Posted on 03/18/2009 6:36:15 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/
I keep thinking of Oceana.
Combining VDH and Orwell is just too much!!!!!
Thanks for your work, Tolik.
The last time real “Hope and Change” was tried in Washington, the Republican Party won congress in 1994. We had mixed success, but it was derailed by the same leftist crypto-Fascists who want “hope and change” now by calling it “Radical” and “Extremist”.
| http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmE0MTY3YWMxYzI3ZWM1OGUyZWMzOGQ1ZjRhNTMzYWQ= Friday, March 13, 2009From Catastrophe to Not so Bad? [Victor Davis Hanson] Washington is by nature an hysterical place. (Remember those who chest-thumped the fall of Saddam’s statue only soon to claim they never supported the war?)
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http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTczNDU5M2YyNTExNWJjNGE2YmI5Nzc3ZWVhOGFlYmU= Monday, March 16, 2009 Making Orwell Proud [Victor Davis Hanson] Guantanamo is still open, but there are no longer "enemy combatants" there (Perhaps the name of the camp can be changed next?). The old campaign snicker that a naïve McCain really believed that a then-stronger economy is "fundamentally sound" is now the new Obama gospel about a far weaker one. There are to be no more earmarks in spite of 8,000-plus new ones. A $3.6 trillion-dollar budget is proof of commitment to financial responsibility; the remedy of Bush’s borrowing profligacy is to increase the deficit from $500 billion to $1.7 trillion. Bush’s signing statements bad; Obama’s signing statements good. An end to lobbyists in an administration ensure there are over ten; the highest ethical standards mean the nominations of Daschle, Richardson, etc. The changing meaning of words really does trump memory and reality itself.
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http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDExY2ZmMzQ5MWViNWJmNDBjZDczYzAwNDBlMTYxMDc= Monday, March 16, 2009 Casting the First Stone . . . [Victor Davis Hanson] I am mystified by Barney Frank's desire to recall the AIG execs' bonuses, not so much over the idea that corporate-welfare recipients should not have grandstanding demagogues chastising them for their hypocrisy, but rather the notion that someone of Frank's ethical past would play Old-Testament railing prophet. Quite aside from his former partners (the gigolo fellow who used Frank's facilities for illegal activities, and the other boyfriend Herb Moses — self-described as part of the "congressional gay-spouse caucus" — who, as an exec, was helping to make Fannie policy at the very time Frank was voting on its appropriateness), Frank received more than $40,000 in campaign contributions from the bankrupt Freddie and Fannie, despite his own role as supposed fiscal watchdog on the House Financial Services Committee. A modest suggestion? Let us agree on the following: No more corporate fat cats partying, jetting, and bonusing around after their tottering companies got federal cash; and all congressional-people and senators who took any contributions from any corporate or quasi-government entity that is a recipient of federal bailout money, must pay that money back, plus interest, to the government. After all, as in the Madoff mess, these congressional-people usually got the cash at a time when their benefactors were already in trouble, albeit hiding their fraudulent or unethical practices through cooked statements and high living. So please, Representative Frank, Senator Dodd, and all the rest — give back all that campaign cash to our government, and then in silence endure what you helped to conceive. |
How about VDH as the Chair of the Republican Party? At least we’d have a coherent message...
People who have lived through a terrible, catastrophic event in their lives sometimes embrace a philosophy of living “day by by”, figuring that they can just press on and things will work themselves out.
This can work, if it’s just you, and you have what you barely need to survive, and are willing to stay at that level for a long, long time.
It doesn’t work so well if you have others reliant on you, or if you ever want to lead a better life for yourself and your family. This takes prior planning, a lot of it, and a close examination of the “opportunity costs” in your life and finances.
Opportunity costs are a principal of economics at all levels. In short, it means that if you have a dollar in your pocket, you can spend it on one thing that costs a dollar, or something else that costs a dollar, not both. You can have one thing you want, or something else you want, and it’s your choice to make. But you *have* to choose, and you *can’t* have them both.
Now imagine the utter red-faced, screaming tantrum you would hear right now, if the federal government was told the same thing.
Instead of just having one dollar in their pocket, the federal government this year should have something over two trillion dollars of tax revenue, for them to spend as they see fit. But for decades now, they have spent more money than they bring in, and this has put the country very deeply in debt.
Because it is such a severe problem, Washington has become like some people who have lived through severe, catastrophic events. That is, the federal government is pretending to live “day by day”, ignoring the enormous problem it has created for us all.
And I mean this in a very literal sense. For example, eventually the government is supposed to pay out dozens of trillions of dollars to Social Security beneficiaries. A wise government would have never promised them nonsensical future rewards in the first place. But having done so, a wise government should have scrimped and saved to build up a huge reserve of money to cover that immense debt.
But our government did neither. In fact, it spent the money people paid in to Social Security as soon as they paid it, and on other things that the government wanted. For them, living “day to day” meant that as long as they paid the people who had to be paid right then, everything was okay. It was not.
As an analogy, the US federal government, after an orgy of drinking, is now lying in its own filth, disheveled in the gutter. It is still so drunk that it neither knows nor cares that it is incapacitated, and is shouting out to passerby to join it in a drink, from its empty bottle of rotgut whiskey. The US government has hit bottom, but it doesn’t know it yet.
Little does it know that its bartender has had enough and is no longer going to let it run up its tab—in fact is going to demand payment on its tab. Nobody else in the bar is going to loan it money, either. The binge is over.
And like an alcoholic, the federal government doesn’t want to quit doing what it wants, but the truth is that it will soon have no choice in the matter.
“I don’t know whether to be more upset at the woman in front of me at the Selma food market on Monday, who, with I-pod in hand, pulled out her welfare food-stamp credit card to buy quite a sumptuous cart of groceries, or the AIG whiz who trumped her 1000x in taking a bonus for running his company into the ground. The former is a petty con-artist but in your face; the latter is toxic and lethal and quite dangerous, but abstract and distant.”
About a week ago I was in a 15 item checkout stand in a grocery store.
Ahead of me was an Illegal Brood Breeder with 2 young kids tearing around with no supervision, one in the cart and another one coming in her hangar bay.
She was using her WIC* book to buy dozens of food items. The process takes time, and the clerk had to make enteries in the breeder’s book when so many items were rung up.
*WIC info http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/aboutwic/
During this time the breeder was yakking on her Blackberry, at least it wasn’t an IPod, in non stop Cal/Mex.
When the process was over, she demanded that someone help her out to her car.
The hard working Mexican American clerk apologized to those of us in line.
A Mexican American guy, whom, I have known for years was behind me. He Told the clerk that was BS allowing that B$tch to check so many items, and she should have told the breeder to go to another line. Then he added, “BS like this in a few months might end up with blood in the street, and you had better hope it isn’t our blood nor our family’s.”
I, too, am enraged at the leeches at both ends of the spectrum.
This can work, if it’s just you, and you have what you barely need to survive, and are willing to stay at that level for a long, long time.
For example, eventually the government is supposed to pay out dozens of trillions of dollars to Social Security beneficiaries. A wise government would have never promised them nonsensical future rewards in the first place. But having done so, a wise government should have scrimped and saved to build up a huge reserve of money to cover that immense debt.
But our government did neither. In fact, it spent the money people paid in to Social Security as soon as they paid it, and on other things that the government wanted. For them, living “day to day” meant that as long as they paid the people who had to be paid right then, everything was okay. It was not.
You totally "get it"...
In other words, he's afraid that his "tribe" (Mexican-Americans) will bear the rage of other "tribes" because of the BS of the Illegal Breeders.
He is one of Us, and I have met many, many middle class Hispanic Americans who have HAD it with Illegal Invaders.
Great comments. I just don't think we are going to pull out of it. The government and financial institutions are so entrenched in moral corruptness, I don't think we can once again be the financial super power we were.
I am a Christian and one day Jesus Christ will return, Isreal will have a temple by then, the anti christ will be identified and the believers will leave this earth. No where in the Bible does it talk about a country like America. You can read about what China does in the end times, Russia, Persia, etc. no one has been able to pin point with complete accuracy where America is talked about in the Bible.
I believe that is because we are insignificant, no influence in the world, no financial or military super power just another struggling country like we are beginning to look like now!! Isn't that how the Dems want it? Save the earth, destroy America as we know it and remove any trace of God from our lives?
This is really the bottom line. Whose fault is it? Whose going to have to clean it up.
It's our problem, our fault, and we need to stop complaining and fix it before it gets worse.
bump
Washington DC is a decadent imperial city same as Rome turned into. As such we are over taxed by them then our Representatives are forced to beg for scraps to be returned home via earmarks and pet projects. Life is fantastic there for everyone. There is no recession. Lots of parties and drugs and call girls. There is zero incentive for our representatives to get serious and solve problems because life is too nice for them. Dittos for their Congressional staffers and all the fatass do nothing Federal employees in the Washington DC area. 10% of Congressional staff is gay, so it has been reported. Affirmative action boobs and incompetents permeate our Federal bureaucracy in DC and throughout America
Washington DC is insulated from the chaos it produces whether it is Alan Greenspan’s easy money policy, Frank, Dodd and Maxine Waters shielding Fanny Mae from scrutiny or keeping our borders wide open
I’ve always wondered where Affirmative Action Anns and Andies did with their Urban Studies and Leftist Arts degrees after graduation. At first I thought that most of them were absorbed by companies to satisfy EEO requirements. Your post corrected that in my mind. The vast majority have ridden their preferences into the bureaucracy! There aren’t that many private company positions to go around. And now Obama is bringing them into the first lines of government. And as groups like ACORN increasingly become quasi-governmental institutions, a huge number of opportunities for them will open up.
according to Glen Beck, ACORN IS CONDUCTING THE US CENSUS IN SOME AREAS!!!!!!!
talk about guaranteed fraud.
Here’s what I think people are saying: Wall Street gets bailed out, despite billions that the masters of the universe skimmed off. Meanwhile our retirement accounts are crashed. Then the government bails out those ‘homeowners’ who failed, often due to their own greed and foolishness, not those who played by the rules: so default on your over priced home that you should have never bought, and the fed is there to bail you out; put away $1,000 a month in your 401(k)—and tough luck.
Try cashing out of that 401(k) and you'll find yourself paying double for that homeowner bailout. Leave it in and you lose it. Cute.
However, elitists such as the bunch that has grabbed control of the Democratic party are not, as VDH points out, particularly in touch with the middle class. The middle class is a threat to them. It is inertia, it is difficult to manipulate, and it's been that way well before Marx ever identified the bourgeoisie as the principal roadblock to a socialist future. That which weakens the middle class strengthens their grip on power. This is, in effect, class warfare by other means.
And frankly it was much easier to conduct with the eminently blameable Bush in office. Now the people doing it are out front and they're squirming a little. They don't understand the middle class, and they don't like it, but they do fear it.
A Scoop Jackson Democrat, JFK, or VDH are more conservative than the GOP/RNC.
The old Reagan quip( modified ), “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, it left me......and took the GOP with it”
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