Why We Suddenly Miss Bush

By Victor Davis Hanson

Various polls report that George W. Bush in some states is now better liked than President Obama. Even some liberal pundits call for Bush, the now long-missed moderate, to draw on his recognized tolerance and weigh in on the Ground Zero mosque or the Arizona anti-immigration legislation. Apparently the erstwhile divider is now the healer that the healer Obama is not.

As President Obama’s polls dip, as Congress is widely disdained, and as the economy slumps, suddenly George Bush is missed. Why so? Let me list ten likely reasons.

1) The Obama record. We naturally compare Bush to his chief critic and successor Barack Obama — and find the latter increasingly wanting as time goes by. Obama turned Bush’s misdemeanor deficits into felonious trillion-dollar annual shortfalls. He will pile up more debt than any other prior president.

Indeed, if reelected, Obama will borrow more than all previous administrations combined. Bush was tarred in 2004 for a “jobless recovery” when unemployment hovered near 6%. It is now almost 10% and Obama still harps about “jobs saved.” Scott McClellan may have been singularly inept; we are not so sure after Robert Gibbs. For every Brownie there is a worse Van Jones or Anita Dunn. For Katrina we have BP. Bush’s NASA did space; Obama’s seems to prefer Muslim outreach. Bush’s prescription drug benefit was an unfunded liability; ObamaCare is a trillion-dollar financial black-hole. I could go on, but Obama’s lackluster record is improving Bush’s legacy every day.

2) Obama as Bush. Senator and then candidate Obama demagogued Bush on a variety of issues, which, as president, he simply flipped and endorsed. Remember Bush’s gulag at Guantanamo? Or how about the terror-producing Predators? Or the need for an immediate pull-out from Iraq? Or those terrible renditions and tribunals?

In case after case of national security, Obama dropped the cheap rhetorical one-upmanship, and, when invested with the responsibility of governance, simply adopted, or even trumped, the Bush protocols. General Petraeus, whose testimony Hillary once suggested required “a suspension of disbelief” and whom Obama cut off and did not allow to speak during his infamous 2007 Senate hearing, suddenly is to be Obama’s savior general.

Candidate Obama claimed the surge failed and all combat troops should be out of Bush’s Iraq war by March 2008. President Obama now calls Iraq a “remarkable chapter” as his vice president claims it as one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” In short, almost daily, Obama is following the Bush anti-terrorism policies — the irony made worse by petulance and ingratitude in not acknowledging his debt.

3) Bush Did It. It is a uniquely American trait to shun whining and petulance. Rugged individualism and can-do optimism used to be ingrained in our national character, and even in our 11th hour have not wholly disappeared. So the public is tiring of Obama’s Pavlovian blaming of Bush. After 20 months, it is time for the president to get a life and quit the “heads you lose/tails I win” attitude about presidential responsibility. If he now takes credit for calm in Iraq without crediting the surge, then Obama can surely take blame for the anemic recovery — brought on by his own bullying of business that has frightened free enterprise into stasis. Note that Bush, unlike Clinton, has not engaged in emeritus tit-for-tat recrimination, and has kept largely quiet in dignified repose. Obama serially goes after Hannity, Limbaugh, and Beck by name; Bush let the slander of a Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann go unanswered.

4) Who is the real yuppie? The media tried to paint Bush as the privileged yuppie, masquerading as the Texas rancher, idly chain-sawing on his spread. But at least Bush went to the Texas outback for vacation and got his hands dirty. Obama’s problem is that Axelrod and Emanuel could not stage a chain-sawing task for Obama if they tried — severe injury would surely follow. The bowling moment in the campaign was as disastrous as the later Obama girlish first pitch. From 2001-3,  presidential golf was proof of aristocratic disdain and laziness. Suddenly from 2009-2010 — given that Obama has hit the greens more in 20 months than Bush did in eight years — the Ministry of Truth redefined the game as necessary egalitarian relaxation. Given the choice, the public would probably prefer a little overdone Texas “smoke ‘em out” braggadocio to worries over the price of arugula.

5) Michelle is no Laura. Remember the narrative: conservative women are elitists who decorate, buy nice clothes, and play Barbie; liberal first ladies are doers who are independent feminists that can’t be bothered by inanities like fashion and play. But Michelle this summer enjoyed a movable feast from Marbella to Martha’s Vineyard, in designer clothes and shades. Laura Bush used to vacation at the national parks. Laura Bush often disagreed with her husband and sometimes offered a liberal “Oh, come on, George” to her husband’s occasional flight-suit strutting. Michelle, in contrast, is the second half of the partisan Obama tag-team, perennially whining that “they raised the bar.” After “downright mean country” and “never before been proud,” we miss Laura Bush’s common sense and nonpartisanship. Ga-ga media talk of Michelle’s biceps, not the earthy decency reminiscent of a Laura Bush.

6 thru 10 here.

Fascism as Sadism

In his book  Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg defines "fascism" as an economic and political system. There's nothing wrong with that, but it misses a vital truth about Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo, Saddam Hussein, and Ahmadinejad: the political use of sadism to recruit millions of followers in a campaign of pleasurable punishment against a scapegoated person or group. Read about the Japanese rape of Nanking, if you can stand it, and you'll see thousands of literal rapes as well as sadistic torture and killing of Chinese people by Japanese soldiers as a matter of policy and for psychological satisfaction.

In sadistic warfare, it is essential to see the conquered enemy suffer. For sadistic regimes, it is not enough to win a war; it is at least as important to see the pain of the victims. If you open  your eyes to this very nasty aspect of human behavior, you'll see it -- not just in news headlines about sexual crimes, but in certain political and media tactics as well.

The worst Nazis were ordered outright to suppress any personal impulse of decency or mercy, and to deliberately act sadistically against the scapegoated enemy -- the Jews most of all, but also Russians, gypsies, and any other victim peoples. Saddam Hussein's regime practiced sadistic torture for pleasure, most obviously by Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay. In Iran today, sadistic torture is a standard practice, and Ahmadinejad is said to have started his political career as a torturer for Ayatollah Khomeini. Ahmadinejad's personal "spiritual advisor," Yazdi, is on video explaining how rape and torture of boys and women before their execution is permitted by Islam.

Fascism is not just national socialism as a political ideology. It also involves a mob frenzy in which cruelty is whipped up and celebrated. If you listen to Louis Farrakhan, you can hear that same menacing quality in his voice; just like Chicago's Father Pfleger, who could have stepped right out of the Children's Crusade of 1220.

Sadistic insults and fantasies have also been a big feature of the leftist attack against Sarah Palin and her family, just as it was part of the "high-tech lynch mob" that Clarence Thomas finally cried out against in his Senate hearing for the Supreme Court. In America today, conservatives don't carry out sadistic assaults; the Left does it every day. It is not just a political tactic, but a reflection of who they are as human beings.  

Sadism is the enjoyment of cruelty against others. It was a prominent feature of Russia under the Czars, of the Ottoman Empire, and in historical figures like the Roman Emperors Caligula and Nero and the Athenian traitor Alcibiades. Sadism was practiced among warrior peoples like the Plains Indians, where rape and torture of captured enemies was taken for granted. It was not enough to kill the enemy; he and his women and children had to be degraded and physically punished for the entertainment of the victors.

Indeed, group murder and  rape is practiced by chimpanzee bachelor groups on their regular raids against neighboring clans. Chimp groups have been known to hunt small monkeys and tear them apart  in a frenzy of group hysteria. Some human beings can fall back into that condition, too. Group sadism is a psychologically primitive act, a throwback to a more primitive state of being, which is why it is so common and why it can be used to mobilize mobs who feel they have nothing to lose.

Read the whole thing.  Permalinked on the right.

America — Behind the Mosque

by Victor Davis Hanson

Blah, blah, blah

We’ve had nearly a month now of fruitless acrimony over the Ground Zero mosque.

About everything that can be said has been said. Little-read Newsweek andTime have published a near dozen “I accuse” essays about America’s supposedly yokel intolerance — as if we did not get their message at about screed two.

The past inflammatory statements and hypocrisies of the Janus Mr. Rauf have been widely aired, and juxtaposed with his occasional Aspen-like ecumenical “I feel your pain” outreach. We have learned that to emphasize the former is considered bigoted calumny, but to cite the latter is called context.

Rauf, from 1-4

In varying degrees, all four possible motivations of Mr. Rauf have also been widely dissected. For a brief moment let’s review them.

1) Rauf is a sincere ecumenicalist, who simply wants to turn the “tragedy” of 9/11 into a teachable moment of interfaith bridge-building: the mosque, in other words, will be a beacon of America’s tolerance;

2) Rauf is part crass P.T. Barnum, part new-age Deepak Chopra con artist whose therapeutic mish-mash and narcissistic efforts to build a $100 million-complex will result in a lot of lucre and influence for himself: the multistoried and multimillion-dollar mosque then will be quite a nice headquarters for Rauf, Inc.;

3) Rauf is a simple naïf who sort of bungled into a controversy, fled the country, and has no idea of the firestorm he inadvertently lit and so when or how or if to come back: the mosque will not be built as he retreats back to a less foolhardy, less ostentatious project;

4) Rauf is a wily, cynical divisive figure who knows darn well that, on his Islamic flank, radical Islamists will use his mosque for triumphalist propaganda value, while, on his liberal flank, the clueless multicultural left will see it as a way of contextualizing America’s role in the world — as all the while he emphasizes a supposed litany of America’s overseas transgressions; if the mosque is built, it surely by intent will be a much discussed, perennially controversial center aimed at offering context to often polarizing Islamic ideas about everything from Iran, Hamas, and bin Laden, to Sharia and the role of religion and state — a project as praised by the left in the U.S. as it is employed as a banner logo on radical Islamist Internet sites in the Middle East.

The Elite Take

I could analyze all this a zillion ways, but let us try some economic reductionism, crude though it may be. A majority of those in the elite liberal culture (CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the foundations, universities, Hollywood, and the usual suspects) seem to have opted for explanation 1, while a vast majority of Americans, even in liberal New York, seems to agree with 4. So the mosque is as much about ourselves as it is about the seemingly permanently absent Mr. Rauf.

This same divide plays out in varying degrees over the Arizona immigration bill, the gay marriage propositions in California, and even much of the Obama agenda itself.

I have no interest in trying to persuade the elite why or where they are wrong, or in hearing from them for the nth time why I am supposedly not only mistaken, but bigoted for thinking a huge Islamic complex juxtaposed to Ground Zero is in itself bad taste, but, under the leadership of Mr. Rauf — given his written and oral corpus of unhinged and crack-pot ideas — bad taste to such a degree that all legitimate rhetorical means should be employed to persuade concerned parties to move it.

A World Apart

Instead, I am curious about the material foundations that frame each side of the divide — not so much money per se, but the very nature of work. Here I ignore both those on the hard far left who do not like America at all for what it has been, and the hard far right who clearly do not like America for what it has become.

In between those poles, it seems to me that the loud voices of columnists, politicians like Mayor Bloomberg, the concerned in the universities and the arts, many on the public payroll, and the elite self-appointed minority spokespeople assume that the building of the mosque near Ground Zero says something about themselves as caring, tolerant, and liberal souls — the sort of progressive community that they wish the world to see and hear about.

To the extent that there is any danger in alienating millions of Americans, or causing grief to families of the murdered, or the possibility of insidiously lending support for revising the 9/11 “narrative,” or even galvanizing extremists abroad, these are all negligible risks or even fatuous concerns.

Page 2 here.

The 72-Hour Expert

Everything you always wanted to know about Afghanistan .  .  .

BY P. J. O'ROURKE

Kabul

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama. I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs. Looks like I’m not President Obama. But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.

As all good reporters do, I prepared for my assignment with extensive research. I went to an Afghan restaurant in Prague. Getting a foretaste—as it were—of my subject, I asked the restaurant’s owner (an actual Afghan), “So what’s up with Afghanistan?”

He said, “Americans must understand that Afghanistan is a country of honor. The honor of an Afghan is in his gun, his land, and his women. You take a man’s honor if you take his gun, his land or his women.”

And the same goes for where I live in New Hampshire. I inquired whether exceptions could be made, on the third point of honor, for ex-wives.

“Oh yes,” he said.

Afghanistan—so foreign and yet so familiar and, like home, with such wonderful lamb chops. I asked the restaurateur about other similarities between New Hampshire and Afghanistan. “I don’t know,” he said. “Most of my family lives in L.A.”

In Kabul I was met at the airport by M. Amin Mudaqiq, bureau chief for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Afghan branch, Radio Azadi. “Our office is just down the main road,” he said, “but since it’s early in the morning we’ll take the back way, because of the Suicides.” That last word, I noticed, was pronounced as a proper noun, the way we would say “Beatles” slightly differently than “beetles.” And, in a sense, suicide bombers do aspire to be the rock stars of the Afghan insurgency (average career span being about the same in both professions).

“The Suicides usually attack early in the morning,” Amin said. “It’s a hot country and the explosive vests are thick and heavy.”

I’d never thought about suicide bombing in terms of comfort. Here’s some guy who’s decided to blow himself gloriously to bits and he’s pounding the pavement all dressed up in the blazing sun, sweat running down his face, thinking, “Gosh this thing itches, I’m pooped, let’s call it off.”

“It’s the same with car bombs,” Amin said. “You don’t want to be driving around the whole day with police everywhere and maybe get a ticket.”

Imagine the indignity of winding up in traffic court instead of the terrorist equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.

Amin pointed out the sights. “There’s U.N. headquarters.” All I could see was blast barriers, sandbags and gun barrels. “There’s the German embassy”—barriers, bags, and barrels. “There’s the embassy of China”—barriers, bags, and barrels. I spotted a rough-hewn stone fort on a hilltop, looking more the way ancient Kabul should look. “Oh, 19th-century British,” Amin said.

Security was all over the place, in various senses of the phrase. I have never seen so many types and kinds of soldiers, policemen, and private security guards or such a welter of uniforms, each in a different pattern of camouflage every one of which stuck out like a toreador’s suit of lights against the white blast walls. Some of this security was on alert, some was asleep, some was spit-and-polish, some had its shoes untied and some, rather unaccountably, was walking around without weapons.

None of the security was American. Americans don’t patrol Kabul. The American military is suffering its usual fate, the same as it does at an Army base in Georgia—shunted off to places the locals don’t care to go.

Page 2 here.

Why we don't need socialized medicine:

The Sources of American Anger 

Barack Obama, the great healer, is proving to be the most divisive president since Richard Nixon.

By Victor Davis Hanson

For Obamacare supporters, judgment day approaches.

Voters simply aren’t buying the Democratic case that health care reform will insure more than 30 million currently uninsured people and save money at the same time. And when they think about their own health care, people worry that reform will mean less, not more, availability of care, and at a higher cost.

Faced with that bad news, the pollsters came up with several recommendations for Democratic candidates. When talking about Obamacare, Democrats should “keep claims small and credible.” They should promise to “improve” the law. They should avoid talking about policy and stick to “personal stories” of people who will benefit from Obamacare. And above all, the pollsters advise, “don’t say the law will reduce costs and deficit.”

It’s a stunning about-face for a party that saw national health care as its signature accomplishment. “This is the first time we’ve seen from Democrats that they clearly understand they have a serious problem in terms of selling this legislation,” says Republican pollster David Winston.

 Deficits, With And Without The Iraq War. 

“Do you see alarming deficits or trends from 2003 through 2007 in the above chart? No. In fact, the trend through 2007 is shrinking deficits. What you see is a significant upward tick in 2008, and then an explosion in 2009. Now, what might have happened between 2007 and 2008, and then 2009? Democrats taking over both houses of Congress, and then the presidency, was what happened. Republicans wrote the budgets for the fiscal years through 2007. Congressional Democrats wrote the budgets for FY 2008 and on.”

Many possible Israeli concessions would be suicidal

By George Will

JERUSALEM 'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct negotiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy has succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" -- in which they have talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries -- and to direct negotiations. But negotiations about what?

Idle talk about a "binational state" has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states -- e.g., the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia -- binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No significant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: "The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders."

Rhetoric about a "two-state solution" is de rigueur. It also is delusional, given two recent, searing experiences.

The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied -- legally under international law -- since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. Michael Oren, now Israel's ambassador to the United States, said several years before becoming ambassador:

"There is no Israeli leadership that appears either willing or capable of removing 100,000 Israelis from their West Bank homes. . . . The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF [Israel Defense Forces] troops -- the largest Israeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War -- and was profoundly traumatic."

Twenty-one Israeli settlements were dismantled; even the bodies of Israelis buried in Gaza were removed. After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an entity dedicated to Israel's destruction, collaborative with Iran and possessing a huge arsenal of rockets.

Rocket attacks from Gaza increased dramatically after Israel withdrew. The number of U.N. resolutions deploring this? Zero.

Full article here.

Three Ingredients for Murder

Neuroscientist James Fallon on why psychopaths kill and libertarians don't