The Audacity of Irony

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWQyZmJkMjFiYTI1MmYyYjUwMDgwNDBkMzc0OTViYmY= ^ | Victor Davis Hanson

[ventanax5]

We have seen irony before, when the moralist Jimmy Carter chastised us with sermons about our paranoid, inordinate fear of Communism and our amoral unconcern with human rights, even as the dividends of his policies were the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran — and even greater global misery than before.

For the last 24 months a youthful Barack Obama has daily offered unspecified “hope and change” idealism — all set against the supposed cynical wrongdoing of the tired Bush administration. In the unhinged manner in which his supporters turned a center-right president like George Bush into some sort of sinister reactionary, so too they deified a rookie senator as the long-awaited liberal messiah.

How could irony not follow from all that?

For the past seven years the United States has seen no repeat of 9/11, although plots were uncovered and threats from radical Islam were leveled in serial fashion. The ability to intercept and hold terrorists overseas, to tap into cell-phone calls abroad, to detain terrorists caught on the field of battle, and to ensure that intelligence agencies freely swapped information was critical to our unexpected salvation

[ChicagahAl]

"For the past seven years the United States has seen no repeat of 9/11"

I don't have a crystal ball. But from what I have read about Obama - who he is, how he thinks, and what he is doing - I have a hunch that the next time the Bad Guys hit America, it's going to be really bad.

The Good people need to be ever vigilant, because the nitwits who elected this guy aren't paying any attention.

[ClearCase_guy]

If I had to guess, I'd say that President Bush kept the terrorists focused on Iraq for several years. It was a close run thing, and the terrorists had a chance to succeed, so they put their resources there. That's been clear to just about everyone for years.

But I think it became clear quite some time ago that they had lost on that battlefield. Their resources were better spent elsewhere. Afghanistan? Maybe. But perhaps the terrorists saw a chance to shift the focus in a larger way. My guess is that the terrorists have been spending 6-12 months considering how they could hit us here in the US. With the right guy in the White House, such a blow might send out troops our of Afghanistan and Iraq and really change the game.

I say the attack has been planned, and it is close.

[nothingnew]

With the right guy in the White House, such a blow might send out troops our of Afghanistan and Iraq and really change the game.

With the right guy in the White House, such a blow might send our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and really change the game?

FMCDH(BITS)

[ClearCase_guy]

I spent years in government skools so I don’t hardly ever make no mistakes.

[nothingnew]

I be unnerstandin and not be castin stones atchoo.

FMCDH(BITS)

[neverdem]

bump & a VDH Ping

[DuncanWaring]

...the healing bipartisan Barack Obama lacked the support of even a single Republican in the House...

Heck, he couldn't even get support of all the Democrats in the House.

As someone else (Rush?) pointed out, the "bipartisanship" was in the opposition.

[Tolik]

        “Hope and change” meet reality. The ironies bring us back to the unlamented days of Jimmy Carter.

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... There were many legitimate critiques of the Iraq war. But insisting, as Barack Obama did, that we invaded recklessly and in haste was not one of them. From the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration deliberately and in public fashion sought debate in the Congress for over a year, received bipartisan authorization, and tried for months to win sanction from the United Nations.

In contrast, Barack Obama immediately upon entering office demanded the largest government expansion in the history of the nation. The staggering debt program will require nearly a trillion dollars in borrowing to fund all sorts of entitlements and redistributive efforts, and in revolutionary fashion redefine the role of government itself. Obama pronounced the current economic crisis the moral equivalent of war, and he wanted a national mobilization to meet it — pronto.

But unlike the Bush administration, which took 15 months to prepare the country for a real war in Iraq, the Obama administration gave the public only a few hours to read the final draft of the legislation before it was made into law. Where the polarizing partisan George Bush managed to obtain the vote of majorities in both parties to remove Saddam Hussein, the healing bipartisan Barack Obama lacked the support of even a single Republican in the House and won over a mere three Republicans in the Senate.

Liberals who once screamed that congressional opponents of the Iraq war were being unfairly tagged as unpatriotic by the Bush administration now yelled louder that the opponents of the Obama debt program were, in fact, unpatriotic.

Bush was pilloried for supposedly hyping al-Qaeda in order to create a security state. Obama trumped that by proclaiming that the present recession is a catastrophe, a disaster, a Great Depression. He ceased his scare-mongering only when he had exhausted the vocabulary of doom. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” bragged Rahm Emanuel, reminding us that the envisioned Obama socialism could take root only if a climate of fear was created.

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    Combined ping to 2 ping lists

Nailed It! Moral Clarity BUMP ! This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You are welcome to browse the list of truly exceptional articles I pinged to lately. Updated on February 10, 2009.  on  my page. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about). Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.   ;

Victor Davis Hanson Ping !         Let me know if you want in or out. Links:    FR Index of his articles:  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson                 His website: http://victorhanson.com/                 NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp                 Pajamasmedia:   http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/

 

[RipSawyer]

Eye wint too gooverment skules two an eye thank U maid ate leest won misteak inn thet postal.

[erkyl]

Hanson clearly summarizes all of Obama’s hypocrisies in a way I want to every time I get into it with a liberal. Sadly, logic and reasoning is lost on most of them. It’s all about pathos (emotion) for them. Facts don’t matter. Obama made them feel better. End of story.

[Taxman]

VDH is a brilliant thinker/essayist whose message should be on the FRont pages of every newspaper in the Western World. Likewise, a Cliff Notes summary of his essays should be the opening statement of every TV and radio news program.

He writes very persuasively, and if given wide coverage, could perhaps win FRiends and influence people to view the world in a different, more reasonable way.

Sadly, I fear that his thoughts are not receiving the sort of exposure required to make a real difference.

HST, it is up to us to see to it that his ideas are spread far and wide. We need to somehow get his ideas out of our conservative community and into media the LIEberal/Socialist/Marxsts pay attention to.

Perhaps enough of the hangers-on will be persuaded that the Obamamaniacs have got it wrong and turn on them.

After all, that is the objective, is it not? Defeat the enemy on the field of battle and win their hearts and minds over to our cause?

Isn’t that why we do this?

[spodefly]

BTTT

[csmusaret]

America has plenty of clear thinkers and an abundance of people who communicate effectively in print. Victor David Hanson is the rare embodiment of both skills in the same person.

[Taxman]

Grat point and very well said!

Our challenge is to get his thoughts into the hearts and minds of the Obamamaniacs and cause them to see the error of their ways.

IOW, enlist them to our cause.

[Billthedrill]

the now President Obama discovered that his Bush the Constitution-shredder had been a clumsy caricature of Bush the sober commander-in-chief.

At least there are signs, albeit hypocritical, that he has in fact made such a discovery. We see nothing of the sort in Congress, still intent on pillorying an administration that is rapidly fading into the distance in order to excuse its own complete lack of accomplishment. What it has managed to accomplish in three short weeks is to burden the country with an incomprehensible level of debt, rather like "stimulating" an already overladen beast by adding a ton or two to its burden, secure in the knowledge that when the beast inevitably collapses they can always blame the other fellow, which is, after all, what the Dems are best at. That is not governance and it certainly isn't leadership.

In less than a month we are looking at the astonishing reality of socialism enacted in a hysterical rush, show trials, repudiation of central tenets of foreign policy that have kept both ourselves and our allies from accepting Islamist terrorism, and the accession to power of an incompetent, categorically corrupt class of time-servers and ward-heelers unmatched since the days of Warren Harding. Meanwhile what is evidently uppermost on the minds of the country's cultural illuminati are the President's torso and what darling Michelle wore to the last society political function, every single visit to the grocer on the part of the long-sufferinc citizen now concluded by a gantlet run through newsracks of treacly hagiographic goo. If it is intended to ameliorate the sting at the cash register, it isn't working.

One month. The real hazard of this porkulus idiocy isn't that it won't work, a likelihood measurable by numbers too small for the average hand calculator, but that the country's economy will recover despite it and the Democrats feel compelled to manufacture another crisis on whose wings to float their next bit of confiscatory graft, redistributive theft, class warfare, and muddle-headed social nonsense. We went careening from crisis to crisis under Carter, too, and the really sad thing is that too many of them turned out, through sheer neglect, to be real after all, Iran being an extant example that still confounds those obligated to try to clean up Jimmy's mess. Obama will not manage it by repeating the same mistakes, by impaneling the same team, by spouting the same idiot pablum, but that is precisely how he is now proceeding.

[villagerjoel]

Must be nice to bask in the warm glow of Obama´s halo, soaking up the gushing omnipotence that flows from the letters on his teleprompter, completely ignorant to the harsh reality of the world in which we live.

[AlanGreenSpam]

Obama combines the slickness of Slick Willie with the inept policies of Carter.

A true disaster...

Obama = ClinCarter