Victor D Hanson; (NEW) A Thorough Explanation of California's Failing Ut...

Part I The Second World Wars with Victor Davis Hanson

VDH: Defense Spending is a Shovel Ready Investment

"We often forget that the appearance of strength in peace is almost as important as the reality of strength in war." 

Victor Davis Hanson, writing today at National Review Online:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/287891/defense-spending-shovel-ready-investment-victor-davis-hanson

VDH: The End of Global Warming?

Victor Davis Hanson, writing today at National Review Online:

So what happened to the global-warming craze?

Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. “Climategate” — the unauthorized 2009 release of private e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom — revealed that many of the world’s top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar-bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.

Of course, it didn’t help that the world’s most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.

Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.

While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery — especially horizontal drilling and fracking — have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution — at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half-a-trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands, and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.

Click on the link below to read the whole piece.

Global Warming — RIP? - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online

Firewall: Turncoat Nation

Bill Whittle, in the below edition of "Firewall," makes it clear that he is not calling our president a traitor - just a "turncoat," and he makes his case as clearly as it can be made. He refers, for myriad examples, to the 2009 book by the classicist Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: How The Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security.

http://declarationentertainment.com/firewall-turncoat-nation

VDH: The First Person Presidency

Victor Davis Hanson, on National Review Online today, says what a lot of people have been thinking about this president but were unable to express so clearly.

President Obama takes credit for operations that would have been impossible had Senator Obama’s views prevailed.

Here are a few excerpts from President Obama’s speech on Sunday night about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“Tonight, I can report . . . And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken. . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed. . . .”

The problem of first-personalizing national security is twofold. One, it is not consistent. Good news is reported by Obama in terms of “I”; bad news is delivered as “reset,” “the previous administration,” “in the past”: All good things abroad are due to Obama himself; all bad things are still the blowback from George W. Bush.

Two, there is the small matter of hypocrisy. The protocols for taking out Osama bin Laden were all established by President Bush and all opposed by Senator and then candidate Obama.
In sum, Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.

Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.

You can read the entire article by clicking Here.

City Journal on Bin Laden's Demise

The inestimable City Journal, the quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, today provided us with five excellent essays, by five of their very best contributors, on the historic event of yesterday. They're all short, easy to read, and worth sharing with friends.

Just click on the name of the author to read the essay.

Sol Stern

Andrew Klavan

Victor Davis Hanson

Guy Sorman

Theodore Dalrymple

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama as Hamlet

Obama as Hamlet - By Victor Davis Hanson - The Corner - National Review Online

Victor Davis Hanson: The New Sophists

Victor Davis Hanson, in his latest piece on National Review Online, exposes the fallacies of the intelligentsia who live their lives devoid of any real life experience, but willing to preach to the rest of us as the sophists did to the citizens of Classical Athens.

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts of having “proved” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism — but without a modern Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can be.

One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, someone writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing of money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials — but not the logic — of the writer.

America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped, and monotonous — circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington–New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors, and degrees among our policy-setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska, or a ranch in Idaho.

Are we to wonder why an angry grassroots Tea Party spread — or why it was instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse?


To read the entire article click on the link below.

The New Sophists - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online

VDH: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Non-Response

Yesterday on the Pajamas Media Blog, the Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson posted a piece entitled: The Truths We Dare Not Speak About Illegal Immigration.

"We are in revolutionary times when the law is a malleable thing, its validity predicated only on its perceived social utility at any given moment.

This is how nations are lost."