Free Republic

When Barack Obama two years ago joked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that potential suitors of his two daughters might have to deal with Predator drones (“But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”), the liberal crowd roared. That failed macabre joke would have earned George W. Bush a week of headline condemnation from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Obama, in fact, has increased those judge/jury/executioner targeted assassinations tenfold during his tenure. But apparently, the combination of Obama’s postracial “cool” and the video-game nature of such...

Who could not despise the tottering Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria? The Syrian strongman has killed some 10,000 protestors over the last year; thousands of Syrians are now refugees. The autocracy arms and aids the terrorist organization Hezbollah. It targets democratic Israel with thousands of missiles, and still does its best to ruin neighboring Lebanon. Theocratic and terrorist-sponsoring Iran has few allies -- but Syria remains its staunchest. Almost no country over the last half-century has proved more hostile to the United States than has Syria. With sanctions not working, and with the Chinese, Iranians and Russians not eager to...

The newly elected French Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is warning Germany that Mediterranean ideas of "growth," not Germanic "austerity," should be the new European creed. No surprise there -- reckless debtors often blame their own past imprudence on greedy creditors, especially if the latter are supposed to be guilt-ridden over causing two world wars. All over Europe, the gospel is that tight-fisted Germans are at the root of the European Union meltdown: They worked too hard, saved too much, bought too little and borrowed not at all. All that may be true, in theory. But, in fact, faulting thrift...

Recently, I was driving down pot-holed, two-lane, non-freeway 101 near Monterey (unchanged since the 1960s) when the radio blared that on a recent science test administered to public schools, California scored 47th in the nation. As I looked at the congested traffic on the decrepit highway and digested the idea that our public schools are competitive only with Mississippi and Alabama, I wondered — is that what we get for a more than 10 percent income tax, 10 percent state and local sales taxes, and the highest gas taxes in the nation?

Sometimes a trivial embarrassment can become a teachable moment. It was recently revealed that Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had self-identified as a Native American for nearly a decade — apparently to enhance her academic career by claiming minority status. Warren, a blond multimillionaire, could not substantiate her claim of 1/32 Cherokee heritage. (And would it have reflected any better on her if she could have?) Instead, she fell back on the stereotyped caricature that a relative of hers had “high cheekbones.�Not long ago, University of Colorado academic Ward Churchill was likewise exposed as a fraud...

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it. Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it...

Former president Bill Clinton just appeared in a reelection television commercial for President Barack Obama. At one point, Clinton weighs in on the potential consequences of Obama’s decision to go ahead with the planned assassination of Osama bin Laden. He smiles and then pontificates, “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].�There is a lot that is disturbing about Clinton’s commentary — and about the fact that such an embarrassment was not deleted by the Obama campaign. Clinton offers unintended...

The temple of postmodern liberalism was rocked these last few weeks, as a number of supporting columns and buttresses simply crashed, leaving the entire edifice wobbling.

Our New Regressivism About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy...

In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of "hope and change." That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity. Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 re-election campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy. Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the...

Conservatives caricature 24/7 Barack Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter. True, his speeches are scripted; but we forget why so: He is very good at reading a prepared script as if he were talking off the top of his head, and he is very bad at actually talking off the top of his head. In the former mode, he sounds pleasantly moderate and mellifluous; in the latter, sort of creepy and awkward. Yet the result is paradoxical: Obama seems to feel false when he sounds balanced and eloquent reading someone else’s ideas on a teleprompter, and genuine only when he is...

Our Modern Lynch Mob Democracies are in general prone to fits of the mob. Just read the Thucydidean account of the debate of Mytilene. Or watch a 1950s Western as the lynch party heads for the town jail. Fear of democratically-sanctioned madness is why the Founders came up not just with classical tripartite government to check and limit power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches, but also now generally disdained notions of allowing states to impose property qualifications for voting, the Electoral College, two Senators guaranteed per state regardless of population, and Senators originally selected without direct votes....

So, the next time someone quotes philosopher George Santayana for the umpteenth time that "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," just assume that what follows will probably be wrong. Having a Rolodex of cocktail party quotes to beef-up an argument is not the same as the hard work of learning about the past. Thus, we are now warned that the war against terror is failing because it has lasted as long as World War II — as if the length of war, not the cost, determines success. Yet the nearly 2,000 U.S. combat fatalities in...

Americans — left, right, Democrats and Republicans — are all sick of thankless nation-building in the Middle East. Yet democratization was not our first choice, but rather a last resort after prior failures. The U.S. had long ago supplied Afghan insurgents, who expelled the Soviets after a decade of fighting. Then we left. The country descended into even worse medievalism under the Taliban. So after removing the Taliban, who had hosted the perpetrators of 9/11, we promised in 2001 to stay on. We won the first Gulf War in 1991. Then most of our forces left the region. The result...

In the last three months, we've been reduced to something like the ancient Athenian mob — with opportunistic politicians sometimes inciting, sometimes catering to an already angry public. The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes once described how screaming politicians — posing as men of the people — would sway Athenian citizens by offering them all sort of perks and goodies that the government had no idea how to pay for. The historian Thucydides offers even more frightening accounts of bloodthirsty voters after they were aroused by demagogues ("leaders or drivers of the people"). One day in a bloodthirsty rage, voters demanded...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version November 11, 2005, 8:27 a.m. Why Did Athens Lose? The misery of war. EDITOR'S NOTE: Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War has recently been released by Random House. This week National Review Online has been excerpting Chapter 10 of the book. Below is the final installment; the first can be read here and the second here; the third here; the fourth here. Check back tomorrow for the final installment and click on Amazon to purchase A War...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following is an abridged version of Dr. Hanson's lecture at a seminar on quot;Liberal Education, Liberty, and Education Today,quot; delivered in Phillips Auditorium at Hillsdale College on November 11, 2001. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The study of Classics -- of Greece and Rome -- can offer us moral lessons as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. In our present crisis after September 11, it also offers practical guidance -- and the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the disturbing reactions to the war that we have seen...

Not long ago, European Union bankers gave the Greeks a €110 billion bailout—along with stern recommendations to stop cooking their books, to go after tax cheaters, to trim fat public payrolls, to reform ludicrous pensions, and to open up the economy to the private sector. The money men were answered with riots, strikes, and defiance in the streets of Athens. Even as the government has nodded that it would enact prescribed austerity measures, it found ways to delay or subvert them. The Greek message, whether deliberate or not, came off as either, “Don’t tell us how to spend your money,”...

As gas nears $5-a-gallon out west, the president, who has cancelled a key pipeline and frozen federal leases from Alaska to the East Coast, teaches us about American algae potential, in the way he used to emphasize the importance of tire pressure and “tune-ups.” He castigates the opposition for making political hay out of bad news, in the way he routinely did as a senator in compiling the most partisan voting record in the Senate. Energy Secretary Chu cannot and will not say a word about soaring gas prices, since he is on record not so long ago hoping that...

It is hard to remember a more tense time in the last 20 years. Tiny Israel may be poised to preempt the nuclear capabilities of Iran (an Iran that itself once attempted, unsuccessfully, to take out the Iraqi reactor at Osirak before Israel finished the job), whose terrorist appendages and missiles have the ability to do it a great deal of damage in return. How such a war would escalate or end, no one knows. There is no sense of a global effort to stop Iran’s proliferation, given that China and Russia seem to enjoy the irritation that Iran causes...

In a scathing denunciation of Mitt Romney last week, Fareed Zakaria praised Barack Obama for his nuanced understanding of what Zakaria has called the “Post-American World�: This is a new world, very different from the America-centric one we got used to over the last generation. Obama has succeeded in preserving and even enhancing U.S. influence in this world precisely because he has recognized these new forces at work. He has traveled to the emerging nations and spoken admiringly of their rise. He replaced the old Western club and made the Group of 20 the central decision-making forum for global...

NO MAS, MR. PRESIDENT The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose..,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by …,” I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it...

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount. News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin -- as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks. Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of...

I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind. — John Edwards When does the legitimate “I oppose Obama” descend into the illegitimate “I hate Obama”? It is popular now to suggest that conservatives in general and congressional Republicans in particular suffer from an obsession characterized by an uncontrolled antipathy for Barack Obama — personal and visceral — that warps their entire political outlook. No doubt some do experience the same obsessions that infected the Left in their furor at George W. Bush. One can find unhinged posters...

While the elites make excuses, citizens cope with theft and destruction. I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it. Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen....

While the elites make excuses, citizens cope with theft and destruction. I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it. Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen....

Global Warming — RIP?The issue seems deader than a doornail. Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing “cap-and-trade� legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America’s traditional carbon energy use.The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy — a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil, and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would “necessarily skyrocket.� His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point even said, “Somehow...

Obama's Racial CrisisOur post-racial president has set race relations back decades. In the current racial circus, the president of the United States, in addressing an assembly of upscale black professionals and political leaders, adopts the style of a Southern Baptist preacher of the 1960s. He alters his cadences and delivery to both berate and gin up the large audience — posing as a messianic figure who will “march� them out to speak truth to power. In response, the omnipresent Rep. Maxine Waters goes public yet again, to object that the president has no right to rally blacks in this way,...

Obama's Predictable ScandalsThe media can no longer shield Obama from scrutiny. The media finally conceded the Obama administration to be inexperienced and inept, reminiscent of the Carter administration — but, they maintained, not possibly involved in any corruption. Then suddenly scandals erupted on nearly every conceivable front: the crony-capitalist half-billion-dollar loan guarantee to a now bankrupt Solyndra; the Fast and Furious gun deal, in which, in lunatic fashion, the U.S. government sold deadly automatic weapons to Mexican drug-cartel killers; the administration’s pressure on a four-star general to fudge his testimony as a favor to a big campaign donor whose suspect...

Post-9/11 MysteriesThe aftershocks of 9/11 have generated a bizarre collective amnesia. Strangely, both the media and the public rarely mention some of the most important aftershocks in the decade since 9/11. Here are some representative examples of landmark events that to this day remain mostly undiscussed.1. No more falling skyscrapers? Few imagined that the United States could go an entire decade without another major terrorist attack — other than freelancing jihadists’ killing members of the American armed forces. Almost monthly, U.S. authorities have thwarted serial attempts to cause mayhem on airliners, bridges, city squares, shopping malls, and high-rises. It was...

What's Off the Table in 2012?Everything except the economy What should we not expect during next summer’s presidential campaign, given what was put off limits in 2008 and later? There is much talk about what some are perceiving as the fringe religiosity of Republican candidates such as Michele Bachman and Rick Perry. But the media established the precedent four years ago that no candidate can be held responsible for his church. Barack Obama’s pastor of more than 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an unapologetic racist, an anti-Semite, and a raving conspiracy theorist whose parishioners gave him standing ovations...

Environmentalist efforts to save the delta smelt threaten to create a new dust bowl. California’s water wars aren’t about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation’s most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past generations of Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state’s inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs, and canals. Only that way can California’s rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the...

A once civil and orderly England was recently torn apart by rioting and looting -- at first by mostly minority youth, but eventually also by young Brits in general. This summer, a number of American cities witnessed so-called "flash mobs" -- mostly African-American youths who swarmed at prearranged times to loot stores or randomly attack those of other races and classes. The mayhem has reignited an old debate in the West. Are such criminally minded young Americans and British turning to violence in protest over inequality, poverty and bleak opportunities? The Left, of course, often blames cutbacks in the tottering...

Quite often a brief news story sums up the collective pathologies of postmodern American society. : Police call slaying of Hanford woman a random act Posted at 06:04 p.m. on Thursday, July 28, 2011 By Paula Lloyd / The Fresno Bee A woman found slain at a Hanford car wash this week was killed randomly when a 17-year-old gang member happened to see her while taking a walk, Hanford police said Thursday. Denise McVay was washing her car — something she did several times a week — early Tuesday morning before work. The teen was wandering the streets after leaving...

President Obama does not care much about deficits — other than worrying that big debt might matter in his re-election campaign. In his first three budgets, Obama borrowed nearly $5 trillion. Currently, the government is borrowing about 45% of everything it spends. Obama's projected 10-year plan would add nearly $10 trillion to existing U.S. debt. This spring he proposed the largest annual deficit in U.S. peacetime history, which is why his $3.7 trillion budget for 2012 was rejected in the Senate by a 97-0 vote. In other words, under Obama, the government during the last three years has borrowed on...

...Demagoguery, at its best, requires good oratory and charisma — which is why Jimmy Carter was such a dismal failure at it, despite his half-hearted demonization of three-martini lunches and private yachts at a time of a record misery index that saw high unemployment, out-of-control inflation, and usurious interest rates, coupled with a neutralist foreign policy that had led to Russians in Afghanistan, Communist takeovers in Central America, and American hostages in Teheran. Carter’s mock-serious delivery was so droll, his presence so wooden, that his fist-pounding against “them” turned into caricature. Under a more skilled practitioner such as Barack Obama,...

The First Symptoms of Hatred—2004 to 2008 For about seven years the nation lost its collective mind—and was only partially coming to in November 2010. During the years of insanity, Al Gore won both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award for his propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth—before the disclosures of climate gate, new data on everything from the Himalayan glaciers to polar bear populations, realization that temperatures had not risen in the last 12 years, and the rather blatant and various money-making scheme of Gore, Inc. (that parlayed green advocacy into a billion-dollar, medieval exemption/carbon offset empire, several homes,...

Recently, in symbolic fashion, spectators of Mexican ancestry in Pasadena's Rose Bowl did not merely cheer on the Mexican national soccer team in a game against the U.S. national team -- such nostalgia is natural and understandable for recent immigrants -- but went much further and also jeered American players and, indeed, references to the United States. Which was the home team? Was America to be appreciated for accepting poor aliens, or resented for not granting them amnesty? Is the idea of the United States to be conveniently booed or opportunistically thanked -- depending on whether you are watching a...

Are There Really Socialists?Two unconnected developments were announced this past week. President Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, despite the absence of a global embargo or horrific natural disaster — and despite a litany of assertions from 2008 that drilling and increased supply might only have a marginal effect on prices.Like the sudden Afghan withdrawal announcement, the tapping is largely explained by political worries about reelection, as in increasing oil supplies to lower gas prices by election time — and thus avoiding campaign ads equating Obama’s opposition to drilling with high prices at the 2012 pump.In a...

Same Old, Same Old… Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.): 1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving by saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver...

ROME -- If Americans think fuel and food prices are high, they should try Europe, where both can nearly double those in the United States -- while salaries here are often lower. Italians, like most now-broke Southern European countries, are desperate to privatize bloated public-owned utilities. Politicians are trying to curb pensions, and to encourage the private sector to hire workers and buy equipment, as a way of attracting wary foreigner parents to lend such perpetual adolescents more bailout money. In theory, Italians accept that they are going to have to be a lot more like the Germans, and less...

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common? John Edwards built a mansion, replete with a 3,000 foot “John’s Room” playhouse in the compound’s inner sanctum, as he oversaw a University of North Carolina center with the pompous title “The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.”...

~ EXCERPT ~ Democrats in Congress recently went all out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll — and stay — in college. Most who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California — still struggling with its $15 billion deficit — is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions. At about the same time, the state has announced plans to release roughly 40,000 inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding....

Democrats in Congress recently went all out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll -- and stay -- in college. Most who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California -- still struggling with its $15 billion budget shortfall -- is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions of dollars. At about the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address...

There was something quite Roman in the killing of Osama bin Laden, something reminiscent of the manner in which the Romans eventually dealt with a rogue’s gallery of charismatic tribal enemies—Spartacus, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Boudica, and others—all of whom claimed victory over the Romans and invulnerability from their global reach, only to be eventually defeated, forced to kill themselves, executed, or killed in battle. The killing reminds us that there are official rules we cite and unofficial ones that, thankfully, we actually follow. Pakistan is to be praised publicly as a partner, even as privately it is recognized as the...

Yes, Libya Is Not IraqHowever each may turn out in the long run, Iraq in 2003 made sense; Libya in 2011 does not. The Left is terribly embarrassed about the U.S. intervention in Libya. We have preemptively attacked an Arab Muslim nation that posed little threat to the national-security interests of the United States. President Obama did not have majority support among the American people. Nor did he even attempt to gain approval from Congress — especially egregious because he seems to be the first president since Harry Truman who sought and obtained sanction for military action from the United...

The Triumph of the Therapeutic MindWhether it's budget deficits, teachers' pay, or delta smelts, the therapeutic mind refuses to count the cost. Beyond the political posturing over state and federal budgets, there looms an age-old philosophical divide over human nature, perhaps defined as the therapeutic versus the tragic view of our existence. The therapeutic view — thanks to the bounty and affluence brought about by modern technology — has largely triumphed. The tragic view is deemed the domain of the embittered, the selfish, and the downright mean. There are several tenets of the modern therapeutic view. In such a utopian...

The wealthier and more leisured American society has become, the more it has developed some terrible habits that will have to end if we are going to return to fiscal sobriety and a unified culture. I am pessimistic on that count, but here are a few examples: 1) The Administrative Fig Leaf of Cosmic Justice I was always curious when teaching in the California State University system why self-important administrators sent us weekly memos about their diversity goals and accomplishments, but were silent that under their watches the number of students in the freshman class who needed remedial courses...

President Obama established a bipartisan debt-reduction commission -- and then ignored its findings, which called for unpopular reductions in entitlements and across-the-board spending cuts. His first two budgets led to the largest deficits in U.S. history. The ensuing $3 trillion dollars in red ink prompted the Tea Party movement and led to the largest midterm defeat of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives since 1938. No matter. The president has proposed a new budget with an even larger, $1.6 trillion deficit. That record federal borrowing prompted columnist Charles Krauthammer to describe it as Louis XV indulgence, an allusion...

A New America in a New World OrderObama's vision of sameness — at home, equality of result; abroad, all nations equal — carries an appalling price tag. The year is quite young, and yet it has already seen a multitude of disturbing events and trends — unrest in Cairo and North Africa; nuclearization in Iran; a growing anti-American alliance among Turkey, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria; the expansionary designs of a newly unabashed China with attendant repercussions on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; calls for the end of the dollar as the global currency; the muscle flexing from an “I can’t...