Californians have been experiencing ten days of the wettest, snowiest weather in recent memory. In the usually arid San Joaquin Valley, flooding is ubiquitous. The high Sierra passes are locked in snow well before the first of the year. If the United Kingdom is dealing with the irony of its elites’ recently warning of an end to snow on a now snowy island, out here our version of that embarrassment is water everywhere after Energy Secretary Chu warned us that our farms would blow away and that he could envision an end altogether of California agriculture — logically, he asserted, given that 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would soon disappear.
Advertisement
While the state struggles with flooding and blizzards, Governor Schwarzenegger is advertising himself to the Obama administration as a possible post–Van Jones green czar, to regulate energy for the country as he has done for a now insolvent California. But then, once global warming morphed into climate change, too much rain, snow, and cold could become as symptomatic of too much man-made carbon being released as too little rain, snow, and cold once were. Start that engine, and thou shalt both burn and freeze in hell.
This week Attorney General Holder was warning about the threat of terrorism — but not terrorism in the usual liberal Timothy McVeigh, “even Christians can be terrorists” sort of gobbledy-gook. Rather, Eric Holder, as this Christmas’s new Dick Cheney, is warning about U.S. citizens who are stealthy radical Islamists. Holder fears that they wish to succeed where the would-be Times Square, subway, Portland, and Christmas airliner bombers all failed. He assumes that the terrorists among us for some reason did not read the Al-Arabiya interview, fully appreciate the Cairo speech, see the famous bow to the Saudi king, or hear of administration pressure on Israel. In short, “All religions produce terrorists,” is now followed by “But some religions produce more terrorists than others.”
So, gone for the moment at least are we “cowards” who racially stereotype, oppose the Ground Zero mosque in Neanderthal fashion, and fail to appreciate Holder’s own commitment to shutting down Guantanamo and trying KSM in a New York federal court. Much like his colleague Harold Koh (who, as an Obama State Department justice official rather than a Yale law dean, is no longer suing to put an end to waterboarding at Guantanamo, but is instead opposing those who are suing to stop Predator assassination missions), Holder in a blink of an eye went from trashing the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols to sighing that it is almost a matter of when, not if, home-grown Islamic radicals will kill lots of us. Holder’s road to Damascus is eerily reminiscent of the sudden conversion in 1938 of British intellectuals, who, as Czechoslovakia was swallowed, abruptly went from 15 years of trumpeting League of Nations pacifism to calling for British military deterrence against fascism. Unlike Holder, however, they at least explained why they had made their about-faces.
To be fair, the Obamaites are simply channeling their commander-in-chief, who spent a near decade, from 2001 to 2009, pontificating on the illegality or superfluousness of the Patriot Act, renditions, tribunals, Predators, Guantanamo, and overseas wars, and then as president embraced or even expanded all of them — with not a word of remorse that his earlier demagoguing might have done great harm both to the efficacy of the programs and to the reputations of those involved in them, as well as to his country’s image abroad. I suppose we are all Orwell’s farm animals now, mystified but quiet as we wake to see the commandments on the barnyard wall crossed out and written over#.
The ability for the Left to turn on an intellectual dime is not new. It may,in fact, be a DNA marker of the species.
For instance, when Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Non-Aggression pact between Germany and the USSR, the Left in the US immediately got with program and insisted that Germany weren't bad guys after all. Maybe it's just a big misunderstanding. And that was the pitch until the Stukkas began to fly over Russian skies at which point the Left did their usual pirouette and find themselves furiously campaigning for the US to help Mother Russia.
As I said, it's part of their DNA, they can't help themselves.
Brilliant summation of all that is The One. Thus Obama. Does anyone think that the mainstream media will notice or is it up to writers like Mr. Hanson to point it out. Thank you Mr. Hanson for an excellent bit of writing.
Mr. Hanson is right on here. The problem, however, is the GOP's absolute inability to communicate this to the American people. They are stuck in the same old talking points on every single subject, from war to taxes to immigration. Outside of a few commentators on NRO and maybe Fox, the GOP continues to let liberals frame the debate on every issue. It's sad, sad, sad...
What does it matter to Obama whether he changes on various things? He has already accomplished the two most far-reaching social changes he wanted: nationalization of health care, and official acceptance of homosexuality in the military. These will be with us for years to come. If he gets government control of the internet, it won't matter what tax rate he embraces or diplomatic thrust he endorses; all those can be changed in a minute.
When your purpose in office is announced as “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” you have as much respect for those obsolescent institutions as a bull has for china in a showroom, a monkey for open heart surgery, a philanderer for his wife, or an adversary of our way of life for a bust of Churchill, and thereby give yourself full license to say “oops” without conscious, “sorry” without conviction, “never mind” without remorse, and “après moi le déluge” without shame.
The façade of the self-appointed overlords of the proletariat and their acceptance of our historic first Islamic apostate president’s dissolute leadership exposes as much them as him.
Right on, as usual, however, you attribute Obama and his ilk with having faith in their manifesto.
Faith is actually a good thing because unlike what many professing "agnostics" think, faith is really dependent on the truth and reality of the object of it.
The adolescent belief system of Obama is based more on rebellion rather than principle or faith.
Obama apparently was quite indulged in his youth and is only now maturing. My sons faced this juncture in their mid twenties. Obama is late forties. He presents as a case study in the effects of American overindulgence by hippie minded parents who lived knee jerkedly opposed to all things traditional.
You give him too much credit for having any other reason other than adolescent rebellion for his turn around. Even 63 seats lost is not the pivotal issue for him; rather, his own peers' losing their adulation for him. Sheep follow the path of the most skittish among them.
And Obama's rich cohorts are starting to rail at the financial and reputation hits they have taken by following his ridiculous immature theoretical wanderings.
Full steam ahead though, down at the FCC and the EPA. The legislative part of the team is leaving the ring, and here come the bureaucracies in earnest. Just like on the Enterprise in Star Trek, with the deft Mr. Scott in engineering, you assess the damage reports, divert power, and keep on going.
As usual, Dr. Hanson hits the nail on the head with insight and analysis based on solid historical knowledge. Unfortunately, the entrenched "educators" at public schools and universities combined with the entertainment industry and the (formerly mainstream) media maintain a constant porpaganda output that omits and misinterprets facts and spins virtually everything into a presentation that leaves even some of the diligent members of their audiences at a loss as to what the truth is. Keep up the much needed work so that those of us who value faith, tradition, life, and liberty have a few contemporary sources to turn to for support in what one might call a modern day "resistance."
Yeah, times are certainly changing. Was it Ziggy who said that he has met the enemy and it was "him?" I mean we have all of these homegrown terrorists out there and come to find out they are us. Sure hope I am not one. Will have to wait until AG Holder tells me whether or not I'm a bad guy. This is probably all due to global warming, which stopped 1.5 decades ago. Probably some kind of delayed effect thingy. Just ask Gov. Schwarzenegger. He is interviewing for a job to fix this global warming stuff when global warming stopped 15 years ago. A guy just has to be really smart to do that. But, with all of this CO2 being released into the atmosphere this has got to be affecting something even though it is not global temperatures. In that photosynthetic life forms are not at saturating levels of CO2 the good gov will make a muscle in his brain and get this figured out. I just love our government taking such good care of me.
The current occupant(s) at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are simply not capable of any genuine emotion, let alone remorse for bad political conduct. Oodles of fanfare for the commoner can be programmed to roll off the teleprompter, blended with the required dose of blame assigned to the villian du jour, but it's all kabuki theater in the script to consolidate power.
As usual, a very insightful article that exposes the moral relativism that seems to be the bane of our post-modern lives! Oh, I forgot--moral relativism is supposed to be a GOOD thing. Changing on a dime to do what seems right for the short term acceptability to others. What this administration lacks, in my opinion, is any kind of guiding principle. Any at all.... Even "hope and change" must have some kind of object.
"The wonder is not that politicians change as politics dictate, but that the most vehement leftism now accepts nonchalantly what it not long ago so ardently demonized."
Such "acceptance" is only a temporary and tactical stance. The Left is not stupid and it is, if nothing, patient.
Some good points but glaring omissions/distortions. You are correct in stating that deficit spending is a problem, but that is primarily the fault of Republicans (unnecessary tax cut extension for the wealthy). Pragmatic Obama has been a pragmatic centrist all along (albeit slightly left of center), it's just that the far right is so loud that there is no room in their political spectrum for moderates.
President Obama is a shrewd politician with his eyes toward the long term. The best thing that happened to his presidency was the "shellacking" in November, as evidenced in the highly productive lame-duck session.
Look for more compromises and moderation in the next two years. Remember, Senator McCain has always had the ire of the far right and he demonstrated how to defeat a tea party candidate in a primary in a very conservative state. Look for other moderate Republicans to follow the same blueprint.
