Victor Davis Hanson: What If?—Mr. President
[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.]
Not in Good Form
Based on a few of President Obama’s statements, this was not a particularly good week for the administration. In a disturbing pattern, we are beginning to learn far more about Obama in his impromptu moments, in periods of national crisis, or in off-the-record reported bantering, than in his set teleprompted speeches. Consider some of the things the President said the past week — and then imagine what he might have said.
A Little More Spirit, a Little Less Cool
In his reaction to the horror at Fort Hood, Obama, in detached fashion, urged Americans not to rush to judgment about the motives of the killer Major Nidal Malik Hasan — despite immediate reports that Hasan had screamed out “Allahu Akabar,” as well as been known to post on the Internet inflammatory anti-American, and radical Islamic messages. Each day more incriminating information is released about a clear past record of inflammatory hate speech directed at the U.S. military.
What if the President had said something quite different? — something a little bit more angry like, “All Americans have had it with these mass murderers, whether formal terrorist plotters or individual assassins. I promise you we will find out what motivates a Major Hasan — and do my best to ensure that there are no more Major Hasans in our future.”
We are not asking Obama to rush to judgment before the facts are in (e.g., in the manner of the Professor Gates mess, in which he, in Pavlovian fashion, immediately condemned the Cambridge police as acting “stupidly” through stereotyped racial profiling) — only that he express some sort of visceral outrage at this serial killing of innocent Americans...
... Has Robert Gibbs Been on Mars?
Speaking of alluding to terrorist violence for partisan political purposes, recently the anguished Press Secretary Robert Gibbs complained of the sad state of partisan debate over healthcare.
“Imagine five years ago somebody comparing healthcare reform to 9/11,” Gibbs lamented. “Imagine just a few years ago, had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.”
Is this man sane?
“Imagine?”
“Hitler”? You think?
For the last eight years, it was considered good liberal politics to evoke Hitler in smearing George Bush. In fact, just about that time in question — when in 2003-5 the then silent Robert Gibbs had resigned as the then press secretary to presidential candidate John Kerry and had helped form a political group to attack Howard Dean and then later joined the Obama Senate campaign that was a beneficiary of the leaked divorced records of mirabile dictu both his primary and general election opponents — I wrote an article precisely about Gibbs’ present worries: the evocation of Hitler to demonize political opponents (but I don’t remember any Gibbs outrage at the time “five years ago”):
Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.) more recently likened President George W. Bush’s political methodology to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Earlier during the run-up to the Iraqi war, German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin smeared Bush with a similar Hitlerian analogy…
In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…. But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities (e.g., Jonathan Chait’s embarrassing rant in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush” or Garrison Keillor’s infantile slurs about Bush’s Republicans: “brown shirts in pinstripes”), but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”
Read entire article at Private Papers (Website of Victor David Hanson)
Not in Good Form
Based on a few of President Obama’s statements, this was not a particularly good week for the administration. In a disturbing pattern, we are beginning to learn far more about Obama in his impromptu moments, in periods of national crisis, or in off-the-record reported bantering, than in his set teleprompted speeches. Consider some of the things the President said the past week — and then imagine what he might have said.
A Little More Spirit, a Little Less Cool
In his reaction to the horror at Fort Hood, Obama, in detached fashion, urged Americans not to rush to judgment about the motives of the killer Major Nidal Malik Hasan — despite immediate reports that Hasan had screamed out “Allahu Akabar,” as well as been known to post on the Internet inflammatory anti-American, and radical Islamic messages. Each day more incriminating information is released about a clear past record of inflammatory hate speech directed at the U.S. military.
What if the President had said something quite different? — something a little bit more angry like, “All Americans have had it with these mass murderers, whether formal terrorist plotters or individual assassins. I promise you we will find out what motivates a Major Hasan — and do my best to ensure that there are no more Major Hasans in our future.”
We are not asking Obama to rush to judgment before the facts are in (e.g., in the manner of the Professor Gates mess, in which he, in Pavlovian fashion, immediately condemned the Cambridge police as acting “stupidly” through stereotyped racial profiling) — only that he express some sort of visceral outrage at this serial killing of innocent Americans...
... Has Robert Gibbs Been on Mars?
Speaking of alluding to terrorist violence for partisan political purposes, recently the anguished Press Secretary Robert Gibbs complained of the sad state of partisan debate over healthcare.
“Imagine five years ago somebody comparing healthcare reform to 9/11,” Gibbs lamented. “Imagine just a few years ago, had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.”
Is this man sane?
“Imagine?”
“Hitler”? You think?
For the last eight years, it was considered good liberal politics to evoke Hitler in smearing George Bush. In fact, just about that time in question — when in 2003-5 the then silent Robert Gibbs had resigned as the then press secretary to presidential candidate John Kerry and had helped form a political group to attack Howard Dean and then later joined the Obama Senate campaign that was a beneficiary of the leaked divorced records of mirabile dictu both his primary and general election opponents — I wrote an article precisely about Gibbs’ present worries: the evocation of Hitler to demonize political opponents (but I don’t remember any Gibbs outrage at the time “five years ago”):
Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.) more recently likened President George W. Bush’s political methodology to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Earlier during the run-up to the Iraqi war, German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin smeared Bush with a similar Hitlerian analogy…
In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…. But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities (e.g., Jonathan Chait’s embarrassing rant in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush” or Garrison Keillor’s infantile slurs about Bush’s Republicans: “brown shirts in pinstripes”), but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”