Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out
Posted on 03/13/2005 1:33:47 AM PST by Marguerite
"Wow. Excuse my ignorance, but who is this guy?"
From the end of his latest contribution to National Review:
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
www.nationalreview.com
"if you make $30 thousand a year and your wife wants half it's time to kill the witch."
LOL!
My favorite Chris Rock routine is where he explains the differences in lying between men and women. He says that men tell MORE lies than women, but that women tell BIGGER lies than men. A man will call up his girlfriend from a strip club and say "I'm over at Tony's house" but a woman will say "Of course it's your baby"!
Bookmark bump.
Right on but he's going to get in trouble if he keeps telling the truth.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12632
You gave the Front page quote..here's the Hanson reply to that FP quote..The whole interview is great
snip
Hanson: But we are talking about apples and oranges-on the one hand, hard-core, thuggish revolutionaries abroad who want power and all that it brings under the cynical aegis of "equality" and "social justice;" and on the other, mostly pampered intellectuals here at home at the trough of American splendor and luxury, in the manner of court jesters, jetting around trashing their alma mater.
Again, while there were a few deluded who really did cut sugar cane in Cuba, committed treason of sorts in Hanoi, and went down to idolize Daniel Ortega, most on the radical Left are really indistinguishable from most Americans in their patterns of consumption, tastes, jobs, etc.
So we are not confronted with Stalinists, hard-core Marxists, or fifth-columnists as much as those afflicted with the "Western disease"-a sort of glib self-hatred of the very society that imparts such freedom and affluence.
Of course we don't want to downplay the pernicious effects of such a malady. These fakers are serious and in fact pose our greatest challenge in the current struggle by unleashing a constant stream of negativism that encourages our enemies and weakens our resolve. The hysteria over the looting, the missing WMD, and the President's aircraft carrier landing--all that and more have clouded a stellar military victory and a largely successful effort so far to foster consensual government under impossible circumstances--something that 50 years from now we will look back on with awe.
The transmogrification of Islamofascists into the "other" is one of the most stunning developments in American intellectual history-but inexplicable apart from this postmodern, trendy left-wing dogma. We overlooked 25 years of continued terrorist assaults from November 1979 in Teheran to the USS Cole, in part because multiculturalism and cultural relativism were so entrenched that we dared not condemn as evil and wrong those creepy people who believed in gender apartheid, fundamentalism, autocracy, anti-intellectualism, and anti-Semitism, but instead romanticized or at least ignored them.
Ditto Arafat's Tunisian Mafia-and all the assorted Middle East manipulators who grasped that an NPR, New York Times columnist, ABC evening news lead-in, or Kennedy School of Government symposium would always prefer to hector Israeli self-defense, rather than suicide bombing, or scream over an American missed bomb rather than Taliban lynching, or looters in museums rather than Saddam's garrish destruction of Babylon.
So I am talking about a secular religion of anti-Americanism brought on by our very success that allows such utopianism and cheap caring-and it does weaken and tire our efforts to win this war.
A final example: the President has raised domestic spending by 8% per annum, lavished funds on health care and education, offered near amnesty to illegal immigrants from Mexico, appointed a plethora of minority judges, cabinet officials, and administrators, and committed more AIDs relief funds than all prior administrations put together-and is still hated by our Left, simply because his demeanor, accent, religion, and even appearance don't validate the aristocratic Left's rhetoric about sex, class, gender, and the other. It really is a make-believe world in which a Barbra Streisand, Gore Vidal, or Arianna Huffington cheaply sound off from their estates about some purported cosmic evil fostered by poor deluded Americans hooked on K-Mart and NASCAR.
snip
Great collection...THANKS!!!!!
You find my interpretation too extreme...........
I find your interpretation EXTREMELY accurate.
Liberals defend dictators because they are the enemy of all the authority figures in their lives ( Bush and friends, etc.). They have always seemed to want to go and wallow in the embraces of the Stalins of the world, while turning a blind eye to the suffering imposed by same.
Were I a pschycologist, I might be able to figue it out, but there does seem to be something of a sub-conscious death wish on the part of those who love brutal authority in other lands, yet hate any ( even benign ) form of it at home. They are so angry, that many of them acutally harbor wishes of an attack on us, to somehow avenge the president's policy on fighting terrorism.
They are without sympathy for the butchered over there, yet claim "oppression" here because they don't have free health care.
Great post John!!!
VDH BUMP!!!
"actually', not "acutally". Sorry
Worth repeating:
"We overlooked 25 years of continued terrorist assaults from November 1979 in Teheran to the USS Cole, in part because multiculturalism and cultural relativism were so entrenched that we dared not condemn as evil and wrong those creepy people who believed in gender apartheid, fundamentalism, autocracy, anti-intellectualism, and anti-Semitism, but instead romanticized or at least ignored them."
"he's going to get in trouble if he keeps telling the truth"
I don't think Hanson cares for that kind of trouble ;-)
Let me know if you want in or out
You've never had the pleasure of reading VDH?
He's one of the best.
FReeper Tolik runs a VDH ping list, I'm sure he'd add you to it if you asked.
His NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
His blog: http://victorhanson.com/index.html BIO: http://victorhanson.com/Author/index.html
Yes, he is listened by the Bush Administration; they like him maybe as much as we do: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1085464/posts?page=6#6
Thank you both,
Keep 'em coming.
BFL again and again
An excellent post. ping
Love this paragraph:
At its richest, most populous stage in its history, the United States, after reeling from a devastating blow to its financial and military nerve centers, in less than three years toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, implemented elections in Afghanistan and scheduled them in Iraq, prevented another 9/11-like attack — and so far has tragically lost about 1,100 in combat in a war against a virulent fascism that is antithetical to every aspect of Western liberty. Our grandfathers would have considered all this a miraculous military achievement. We call it a quagmire, deride our leaders as liars and traitors, and often doubted that our Marines — the greatest street-fighting besiegers in the history of warfare, who stormed Manila, Seoul, Hue, and Panama City — could take Fallujah last April."
And he has this figured out exactly:
"Beheadings, suicide bombings, mass executions, and improvised explosive devices are not intended to destroy or even defeat the U.S. military. Rather, they are aimed at the taxpaying citizens back home who fuel it."
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.