A Companion Piece: What’s Wrong with Democrats?
Some thoughts on Carter, Pelosi, and Obama
by Victor Davis Hanson
May 15, 2008
NRO’s The Corner
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Pious Amorality
In what I think was a rephrensible one-sided Jimmy Carter article in the Guardian condemning Israel for the conditions in Gaza, I was struck by these two sentences:
It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the U.S. in the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the U.S., Israel and elsewhere to speak out and condemn the human rights tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people.
An ex-President of the United States seems to be saying that the "strong voices" of the world should oppose the lead of his own country in pursuing a long bipartisan policy of peace negotiations. This reminds one of Carter's harsh criticism of his own country prior to the 2002 Nobel Prize deliberations, in which even one of the judges acknowledged that the award was happy payback for his antiwar stance — reminsicent of his earlier letter to the Security Council to try to stymie the first George Bush's efforts to isolate Saddam Hussein and get him out of Kuwait.
It is hard to think of any ex-President in our history who has written and done so much to counter the official policies of his own country abroad. Of all the countries one could blame for human rights violations — Iran, Syria, the Palestinians and Hamas, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, etc. — why would he single out the only liberal democracy in the Middle East?
Veto and Drill!
Nancy Pelosi chanted "Veto and Drill", "Veto and Drill" in caricaturing the threatened presidential veto of windfall oil company taxes and desire to drill in ANWR and elsewhere. But all that might sound, in fact, good to most Americans. With the world's largest reserves of coal, after creating the nuclear power industry ex nihilo, and with billions of oil still under our soil and waters, it makes no sense to produce less energy while blaming and taxing those who produce what we have, rather than drilling, digging, and saving, as we find ways to transition to the alternate energies. The problem is not just oil, but importing oil at $120 a barrel that is bankrupting us as much as it is enriching the wrong people.
This would seem to be an explosive campaign issue (if the candidates disagreed), especially if someone could offer a rough estimate of how many billion barrels of oil are in no-go areas, times them by $120 a barrel, and then compute how many trillions in national wealth we leave untouched while we pay our enemies for the commensurate alternative. I could accept the argument that it will take years to get the oil out of Alaska, the coasts, or other federal lands and therefore is not worth it (the classic argument for stasis), if we could be convinced it will not take even a greater amount of time to get solar and wind technology cheap and efficient enough to produce the bulk of our energy needs.
A postscript: I'm not sure that, ecologically speaking, drilling oil in about 2000 acres in the north of Alaska is all that different from dotting our mountain ridges and coasts (ask the Kennedys et. al.) with enormous windmills or creating vast acres of solar panels throughout our fragile deserts or covering our roofs with panels and pipes and assorted gadgetry.
About that Hamas Quote
One of the strange things that struck me about the following much discussed quote is the sheer arrogance of Hamas:
During an interview on WABC radio Sunday, top Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef said the terrorist group supports Obama’s foreign policy vision. “We don’t mind — actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will [win] the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance,” Yousef said in response to a question about the group’s willingness to meet with either of the Democratic presidential candidates.
So we are to believe that John Kennedy was to Palestinian terrorists — a "great man with great principle"? If so, why then did Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan murder his brother Robert, and for years became a cult figure on the West Bank and Gaza for it?
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Listening to Obama's victory speech in North Carolina one can get a good idea of what's to come. The script will be a sort of messianic call to bipartisanship, post-politics, and a new election gentleness; while to evoke the facts of Obama's own record of hyper-partisanship, his long-standing relationship with the serially racist Wright, a Dukakis/Mondale/Kerry political agenda, his own disturbing ex tempore comments on race (whether the Pennsylvania "cling" or 'typical white person' quips) is not merely taboo — but reflects the crassness — if not far worse — of any who would stoop so low.
The Advantages of Sainthood
Almost imperceptibly to the McCain campaign, I think Obama has already established quite new messianic rules of engagement that will be difficult to overturn: he talks about supposedly illiberal Pennsylvanians as a racial group or quips “typical white person”, associates with the racist Wright, and counts on a solid base that votes 90 percent along racial lines, and you are a racist for being disturbed by that Manichaeism. He talks of hope/change, new politics, unity, and bipartisanship and you are cynical and hateful for not buying it and instead worrying that he has a serial propensity for distortion (“100 years”) and invective (“lost his bearings”). The immediate advantage is that the nonbeliever is always ridiculed for his devilish skepticism; the eventual downside for Obama is that the loftier the prophet, the more transparent his all-too-human transgressions.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
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