Victor Davis Hanson: The Factory of Selective Moral Outrage

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.

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 of those 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 around the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding. Highly taxed Californians can borrow money to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.

Americans still seethe about the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. But the “fat-cat bankers,” in fact, were players in a far larger fraud made possible by liberal executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bill Clinton’s appointees and insider friends such as Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, and Robert Rubin made millions, while the agencies and banks they oversaw lost billions....