The Enlightened Despot

From February of 2005, a bold prediction of the imminent dawn of a neoconservative utopia:

Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.

A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab “moderates,” ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros — perhaps even Hillary herself — will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along — sort of…

Remember when all those liberal pundits and backsliding conservatives were forced to admit to the growing tremors of a moral awakening in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the West Bank? That sure was embarrassing for them.

P.S. Bonus points for adding Islamophobic undertones purely through the use of quotation marks.

The VDH Watch is back. There are a million dishonest lunatics out there in the blogosphere, but for some reason this guy really gets to me. There is a depth of propaganda in his writing that really rewards a sentence-by-sentence treatment. So I promise I’ll (try to) lay off for a while after this, but, for now, here we go again, Victor:

Under Obama we are obliterating, by Predator-missile attack, suspected jihadists (and anyone in the general vicinity near them) in Waziristan — the last time I looked, it was a foreign country — something a little bit more discomforting to them than rendition.

The last time I looked, Waziristan wasn’t a country at all, but never mind the details. One can argue about the merits of the drone campaign in Pakistan, but only hard-core pacifists deny that there is a time and a place for firing missiles at people to kill them. Meanwhile, it isn’t rendition simpliciter that the Obama administration has rejected, but rather turning detainees over to other countries for the purpose of torture. Are there people who would rather be tortured than blown up by a missile? Sure. But that isn’t a very interesting point. Over thousands of years of human civilization, people have periodically resigned themselves to the necessity of doing their best to kill other people. Yet most civilizations have maintained that it was a moral imperative to treat their surviving enemies with some degree of restraint. If Hanson wants to argue that humanity has had this one wrong all along, he should say so. Pretending it is a novel hypocrisy of the Obama administration isn’t a serious option.

And blowing the brains out of suspected piratical kidnappers in international waters might be seen, in the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence, as something a little more extreme than bringing detainees out of their Koran- and Mediterranean-food-stocked Guantànamo jail cells for interrogations.

Victor, you’re doing it again! Whatever ‘extreme’ is supposed to mean here, it isn’t relevant. Forget getting shot, I’d choose a few minutes on the rack over life in prison without a second thought. Yet the former has been considered legally and morally impermissable since long before ‘the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence’. (Try saying that five times fast!). Also, that bit about interrogations? Also dishonest. No one has ever suggested we not interrogate prisoners. That would be crazy. What bothers people is when the interrogations look like this:

It is possible to ask people questions without resorting to this sort of evil.

I know I’d prefer to be shown some upsetting nudie magazines as humiliation to make me talk than have a bullet take apart my skull.

I’m glad you like porn more than sudden death. Me too. But, on top of repeating the confusion and hand-waving from above, you are side-stepping the fact that this sort of humiliation is designed for devout Muslims, and doesn’t really apply to you. It’s more akin to someone forcing you to read a science textbook.

Once Team Obama chose to trash Bush as a Constitution-shredder, while blinking and nodding at Spanish theatrics — all the while either not changing, or, in fact, stepping up Bush-era anti-terrorism measures — it put itself in a soon-to-be untenable position that even a fawning media won’t long be able to ignore.

Well, it sort of depends on the measures, doesn’t it? The idea wasn’t to stop counter-terrorism altogether, just the evil, illegal, and ineffective kinds. There is nothing untenable about condemning certain means of fighting terrorism while continuing to fight terrorism. That’s not all that complicated.

Who knows what’s in our future — a Spanish indictment of “judge-and-jury” Barack Obama for ordering the executions of Pashtun and Somali suspects in foreign or international territories, without an arrest warrant, habeas corpus, rights to counsel, and recourse to appeal?

I’m actually in Spain at the moment, so I asked around, and no, it turns out that Spain isn’t planning to outlaw warfare. I’ll let you know if there’s any movement on that though.

Uh-oh, it looks like someone else has noticed that Victor Davis Hanson is an ever-flowing fountain of entertaining lunacy:

Courtesy of The Corner’s increasingly wacky Victor Davis Hanson:

In academic circles the last two decades, pirates have been romanticized in a variety of contexts—as in pirates being contrarian individualists, admirable anarchists, Marxist redistributionists, sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing, transgendered libertines, and Lotus-eater-like sensualists, rather than as murderous criminals. Who knows, maybe such esoteric theorizing has filtered down to the U.S. State Department.

Sure, VDH is confusing academia and hollywood, and splicing dishonesty with paranoid delusion to create his trademark variety of unhinged screed, but pointing that out is my job. Stop stealing my thunder, Isaac!

I defy anyone out there to steer me in the direction of a more consistently dishonest politics blogger who began as a classics professor than Victor Davis Hanson. Here’s his take on the AIG bonus drama, which he entitled ‘Cry, the Beloved Republic’ because that’s the sort of calm, thoughtful guy he is, along with some (I hope) helpful suggestions on how he might improve it:

Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Let’s get this straight: Our president takes over $100,000 from AIG in campaign donations. Then he signs into legislation a bill crafted by his own party, with input from his own Treasury secretary, giving mega-bonuses to the execs of this bankrupt, federally bailed-out company — and then goes on the stump to trash the culture of Wall Street as typified by . . . AIG, of course.

Let me stop you right there, Victor. I know, I know, you’re just beginning to foam at the mouth, but I really must interject. If there were a bill, crafted by Democrats, with input from Geithner, and signed into law by Obama that awarded bonuses to AIG, that would be outrageous. I’m with you there. The only detail I want to quibble with is the part where you say this actually happened. It didn’t. The AIG bonuses were awarded by, well - you’re going to kick yourself when I tell you - AIG. See, the scheme’s genius lies in its simplicity: AIG determined for itself how it would compensate its employees. In the case of these bonuses, they were written into contracts well before any of the relevant legislation. Sorry, please continue:

Not to be outdone, Senator Dodd denies he put the AIG bonus provision in the bill, then — in a now familiar Obama administration habit — coughs up the truth that he in fact did when the evidence no longer allows him to prevaricate as is his wont.

Sorry, I have to jump in again, but I’ll be quick. Senator Dodd is not, as it turns out, a member of the Obama administration. The clue is in the title ‘Senator’. Think back to your grade school days, when you read about “How a Bill Becomes Law”, and studied the fun diagrams with the various branches of government, and the checks and balances between them.

So ethicist Rangel now uses his position to post facto rewrite tax laws to get back the money from AIG that his party approved, his president signed into law, and he himself used to out-elbow others for.

Actually, that bill would have taken money back from AIG employees, specifically the bonuses they received, which, you will recall, were not provided for in any such bill outside your imagination. And a general word of advice: when trying to demonstrate how corrupt Charlie Rangel is, lying can only hurt you.

Victor Davis Hanson, my least favorite human being in the blogosphere, is lying again:

The last two days I got a lot of hysterically angry mail about a rather pedestrian, empirical observation the other day that Obama was in a near-meltdown in his third week of governance. I pointed to Obama’s trashing-then-adopting the Bush security plan (FISA, Patriot Act, renditions, Iraq, sorta of Guantanamo), the serial cabinet appointee implosions, the mockery of our tax laws, the embarrassing provisions of the $1 trillion “stimulus”, the lobbyist exceptions to the no-lobbyist policy, the unfortunate al Arabiya interview, and the McClellanesque performances of Robert Gibbs. But I think, nonetheless, the near-meltdown description is accurate (poll drops suggest as much) and serious. [emphasis added]

If Obama’s drop in the polls is suggesting near-meltdown, it should be commended for its subtlety:

A new CBS News survey out today, detailed in full here, finds that President Obama’s approval rating now stands at 62 percent. Fifteen percent disapprove of the president, while 23 percent have not made a decision.

It is not unusual for a newly-inaugurated president to enjoy a favorable approval rating, though Mr. Obama’s rating two weeks into his presidency exceeds that of his two immediate predecessors.

Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had approval ratings of 53 percent around this point in their presidency; George H.W. Bush, with a 61 percent approval rating at this point, nearly matched Mr. Obama.

President Obama is not setting records for popularity, however: John F. Kennedy enjoyed at 72 percent approval rating at this point in his presidency, while Dwight Eisenhower had a 68 percent rating and Jimmy Carter a 66 percent rating.

Nearly all Democrats and most independents approve of the job President Obama is doing, while Republicans are evenly divided.

Would that our economy could meltdown thusly!

Back in early December, I wrote about an emerging strategy from GOP party-line hacks: portraying certain Obama policies as functionally identical to some of the Bush policies he criticized on the campaign. I imagined that, while sticking to the standard this-is-terror-loving-socialism fare on most issues, they would trot this Bush v2.0 routine out whenever he was doing something particularly popular, successful, or irritating to the hard-left, who would be a great source of rhetorical ammunition. It did not occur to me, however, that they could ever use both of these strategies at the same time. How naive. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson, summing up the early days of the Obama administration:

If one were to have gone into deep sleep in late October during the Dark Ages, and woken up in late January in the AB (after Bush) era of Hope and Change and an end to all evil, would the world seem different? No, it looks pretty much the same. Same old Predator strikes on terrorists in Pakistan [wait, the strikes Obama promised before Bush ever ordered any? Sorry, keep going]. Same old DC and NY grandees caught fudging on taxes and giving complex explanations of hiring less than legal nannies and maids, same old Guantanamo open with the same old pledges to, “Close it now! Or at least soon!”

Yep, the more things change, and all that. This should be wonderful news for Bush fans. Sure, you have to hate Obama for being such a dishonest hypocrite, but you also have to be pretty thrilled that W’s agenda is still on track, right? Er…:

(more…)

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Bush signed a lot of ethics legislation (including the Sarbanes-Oxley Wall Street reform) and, compared to past administrations, his was probably the most free administration of scandal and ethical lapses of any in a quarter century.

Go on with your bad self, VDH!

The other day, I wrote about what struck me as a pretty astonishingly dishonest portrayal by Victor Davis Hanson of Obama as secretly appropriating Bush policies he’d formerly condemned. The specifics aren’t worth getting back into, but here was VDH’s take-away lesson:

And I suppose that, given the Obama appointments, Iraq is now no longer an open sore, and of no utility in fighting radical Islam, but quietly evolving into a success better turned over to the Petraeus/Iraq timetable. And I think there will be both no more campaign-trail chest-thumping about going into Pakistan (lest India finds that a useful exemplar), and quiet compliance with existing stealthy Predator strikes against bin Laden followers in Waziristan.

All this is very American: Like taking the same old laundry detergent, sprinkling in a few new inert green crystals, and putting it in a more eye-catching redesigned box, with “New and Improved” (rather than ‘hope’ and ‘change’) spashed in bold cursive across its top.

Bush’s policies, obviously, are far too awesome to abandon. All they need is a little rebranding. I suspect this is mostly hedging; for the most part, the Cornerites of the world will actually be attacking Obama’s policies, not explaining that he doesn’t deserve the credit for how terrific they are. There’s a tanking economy that needs a scapegoat, after all, and signs are not pointing towards a safe and peaceful world any time soon.

Still, on some issues at least, Hanson’s strategy appears to have legs. Here’s Andy McCarthy a few days ago:

In any event, today the Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will be staying on in the new administration, says, yes, we’d love to close Gitmo yesterday, indeed shutting it down remains a “high priority,” but, whaddya know, it may take a while to get that done.  Why?  “Mr. Gates said the Democratic-controlled Congress would need to craft legislation resolving legal issues before the prison could be closed. Specifically, he said the bill would have to bar freed prisoners from seeking asylum in the U.S.”

…

Moreover, regarding this new Gates/Obama proposal that the Democrat-controlled Congress enact some legislation to bar prisoners freed by the courts from seeking asylum in the United States, Attorney General Michael Mukasey made precisely this plea to the Pelosi/Reid rabble some four months ago — i.e., shortly after the Supreme Court set disaster in motion with its Boumediene decision that gave our alien enemies the constitutional right to petition our courts for their release.  In this piece, I recounted AG Mukasey’s proposal and — speaking of deaf ears — the reaction to it by leading Democrats.

Naturally, now that it’s Obama rather than Bush doing the asking, there will surely be action — probably even quick action (though, as Obama will remember and come to rue, many in the hard Left from which he comes don’t mind the prospect of terrorists being freed and would prefer the more detainee-friendly procedures that courts are likely to make up on their own if Congress continues sitting on its hands).

It all underscores a reality that grates even though that we’ve long understood it:  Democrats were never going to get serious about the war until they owned it.  Be prepared for all sorts of things that were “constitution-shredding” for the last seven years to transform before our very eyes into “smart, effective counterterrorism.”

Now, it may be the case that Pelosi et al didn’t respond to this issue responsibly - I don’t know. But there is absolutely nothing inconsistent between believing that a policy was very wrong and believing that getting rid of it without a lot of ugly side-effects is difficult. McCarthy is being disingenuous in pretending not to recognize this distinction. His closing point - more or less identical to Hanson’s - is a complete non-sequitur - his quotation marks notwithstanding, no one on the Obama team is calling the practice of keeping prisoners locked up indefinitely in Cuba outside the reach of law “smart, effective counterterrorism.” There are voices pointing out that figuring out what to do with them now that we have them there is a serious problem. But GITMO was not conceived as a solution for what to do with all the detainees in GITMO, so this hardly qualifies as a defense of the place.

This line of attack is an area in which the crazy left will be of invaluable help to the crazy right. Take the withdrawl timetable: even during the primaries, Obama couldn’t stop repeating his line about being as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. When the general election rolled around, he “tacked to the center” by, basically, adding on “Oh, and I actually mean that. Really. I’m not just saying it.” The Daily Kos cried treason. To those guys, ‘facts on the ground’ are weasel words, so admitting that he wouldn’t bring the troops back with his eyes closed was a betrayal.

Now that he’s actually president, this is terrific fodder for the right. Any practical considerations that slow down our withdrawl from Iraq, the shutting of Guantanamo, the reform of the CIA, etc. will be offered up as proof that even Obama recognizes that Bush was right. That he won’t be continuing Bush’s policies or doing anything other than what he said he would do will be immaterial. The far right can simply point to statements from the far left screaming about how such behavior constitutes a reversal on Obama’s part. And if Kos and K-Lo agree, they must be right. Right?

With all the gloominess in the news today, it’s nice to know the guys at The Corner are still doing what they love: lying about things. In a post predicting that Obama will co-opt all of Bush’s terrific policies and rebrand them to rave reviews from the media, VDH says the following:

FISA and wire-intercepts of terrorist communications in the pre-Obama president months were once derided as more of Ashcroft-Bush stomping on the Constitution — except that now ABC News reports that, in fact, US intelligence agencies supplied India with general knowledge of the rough time period, place, and perhaps even method of terrorist attack. Are we to believe that such newfound capability to warn a country 7000 miles away about terrorist infiltration on its borders would be of no utility here at home?

I think in response what we will see is that insidiously, bit by bit, Obama and the Obama-brand press will begin to drop the shrill rhetoric about destroying constitutional liberties, and replace it with the vocabulary of ambiguity (e.g., try “complex,” “no easy answers”, “problematic”, etc.).

This is just flat out dishonest. No one has ever argued that we should just give up on intelligence altogether. Of course, no one has reported that we warned them based on information gained from warantless domestic wiretaps, and no one is going to report that, because it didn’t happen.

As far as I can tell, Hanson isn’t claiming something quite that crazy. Instead, he’s saying that we have this shiny new system for finding stuff out that is doing great work abroad (well, something seems to have gone wrong in this particular case, but still…) and we’d love to use it at home but the whiny Democrats won’t let us. But no part of this is in any way true. There is nothing ‘newfound’ about our capability to warn a country 7,000 miles away about things going on there. That’s called foreign intelligence, and we’ve always done it. Nor is there anything revolutionary about doing the same sort of thing at home. That’s called domestic intelligence, and we’ve always done that too.

What is at issue is something far more specific: warantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Some people think it’s a vital source of intel. Other people think it isn’t worth the loss of privacy rights. There is a serious debate to be had there (though the former group of people are on the wrong side of that debate, and anyway it’s illegal). But there is nothing at all serious about pointing to the existence of intelligence gathering as evidence one way or the other. It doesn’t even begin to bear on the question at issue. It is dishonest drivel, and that is the M.O. of the National Review these days.