Rhetorical Q&A ODS Q.E.D. PDQ

Q (Andy McCarthy):

Will There Be an Obama Derangement Syndrome?

A (Victor Davis Hanson):

I think we are slowly (and things of course could change) beginning in retrospect to look back at the outline of one of most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history, predicated on the mass appeal of a magnetic leader rather than any principles per se. He out-Clintoned Hillary and followed Bill's 1992 formula: A young Democrat runs on youth, popular appeal and charisma, claims the incumbent Bush caused another Great Depression and blew Iraq, and then went right down the middle with a showy leftist veneer.

Feel free to leave your own examples of ODS in comments.

Update: Title change per comments.

The Inoculator

Over at The Corner, government-sanctioned academician and major media figure Victor Davis Hanson plumbs the appeal of Big Pharma:

So for the [Limbaugh] audience, the attraction comes not just from the political commentary per se, but from the catharsis he offers to the weary who are exhausted after hearing from government, the media, the universities, and the politicians 24/7 that they and their ancestors have been greedy, racist, sexist, homophobic, polluters, destroyers of wildlife, destructive to the planet and unsophisticated. Limbaugh says to them all "Hey, relax, the problem is not you, but those calling you all those names" — and then has fun proving his point.

"Unsophisticated"! Oooh, that's gotta hurt.

Breaking: Historical Verdict Rendered

Noted humanist Victor Davis Hanson -- a deep thinker President George W. Bush last year awarded a National Humanities Medal -- has rendered his historical judgment on the phenomenon that is the presidential candidacy of Democratic Senator Barack Obama, of Illinois:

...[T]he Obama campaign in mid-February...became the new generation's pet rock.

The National Humanities Medal "honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities."

VDH: If You're Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem

Shorter Victor Davis Hanson

Our addiction to oil is a bad thing...and the people trying to push conservation are as much at fault as the people pushing consumption.

Tailgunner Vic

In the wake of attacks on Brzezinski for his defense of Walt and Mearshimer (more here), Victor Davis Hanson joins in the fun with a loathsome and dishonest column on 'anti-Semitism'.

The rhetorical trick in this one is to start with a few contemporary examples of genuine anti-Semitism (with names given), then shift seamlessly to critics of Israeli policy, and from there to liberals in general. I won't quote it at length, but a couple of excerpts illustrate the sleaziness of the thing. For example:

Here at home, "neoconservative" has become synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal of Washington insiders who hijacked U.S. policy to take us to war for Israel's interest.

In other words, opposition to neoconservative dreams of empire can be ascribed not to the insanity of those dreams but to the dreamers' being Jewish. Hanson efficiently mixes outright falsehood with just enough truth and half-truth to give the smear some credibility. Obviously, 'neoconservative' is not "synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal" except to those who seek to discredit criticism of neoconservate policies; at the same time, the neoconservatives have certainly hijacked U.S. policy, they do put a high priority on the interests of the Israeli state, and many prominent neoconservatives are Jewish--just enough truth to make the lie plausible.

This bit is similarly vile:

This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics -- and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

Remember how Hanson named names when he was talking about the genuine anti-Semites? He doesn't here. In fact, those first three names are the only ones in the whole column. Who are these anti-Semitic "diplomats and academics"? Who is this "sophisticated left"¹ that has embraced anti-Semitism? No one and everyone; that's the point. No one is named, and everyone is suspect (every liberal, that is).

We've seen this kind of thing before. Challenge Hanson on it, ask him who exactly he's talking about, and he'll probably say he has a list.


¹The Left does review foreign films, so could probably be called 'sophisticated', but it is unclear whether he is the Sophisticated Left of whom Hanson speaks.

If We Fail to Cower in Terror, the Terrorists Win

Or so Victor Davis Hanson says:

In short, six years of quiet at home since 9/11 have fooled some into thinking that terrorists pose little danger here — or that we may be doing far too much rather than too little to stop such killers. No matter that this past week a jihadist plot to destroy U.S. facilities in Germany was thwarted.

Others make the mistake of endlessly refighting the past six years — who let al Qaeda grow?; who “lost” Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? — instead of concentrating on the storm ahead.

Hanson is shocked that people are actually questioning the methods of the Global War on Eastasia Oceania Terror; clearly, if they understood the direness of the situation, they would complacently accept any and all actions taken by the administration using terrorism as a pretext. Because, being insufficiently complacent about Bush means you're way too complacent about people who want to take a blowtorch to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Or something.

Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and in-fighting was naivete. But what will be the reason for the next successful strike against us by the jihadists?

Administration incompetence? Just a thought.

I know we'll probably never get to a point at which we can talk rationally about the statistically tiny threat posed by loosely-organized fractious groups composed largely of self-aggrandizing incompetent wannabes. In the alternative, though, maybe we could get hysterical about things that are really killing Americans.

Maybe we could ascribe the 30,000 or so workplace deaths since 9/11 to "employer terrorism". Or the 180,000 handgun fatalities to "NRA terrorism". Maybe we could call the 24,000 pedestrians slaughtered since 9/11 victims of "vehicular terrorism".

Nahhh...we'd probably just end up declaring war on bicyclists.

The Phenomenology of Surge

Roll over, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — Victor Davis Hanson is in the house.

"Post-Surge Dialectics," VDH entitles the latest elegant rant he has chiseled into stone slabs over at The Corner. Two hundred and fifty finely-wrought words to say, essentially, that it's not the surge that matters but its political yield in Iraq and D.C. Four paragraphs of waltzing his Wurlitzer down the road to this simple conclusion:

In the meantime we must deal the enemy such a blow that security and utilities improve radically, Iraqis join the perceived winning side, and present regional troublemakers alter their assumptions that we are going to leave in defeat to their advantage.

To which I can only say, roll over, Fonzie — George W. Bush is in the house.

Immigration and Security

Victor Davis Hanson's latest, on immigration, is the usual mixture of dubious assumptions, half-truths, platitudes, misread polling data, and just plain craziness. You can skip all that. There's one line that encapsulates the nuttiness behind Hanson's (and the other wingnuts') nativist hysteria:

The public thinks anti-terrorism efforts are futile when hundreds of miles on our southern border are, for mysterious reasons, left wide open.

Yes, for reasons that are completely inexplicable, a 1,951-mile border between a wealthy country of 300 million people and a poorer country of 100 million has not been magically sealed so as to guarantee that nobody from the latter can ever enter the former illegally.

Go figure.

What Hanson never discusses is just what 'closing the border' would entail. A great big fence? As somebody or other said, if you build a 50-foot fence somebody else will build a 50-foot ladder. Massive troop deployment? I'm afraid our soldiers are otherwise occupied. Some kind of force field? Hasn't been invented yet.

The reality is that any solution that would be non-trivially effective would entail vast expenditures of money and personnel, neither of which would magically materialize; something else would have to be drastically shorted. In practice, 'closing the border' would make us less safe, not more, by diverting resources on a massive scale from more effective security measures (port safety, anyone?) to a hopeless and misdirected effort that even if it succeeded beyond the most improbable expectations would at best make us marginally less vulnerable in one particular aspect of the overal security situation.

In other words, 'closing the border' is exactly like 'victory in Iraq': an empty phrase that glosses over both the impossibility of the thing it describes and its irrelevance to the goals used to justify it.

Empty phrases, of course, are Hanson's shock troops in his own Global War on Liberal Ideas. For Hanson, for most of the wingnuts, there is no difference between an empty phrase and the thing it describes; to express the desire for 'victory in Iraq' is the same as achieving it. Practicalities aren't even an afterthought--they're not a thought at all, for Hanson. It doesn't matter that the war in Iraq has sown chaos across the Middle East, has weakened our military, has strengthened the very people who most want to attack us. What matters is that you use the right empty phrases to describe the thing.

What would really improve border security would be removing artificial barriers to legal entry. If the vast majority of people who want to come here to work could do so through official channels, the remainder would no longer pose the enforcement nightmare we have created for ourselves. The enormous resources we currently spend on catching people who have done nothing wrong beyond crossing an arbitrary and fictitious line in the sand could be redirected to real security measures. That's if, of course, we wanted to pursue a strategy based on practical effectiveness rather than conformity to the slogan du jour.

But then, if America wanted that, we wouldn't be in Iraq.

Victor Davis Tinkerbell

Shorter Victor Davis Hanson: "Well, whattaya know--I guess things really are bad in Iraq. Let's all clap louder."

Even shorter VDH: "Hope is too a plan."

Think I'm kidding? Here's longer VDH:

Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t. If the Left is right that it isn’t, then we should flee; if they are wrong, and I think they are, then we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake — in a strategic and humanitarian sense — and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it, and how we have adjusted to counter our enemies who in the last four years have not won in Iraq or anywhere else either. [emphasis added]

That's it. That's his strategy for victory: tell people how important it is, and tell people we're actually winning.

If we all just believe hard enough...

Exterminate the Brutes...With History!

Today Victor Davis Hanson asks the rhetorical question, Can General Petraeus Turn the War Around?

There's an obvious answer to that (hint: it starts with "no" and ends with "fucking way"), but Hanson falls back on his trusty mantra: if the present isn't working out for you, go with historical parallels. So he cites a number of past generals who succeeded in turning around bad miltary situations.

Including this one:

Take, for example, the Boer War between a colonial Great Britain and the Afrikaners of South Africa. Its first year (1899) proved disastrous for British forces. Their conventional forces were ill prepared for guerilla ambushes by Afrikaner irregular sharpshooters and cavalry. But with the appointment of Lord Kitchener in 1900 came the creation of British commandos and new tactics, leading to a British victory and an eventual settlement.

And how did Kitchener do it? Here's Josh Treviño with the answer:

In assessing manning needs for Iraq, one would do well to look to prior conflicts of similar nature… one might look especially to the Boer War, in which a fractious, semi-fanatical culture was slowly ground into submission by an occupying force — several years after the seeming success of the initial invasion...the means of victory there offer an instructive thought experiment for Iraq today.

Make no mistake: those means were cruel. I have stated previously that I endorse cruel things in war — to eschew them is folly. The British achieved victory over the Boers by taking their women and children away to concentration camps, by laying waste to the countryside, and by dotting the veld with small garrisons in blockhouses at regular intervals. The men who remained were hindered in their movements by the wire stretching from blockhouse to blockhouse (a phenomenon that the Morice Line experience has shown would be massively more effective now); they could either surrender or die. Absent women and children, the rules of engagement were lax. From implementation to victory took under 18 months.

Give Treviño credit for embracing the "batshit Nazified desires from the heart of darkness" (as Sadly, No put it) rather than (as Hanson does) simply pretending they don't exist.

Haunting Similarities

Victor Davis Hanson:

Kerry's criticisms are hauntingly similar to Al Qaeda's own talking points.

'Hauntingly similar', eh? Hmmm...

VDH: "In this regard, would it not be wise for a variety of reasons, and until this war is over, not to let thousands into the United States from the Middle East? They may well end up hating us more, not less; and they may think there is to be no penalty for the extremism of their governments. I'd like to see fast track admission for allies like the Poles, British, or Danes, and no-track for the Pakistanis, Saudis, Syrians, or Egyptians."
George Lincoln Rockwell: "We must have a foreign policy which is based only on the long-term interests of our race, not on the interest of other races or on economic considerations or anything else."

VDH: "If I were to sum up the collective mentality of the current Arab Middle East...it would run something like the following: ....We will damn your culture and politics, but expect our own to immigrate in the thousands to your shores; upon arrival any attempt to integrate Muslim immigrants into Western pluralistic society will be seen as Islamaphobic; Send us your material goods, whether machine tools, I-pods, or antibiotics. We desperately want them, but will neither make the necessary changes in our own statist, authoritarian, religiously intolerant, tribal, and patriarchal culture to allow us to produce them ourselves, nor will show any appreciation for the genius of others who can do what we cannot..."
George Lincoln Rockwell: "We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return."

VDH: "I was lectured by some that there was nothing such as jihadism in the comprehensive sense. That is, that Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. simply have entirely separate agendas, understandable (i.e., Israel, "occupation" of Arab lands) and particularist grievances, etc. rather than a deeply shared anger at the West that originates from a common sense of lost pride and frustration, brought on by recognition of failure when zeal and religious purity do not restore honor or influence in the age of globalization."
Adolph Hitler: "The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."

VDH: "At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam."
Adolph Hitler: "Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

Title of VDH column: The Power of Will
Title of Nazi propaganda film: Triumph of the Will

Ooh, spooky.


[That's all, folks]

To Jaw-Jaw Is Always Better than to War-War

Matt Yglesias and Scott Lemieux have taken whacks at two separate portions of a spectacularly stupid Victor Davis Hanson post, so I guess I'll join in the fun and take aim at a third:

There is also an Alice in Wonderland flavor to the current Democratic response to the Korean and Iranian crises. We talked to the Koreans all during the 1990s as they prepared nuclear materials.

And now are told that we have a catastrophe since we have not recently talked to them. We talked all during the 1990s with Syria — and got nothing. Bill Clinton has always praised Iranian democracy; so, we talked to Tehran too, both stealthily and overtly.

So what is this obsession with talk, talk, talk? It reminds me of all those discredited British empty-headed pacifists and aristocrats who wanted to keep talking to Hitler after the fall of Poland, even after the fall of France, right up to the Battle of Britain.

Once more, very slowly: when we were talking to Korea, their plutonium was locked away; when we stopped talking to them, it wasn't. When we were talking to Iran, the moderate Khatami was president; calling them the Axis of Evil was one factor that undermined Khatami and gave us Ahmadinejad (whose political support depends largely on American belligerence). Syria, I don't know so much about, but I'd bet good hard cash-type American dollars that they opposed our interests less actively in the '90s.

But of course Neville Chamberlain talked, and therefore talking is bad. That's it; that's the sum of what he's saying here. As Robert Farley says: "when you've got absolutely nothing, reach for Munich". Victor Davis Hanson has a whole boatload of absolutely nothing, and every time he opens his mouth the reputation of Fresno State suffers.

[That's all, folks]

Islamic Fascism Bad; Other Kinds, Not so Much

Victor Davis Hanson, September 7, 2006:

Critics of the term chosen by the president ["Islamic fascism"], however, should remember what al-Qaida, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas and other extremist Muslim groups have said and done. Like the fascists of the 1930s, the leaders of these groups are authoritarians who brook no dissent in their efforts to impose a comprehensive system of submission upon the unwilling.

Victor Davis Hanson, October 28, 2005:

For good or evil, George W. Bush will have to cross the Rubicon on judicial nominations, politicized indictments, Iraq, the greater Middle East, and the constant frenzy of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party — and now march on his various adversaries as never before....He must explain to the nation how a radical, vicious Left has more or less gotten a free pass in its rhetoric of hate, and has now passed the limits of accepted debate.

[That's all, folks]

Victor Davis Hanson Crosses the River Insane-O

Via tbogg, here's the opening paragraph of Victor Davis Hanson'sNational Review commentary:

For good or evil, George W. Bush will have to cross the Rubicon on judicial nominations, politicized indictments, Iraq, the greater Middle East, and the constant frenzy of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party — and now march on his various adversaries as never before. [emphasis added]

And just so we don't mistakenly think the metaphor is chosen carelessly, the article is titled Crossing the Rubicon.

Now, I'll concede that a shocking percentage of what I know about Rome comes from either I, Clavdivs or the HBO series. I do, however, have a layman's understanding of the context of the phrase 'crossing the Rubicon':

The river is notable as Roman law forbade any general from crossing it with a standing army. The river was considered to mark the boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul to the north and the Roman heartland to the south; the law thus protected the republic from internal military threat.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, supposedly on January 10 of the Roman calendar, in pursuit of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus he broke that law and made armed conflict inevitable.

In other words, it's the point at which Caesar defied the law, defied the established political process, and (effectively) declared himself dictator of Rome.

Hanson is surely not suggesting Bush do anything of the kind...or is he?

George Bush also should begin addressing his most venomous critics at home, by condemning their current extremism. He must explain to the nation how a radical, vicious Left has more or less gotten a free pass in its rhetoric of hate, and has now passed the limits of accepted debate. [emphasis added]

Call me paranoid, but when somebody as prominent as Hanson calls on Bush to 'march on his various adversaries as never before', and labels those adversaries 'venomous', 'radical', 'vicious', and 'extremis[t]', and says their 'rhetoric of hate' has 'passed the limits of accepted debate', I can't help asking is this guy really saying what he seems to be saying?

I think the answer is yes and no. If you asked him point blank whether he is calling for Bush to assume extra-legal powers, or for some kind of crackdown on dissent, he would be shocked at the question. He might even be sincere in denying it. At the same time, like Limbaugh, like Coulter, like Malkin, he's helping to mainstream the eliminationist rhetoric that would undergird any future attempt to curtail political liberties in America. He's not a Fascist (yet), but he's giving aid and comfort to Fascists yet to come.