Victor Davis Hanson: Obama’s Glass House
[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.]
Preachers and professors have it hard as presidents. They sermonize too much. Finally the public gets tired of being lectured by those whom they increasingly see as no more upright than themselves. Prophets crumble from feet of clay, and stones shatter glass houses. So it was with Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, and so it is now with Barack Obama.
The Obama administration is throwing stones at a lot of people — John Boehner, Republicans, tea-partiers, Fox News, Glenn Beck, doctors, insurers, Wall Street, and business in general.
Such invective invites a response, and here the White House is becoming as fragile as glass. We saw that recently in the presidential petulance at supposedly being talked about “like a dog,” and in a touchy press secretary Robert Gibbs unloading at everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Forbes magazine.
Last February, Attorney General Eric Holder, self-appointed racial philosopher as well as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, lectured his fellow Americans: “In things racial, we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Professor Holder went on to complain that “certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one’s character.”...
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Preachers and professors have it hard as presidents. They sermonize too much. Finally the public gets tired of being lectured by those whom they increasingly see as no more upright than themselves. Prophets crumble from feet of clay, and stones shatter glass houses. So it was with Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, and so it is now with Barack Obama.
The Obama administration is throwing stones at a lot of people — John Boehner, Republicans, tea-partiers, Fox News, Glenn Beck, doctors, insurers, Wall Street, and business in general.
Such invective invites a response, and here the White House is becoming as fragile as glass. We saw that recently in the presidential petulance at supposedly being talked about “like a dog,” and in a touchy press secretary Robert Gibbs unloading at everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Forbes magazine.
Last February, Attorney General Eric Holder, self-appointed racial philosopher as well as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, lectured his fellow Americans: “In things racial, we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Professor Holder went on to complain that “certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one’s character.”...