Posted on 03/24/2009 7:45:58 AM PDT by Tolik
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/
This is how the Dark Ages began.
I don’t see that Ford or GE have imploded—not yet anyway, and Ford shows every sign of surviving now—but otherwise a superb rant.
First rate.
ping
Great rant/article. VDH is right. The corruption of standards, morality, and ultimately language has worn us out.
I’m on the verge of depression because I see my country going down the drain and recognize that over half of it’s inhabitants don’t have a clue.
Those crowds will no doubt, as I saw late last week, be chanting "O-BA-MA O-BA-MA" to their political leader in a fit of oblivious fascist euphoria entirely unrecognized by a generation educated by the NEA.
Wow.... that was powerful!
Well done, Victor.
This sounds like the national malaise coming back. Once can only hope that morning in America is not far behind.
Monday, March 23, 2009Cry, the Beloved Republic [Victor Davis Hanson]
Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Let's get this straight: Our president takes over $100,000 from AIG in campaign donations. Then he signs into legislation a bill crafted by his own party, with input from his own Treasury secretary, giving mega-bonuses to the execs of this bankrupt, federally bailed-out company — and then goes on the stump to trash the culture of Wall Street as typified by . . . AIG, of course.
Not to be outdone, Senator Dodd denies he put the AIG bonus provision in the bill, then — in a now familiar Obama administration habit — coughs up the truth that he in fact did when the evidence no longer allows him to prevaricate as is his wont. He, like our president, then goes the demagogic route, blasting the Wall Street placenta which nourished him through discounted mortgages, Irish cottages, and Fannie Mae cash — and, yes, like our president with over $100,000 in AIG cash.
We haven't heard from Representative Rangel recently. And why should we, given the failure of the House Ways and Means Committee chairman who oversees tax policy to pay proper taxes on unreported income, Rangel's serial abuse of rent-subsidized apartments, and his shake-down of corporations for money for his "Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York" — and, of course, his efforts to get millions from AIG and/or its execs for his eponymous "Center"? (Should we laugh or cry that it is to be a center devoted to "public service"?) But, as in the case of Dodd and Obama, those with the most AIG money in their pockets are usually the ones calling loudest for others' scalps. So ethicist Rangel now uses his position to post facto rewrite tax laws to get back the money from AIG that his party approved, his president signed into law, and he himself used to out-elbow others for.
But all this is not the real shamelessness. As it transpires, we witness a Pravda-like media, that used to evoke Enron at every juncture, now either stay mum, or, worse, write these pathetic, scratch-your-head op-eds about how odd it is that the Chicago-organizing, Reverend Wright devotee, three-years in the Senate veteran would be presiding over all this sleaze.
At least by 2016, we can anticipate what the campaign slogans for the anti-Obama opposition will be: "I promise to ensure eight years of $1.5 trillion dollar budget surpluses so that the American people can get the national debt back to a manageable $11 trillion of 2008."
The big issues are always around, but the declining civility is most troublesome. Nothing grows out of ashes.
I know I am depressed about what is happening to our country.
I have seen where Mark Levin and Dick Morris have put on weight since Obamanation and so have I.
OBAMA IS MAKING US FAT!!!!!!!
Get him out.
This man is brilliant.
We are victims of our own wealth -- as a society we've learned to live with it, and to value it, but not to produce it.
Ditto...VDH nails it again.
Bump that.
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