Tag: victor davis hanson

#rsrh QotD, Victor Davis Hanson Knows Just Where To Stick The Knife edition.

Not surprising: I believe that the man is still technically a Democrat (or that he was one until recently). That means that he knows where the sensitive bits are.

Liberals used to go gaga over the man who promised that Guantanamo and renditions would be part of our distant criminal past, only to gag that he has embraced and expanded almost every one of the Bush-Cheney protocols that he once demagogued. Obama even recruited Yale Law Dean Harold Koh, who used to sue the government on behalf of Guantanamo detainees, to write surreal briefs explaining why stepped-up Predator missions can quite legally vaporize American citizens suspected of terrorism, and why American planes dropping bombs over a foreign country do not constitute warlike acts. A Yale Law dean who does that is like the proverbial dog walking on two legs, eliciting wonder not just that it is done, but why it is even attempted.

I wonder (but do not particularly care) whether antiwar progressives ever contemplate the equivalent of that paragraph, then go get blind, stinking drunk…

#rsrh In which I idly kick around the antiwar movement a bit.

I am slightly disappointed in this Victor Davis Hanson entry at NRO’s Corner on the curious event of the antiwar movement in the night-time.  It almost, but not quite, goes for the jugular.  For example, here’s this passage about the direct results of this administration’s continuation of the previous administration’s GWOT policies:

The chief symptom of this embarrassment is silence. Gone are the sloppy charges of “war criminal,” the Hollywood movies, the outbursts by celebrities, the anguished op-eds. It is almost as if the 2,000-plus suspected terrorists killed by Predators put a complete stop to all the talk of Guantanamo as a gulag or the water-boarding of three known terrorists as war crimes or any of the other harangues about supposed constitution-shredding. True, for many the hypocrisy is just the stuff of politics, but for others there is a quiet anger that they have been taken for a ride. Fairly or not, it is as if an entire corpus of prior written work, public rants, and activism between 2003 and 2008 — even if sincere — has now been exposed as mere partisan politics.

Good, so far as it goes – but “as if?” “Fairly or not?”  It is eminently fair to characterize the entire body of antiwar progressive thought (pardon the oxymoron) as ‘mere partisan politics:’ certainly the antiwar movement was not shy about reducing the pro-victory movement into something that their intellectually stunted minds could understand*. Continue reading #rsrh In which I idly kick around the antiwar movement a bit.

#rsrh “The Great Madness of 2004-10.”

Alternative title: Victor Davis Hanson puts the boot in.

(H/T: Instapundit) There’s a plethora of schadenfreude-rich goodness in this piece about what VDH calls the Great Madness, but this particular piece referring to the curious amnesia of the antiwar Left over how its own ostensible champions had embraced the liberation of Afghanistan/Iraq is probably most the… symptomatic.

I remember remarking to a former CSU colleague in those dark hours that the Congress had approved Iraq, with stirring speeches in support by Kerry, Reid, Clinton, and other liberal giants, that the public voiced a 75% approval when the 3-week war ended, and that Andrew Sullivan, as a tiny example, had mentioned Bush as Nobel laureate material and the need to use nukes against Saddam if he were behind the anthrax scare. Funny days, those, when Fareed Zakaria and Francis Fukuyama were writing serious, sober, and judicious briefs for preventative regime change in Iraq. The professor said to me, “That’s a lie. They all always opposed his amoral war and the Bush criminality.”

This is stupidity on the professor’s part, to be sure; it is also willful stupidity.  But most of all it’s a starkly necessary stupidity, at least for the originator of it; because the alternative is to accept the terrible reality that when it comes to foreign policy President Obama is just like Bush… only without Bush’s competency*, and without a basic empathy for the plight of the innocent people caught in the crossfire from President Obama’s ongoing military escapades.  Nobody likes admitting to themselves that they aren’t as good as they could be; so imagine how hard it must be for the antiwar Left to even contemplate the notion that they’re vile.  Actually, you don’t have to.  The antiwar Left demonstrates that frantic blindness every single day… and will do so for the rest of their lives, probably.

I’d say “To Hell with them,” except that I suspect that it’d be largely unnecessary.

Moe Lane

[*An alert reader in comments noted the orphan footnote, but I’m blessed if I remember what point I wanted to highlight here: that was one Texas Toast roast beef sandwich and a glass of excellent Belgian White beer ago, I’m debating the virtues of a summer Sunday nap, and it must not have been very important anyway.]

#rsrh I assume that VDH was writing rhetorically…

…when he asked:

Why is being appalled by Hanks’s infantile philosophizing a “right-wing” or “conservative” reaction? Would not liberals as well be angry that in blanket fashion, Hanks had reduced veterans’ efforts in the Pacific after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor (and to be followed by a magnanimous peace that fostered autonomous Japanese democracy) into largely a racist rage to annihilate?

(Background here.)

The answer, of course, is that mainstream conservatives do not generally allow people in their coalition to make puerile moral equivalency arguments like Tom Hanks’ without an immediate (and usually angry) challenge in reply; while mainstream liberals… do.

I’m truly sorry to have to write that, but it’s not my fault that the Democrats have ceded the battlespace on American exceptionalism in order to maintain a ever-more-fragile voting majority.

Moe Lane