in Iran — should not be “meddling” in the country’s internal affairs. Obama suggested that the leading opposition candidate, the reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi, might not be that different from the entrenched theocracy’s choice, the incumbent (and declared winner of the...

The Usual ApologyI think the standard explanation of the trashing accorded the foolish Gov. Mark Sanford (who in embarrassing fashion confessed, and confessed, and confessed to an affair with an Argentinean girlfriend) and the tsk-tsk treatment of former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards -who fathered a child with his mistress, lied about it on serial occasion while he tried to gain political mileage from his ill wife, all as he concocted an alibi that his aide, not he, had really impregnated Rielle Hunter-is that Sanford suffered from the addition wage of hypocrisy. That is, self-proclaimed moralists like the late...

Such a Prudishly Crass SocietyI was watching cable television about 5 PM on a Friday night, channel surfing between commercials on the Western station. Sandwiched between regular cinema programming were about several channels with what could legitimately be called light porn motifs. I then surfed through a confessional about phallic enhancement and a couple talking about herbal remedies for impotence.Once I got out of that channel cluster, and went into the 200s, here and there came up infomercials on everything from how to buy foreclosures with no money down, how to get out of credit card debt, how to avoid...

For much of the Bush administration, the media splashed stories of neoconservative conspiracies and cabals. Exposés about mostly Jewish liberals-turned-conservatives charged that they were adherents of the philosopher Leo Strauss and embraced the Platonic notion of the “noble lie.” In his Republic, Plato outlined an elaborate, ranked utopia, a good city (“Kallipolis”) run by a sort of benign natural selection. The philosopher-kings sat atop hierarchies in which occupations were assigned for the citizenry. To justify arbitrary selections, the rulers would make up “noble lies” about divine edicts, making clear that the occupations chosen for lesser folk were god-given. Once the...

From today's news: "Reacting to Obama's comment Tuesday that he is 'appalled and outraged' by crackdowns in Iran, Ahmadinejad said, 'Mr Obama made a mistake to say those things . . . our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously Bush used to say.'" This revelation of theocratic hurt, surprise, and hubris actually explains a lot: Iran — given the six months (or longer?) of Obama's both backdoor and overt efforts to normalize relations — believes (a) that it has an understanding now with the Obama administration that normal relations with the U.S. trump all...

Pres. Barack Obama came into office apparently believing that his non-traditional background, charisma, and good intentions could placate dictators hostile to America and ease global tensions. In these first six months, the new administration has made clear to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and other strongmen like them that Barack Obama is not a mean-talking George Bush. A kinder, gentler United States has promised to push the “reset” button. In the interest of peace, an American president will finally be listening rather than lecturing, and willing to talk to authoritarian bullies without preconditions....

Recollections On a New Age BegunThink of the hope and change of just the last six months that have changed all our lives. It was, I remember, around the beginning of February when the understandable liberal angst about the Bush deficit simply disappeared. Gone. Vanished. No more haranguing about red ink and shorting our grandchildren.For the last eight years, I had some admiration-albeit along with plenty of bewilderment-at the newly fiscally mature Congressional Democrats and their impassioned attacks on Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility.But then suddenly their principled opposition paid off. Deficits disappeared-at least the multibillion species. Yes, borrowing was replaced by...

Let Me Count the Ways Why Obama Should at Last Speak Out ( — I write this at around noon on Saturday, and suspect the pressure of public outrage will soon get to Obama, and he soon will recant and start sounding Reaganesque) (As in something like this:“Hundreds of thousands of gallant Iranians are now engaged in a non-violent moral struggle against tyranny in Iran-one of the great examples of bravery in our times. All free peoples of the world watch their ordeal, and can only wish them success, while owing them a great deal of gratitude for risking their...

Let Me Count the Ways Why Obama Should at Last Speak Out ( —I write this at around noon on Saturday, and suspect the pressure of public outrage will soon get to Obama, and he soon will recant and start sounding Reaganesque) (As in something like this: “Hundreds of thousands of gallant Iranians are now engaged in a non-violent moral struggle against tyranny in Iran-one of the great examples of bravery in our times. All free peoples of the world watch their ordeal, and can only wish them success, while owing them a great deal of gratitude for risking their...

<p>I think the Europeans, who, remember, caught Obamania quite early, thought they were going to get more of the bipartisan American security shield, albeit with a charismatic multicultural veneer that would resonate with their citizens: no more Texas. No more Christianity. No more twang. No more nuclur. No more Iraq. But same old NATO. Same old bad cop to their good cop. Same old wide open Ami economy. Same old chance for triangulation.  And?</p>

We use Orwell, Orwellian, and Orwellianism loosely a lot these days, but what is going on in the Obama administration is beginning to get a little creepy and resembles a lot of things Orwell wrote about in 1984. When in, Soviet fashion, a critical overseer is dismissed as being "confused" and suffering mental problems in carrying out the law, as Gerald Walpin probably did in uncovering waste and possible fraud in connection with the mayor of Sacramento; or when the government begins to create new words like "overseas contingency operations" and "man-made catastrophes"; or when Justice Sotomayor says that a Latina is...

President Obama has largely drawn praise for his tepid response to the mass uprisings in Iran challenging the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In general, Obama has offered three justifications for his tentativeness — and they have strangely been accepted by his supporters, who almost immediately evolved in lockstep from liberal Wilsonians to hardcore realists. Here are Obama’s three justifications: 1. Given the historical record of U.S. intervention in Iran, we do not wish either to perpetuate that shameful record, or to hang on the necks of the dissidents the smelly albatross of U.S. support. 2. We don’t know which side...

Are you confused by all that has changed since President Barack Obama took office in January? If so, you're not alone. Perhaps, though, this handy guide to Age of Obama "logic" might be of some assistance. 1. The Budget. Wanting to cut $17 billion from the budget, as President Obama has promised, is proof of financial responsibility. Borrowing $1.84 trillion this year for new programs is "stimulus." The old phrase "out-of-control spending" is inoperative. 2. Unemployment. The number of jobs theoretically saved, or created, by new government policies - not the actual percentage of Americans out of work, or the...

Are you confused by all that has changed since President Barack Obama took office in January? If so, you're not alone. Perhaps, though, this handy guide to Age of Obama "logic" might be of some assistance. 1. The Budget. Wanting to cut $17 billion from the budget, as President Obama has promised, is proof of financial responsibility. Borrowing $1.84 trillion this year for new programs is "stimulus." The old phrase "out-of-control spending" is inoperative. 2. Unemployment. The number of jobs theoretically saved, or created, by new government policies - not the actual percentage of Americans out of work, or the...

Apparently the Obama administration is quietly watching the situation, serially voting present, and unwilling to say much until the final outcome is certain. Meanwhile, debate here centers around whether Bush’s past “Axis of Evil” approach to Iran’s theocracy, or Obama’s “We are sorry for what we did in the past” lamentation is the better course for dealing with a thug like Ahmadinejad. Some thoughts:1. Conventional wisdom insisted that we had “empowered” Iran by removing Saddam and allowing the Shiites to gain democratic majorities in Iraq. It is at least as possible that we are destabilizing the autocracy in Iran by...

Thoughts Tonight on Iran1)   Why did we reject the Bush policy of non-engagement with a monster like Ahmadinejad, who oppressed his own and threatened nuclear destruction to Israel? Is it all that moral, or all that wise, or all that much in US realpolitik interests to apologize to a thug? Does it show solidarity with the Iranian people to court a nut? What is so smart in making Iran the center of our attention rather than the Maliki democratic government in Iraq? Hamas rather than democratic Israel? Is what we are now seeing in the streets of Iran proof of...

NRO Corner: A Letterman apologist named Jason Zengerle at the TNR blog claims logic is not my strong suit since I defended Sarah Palin's family and thought Letterman's apology was, well, like most of what he does these days, infantile and cowardly: I know logic isn't VDH's strong suit, but is it really so hard to believe that the joke Letterman was making about a Palin daughter getting "knocked up" was about the Palin daughter who, you know, got knocked up? Is that supposed to be funny in a Lettermanesque way? Zengerle apparently cannot follow basic logic, so here...

In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. The prevarication is ironic given the Obama campaign’s accusations that the Bush years were not transparent and that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was a chronic fabricator. Remember Obama’s own assertions that he was a “student of history” and that “words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.” Yet Obama’s war against veracity is multifaceted. Trotskyization. Sometimes the past is simply airbrushed away. Barack Obama has a disturbing habit of contradicting his...

Smug, hip David Letterman offered a smirky non-apology about his ongoing class and sexist slurs against the Palins, his apparent social inferiors. "We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news and we made some jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter, the 18-year-old girl, who is — her name is Bristol, that's right, and so, then, now they're upset with me . . .""These are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl. I mean, look at...

Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama includedIn his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation. This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had 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...

I am afraid I no longer believe . . .…That we have an inquisitive American media as we once knew it. There has emerged something as bad as state-sanctioned coercion—which we could at least identify, and thus struggle against.Now comes a more insidious, brave new self-imposed censorship of the Orwellian mode. It is not just the perennial embarrassment Chris Matthews describing his Obama ecstasy on camera, or even Newsweek’s Evan Thomas comparing his President to God, or even CNN execs being exposed trashing the US abroad at Davos, or whitewashing Saddam, but rather a more incremental new groupspeak in which...

I think Obama remains popular because there is now no bad news. I saw this recent headline blaring, "Surge in Labor Force Shows U.S. Workers Gaining Confidence" and was uplifted — until way down into the article this little bit was unfortunately left in by some un-podded censor, "The gain in the labor force in part helps explain why the jobless rate jumped to 9.4 percent in May, the highest since 1983." Where did that icky guy come from?In any case, we are happier waking up as alien duplicates. At least no one is dying in Iraq that we know of....

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options. If there were, everyone-both states and individuals-would simply spend, call it stimuli, and then find academics to offer contorted explanations why it was OK and the money need not really have to be paid back. Does Obama think his debt...

A Farmer’s Tale In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself–at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study-all on scholarships, TAships, research-ships and part-time summer and school jobs tucked under the aegis of the academic, no-consequences world. By the end of endless seminars, papers, theses, debates, discussions, academic get-togethers, I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18. The Return Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to...

In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself–at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study-all on scholarships, TAships, research-ships and part-time summer and school jobs tucked under the aegis of the academic, no-consequences world. By the end of endless seminars, papers, theses, debates, discussions, academic get-togethers, I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18. The Return Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres...

President Obama made an earnest effort — as is his way in matters of discord — to split the difference with the Islamic world. His speech essentially amounted to: “We did that, you did this, tit-for-tat, now we’re even, and can’t we all just get along?” He should be congratulated for expressing a desire for peace and for gently reminding the Muslim world of the way to reform, even if he did so while inflating Western sins. But the problem with such moral equivalence is that it equates things that are, well, not equal — and therefore ends up not...

Michelle Obama is now weighing in on the Sotomayor nomination, and I think it will prove a serious political mistake, since she is reverting back to her "me too" campaign mode, in that she emphasizes both race and the anonymous "they" who are not nice or not sufficiently accommodating to the Other.So Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day — and then compares it, of course, to Michelle's own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus (cf. Michelle's thesis for the details), that one is willing to put...

In a recent interview President Obama, I think, was logically trying to say that practical hurdles and costs in the real world mean that we cannot simply force other countries to chose a wiser form of consensual government than their own. Instead, he suggested that, "The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion — those are not simply principles of the west to be hoisted on these countries. But, rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity, the danger,...

Postmodern TruthOne of the chief tenets of postmodernism is relativism — the notion that neither morality nor wisdom is absolute and definable, but instead simply predicated on what those with power and advantage say they are.In response, the postmodernist sees “competing truths” and “rival moralities” that are of at least roughly equal merit. Indeed, those marginalized often have a higher claim on truth and knowledge by the very fact of their prior exploitation that becomes a force multiplier of their more authentic ideas and empathetic beliefs. Those who disagree, and “privilege” a timeless, abstract truth or morality, can easily be...

America is intermarrying, integrating, and assimilating as never before. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has scolded Americans for being “cowards” and not talking more about race. Now, Holder is getting that “dialogue” with the recent controversy surrounding President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Most of the furor surrounds statements on race by Sotomayor herself: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Sotomayor was clear enough. In a broad discussion about sex/race discrimination cases...

One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity. In the last fifty years, United States has evolved into a complex multiracial state. Race no longer is necessarily an indicator of income or material success-as the record of, say, Japanese-Americans or, indeed Asians in general, attests. And what criterion constitutes race itself nowadays, when almost every family has someone who is...

The Sotomayor nomination — since the media focused on her ethnic profile rather than her solid credentials — has had the unintended effect of reminding the nation how strange the politics of racial identity have become, especially in a society where social status and material well-being are not necessarily predicated on being "white" (cf. per capita incomes of many Asian minorities), and the notion itself of "race" is now problematic with so many Americans of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 racial heritage. Are we really to believe that Geraldo Rivera's high profile on Fox News lends "pride" to those who are...