This may be the best article written on the Obama administration to date. Turns out that all those criticisms Obama leveled against Bush… were a bunch of bunk compared with the way Obama runs the country.
Victor Davis Hanson on NRO:
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.
via The Audacity of Irony by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online.
Wow, Victor Davis Hanson is NAILING it on the race industry…
Victimization for generations has proven lucrative, precisely by allowing self-appointed leaders to advance their careers through doctrinaire “they did it” complaints. The script is now old indeed: Blame the pathologies of the underclass that hamper economic progress — inordinate drug usage, illegitimacy, crime, or dismal graduation rates — on the racism of those with “power.” “The Man” can find penitence only through perpetual apologies and the proper channeling of plentiful lucre.
and, near the end… discussing the new “morality” of electing the first black president…
Quit the smug moralizing that we have somehow proved to the world and ourselves that we are now finally worthy and deserving of adulation — as if wisdom and morality were always only an easy punch of the ballot away.
What a great article… I highly suggest the whole thing if you have time.
Win One For the Messiah! by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online.