THERE'S RICH, AND THEN THERE'S HANSON RICH.

Victor Davis Hanson's crying "Vanitas!" again. Since Obama was elected, you can't deport Mexicans anymore, they're letting women serve in combat, and worst of all, some people of whom Hanson does not approve might not die broke in a rooming-house:

Does it really make all that much difference whether you are a doctor at 70 who religiously put away $1,000 a month for thirty years, compounded at the old interest, and planned to retire on the interest income, or a cashless state employee with a defined benefit pension plan? The one might have over $1 million in his savings account, but the other a bigger and less risky monthly payout. Suddenly the old adult advice to our children — “Save and put your money in the bank to receive interest” — is what? “Spend it now or borrow as much as you can at cheap interest”?

That guy got off easy, idling away his days as a highway patrolman or a garbageman, then being rewarded with a comfortable old age. What kind of message is this sending our youth? (The bit about cheap interest is what the classicists call a non sequitur.)

Also, some of the people Hanson doesn't like have even gotten rich:

There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people.

Both the "apparat" and the "kulaks" seem pretty flush to me. But the former get their asses kissed by fancy magazines, and the latter by Victor Davis Hanson, so I can see why they'd feel hard done by.

After decades of philosophizing, Hanson has suddenly discovered class warfare. And he wants in -- but he knows the priests at the temple of Mammon frown on that. So he's devised a dispensation for himself: He'll only rag on the undeserving rich. And while others would draw a distinction between those whose wealth is earned and those whose wealth is unearned, Hanson knows what really makes a man worthy of Fortune's smile: the right politics. These days, this is what passes for conservative populism.

SQUARE PEG.

Victor Davis Hanson goes on for more than 4,200 words about how everybody loves you if you're "hip" -- which in his lexicon is just another word for "liberal" -- and it's just not fair. One of his dozens of examples:

Would Google have had more trouble for all its outsourcing and overseas tax avoidance had it been named American Internet, Inc., or if its founders had grown up together as good ol’ boys in Mobile, Alabama, who still had a nagging propensity for putting patriotic slogans under the Google logo when the browser pops up each morning? Imagine waking and hitting the American Internet, Inc. logo — and then reading “Live free or die” before your search. (How odd that liberals — e.g., “the medium is the message” — always lectured us about advertising-driven false demand, and then became past masters of deceptive branding.)

I thought that's what Bing was for.

The odd thing is, Hanson never seems to grasp how these alleged hip people and things  -- he includes Starbucks, Jay-Z, "Snoop Dogg," Al Gore, and Katie Couric, believe it or not -- acquired whatever cachet they have. Since he hates them, the explanation can include nothing of what they offer the public, which severely limits his options.

Midway through he comes upon an answer that's at least plausible --

Could not Wal-Mart put memorable lines from Shakespeare on its plastic bags, or a Greek hexameter from Homer, or sell vitamin water called Sophos, Kalos, or Logos, or pipe in John Lennon’s “Imagine”?

You're getting warm, Doc -- marketing might have something to do with it. But Wal-Mart has a marketing budget, too, and it eschews Shakespeare for Low Low Prices. I don't hear them crying that they're misunderstood, and I sure don't hear them crying poor.

Alas, this explanation would cost Hanson his opportunity for self-pity, so he avoids it, and retreats thus:

Hip: borrowing became “stimulus”; entitlements, “investments”; and paying it all back became “paying your fair share.” In Obama’s case, he is not just black, but black with an exotic name and a liberal ideology, unlike a Clarence Thomas, who is most unhip...

I predict the first "hip" thing Hanson will adopt will be emo.

OOGA TO THE OOGITY-BOOGA.

neo-neocon started out with a fairly standard rightwing plaint about the big bad liberals:

It’s not just the heady victory of the moment that’s motivating them, it’s their conviction that it’s clear sailing from here on that empowers the left to openly up the ante and signal their next steps in establishing and capitalizing on their hegemony. No need to hide anymore when there’s nothing the right can do about it.

Then suddenly sproinnggg! out of nowhere:

In some ways the anti-white-man rhetoric that has become standard and acceptable lately is the worst sign of all. If the term “hate speech” has a meaning, it most definitely would apply to a great deal of what has been said recently about that despised group. Those who are first to shriek “racism” and “sexism” when criticism is launched against a group defined as oppressed (blacks, women) are turning the tables and dissing white men with impunity. It is both hypocritical and vile, and especially offensive when cloaked in the sanctimony of those on the left who believe they occupy the moral high ground (that would be everyone on the left).

Huh? neo-neocon doesn't explain what the hell she's talking about, so I had to trace back through a link to Victor Davis Hanson she'd left, perhaps inadvertently, as a clue to find out where she caught the fever.

Near as I can tell, this is it: That guy who criticized the Constitution in the New York Times called the Founding Fathers "a group of white propertied men" who "thought it was fine to own slaves." (I like the Constitution fine myself but yeah, obviously they were what he said they were.) Well, Hanson takes exception, but instead of arguing a case he just links the Constitution critic's sentiments to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, for reason unshared with his readers:

I can see Seidman’s vision now: Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi decides that semi-automatic handguns, not cheap Hollywood violence or sick video games, empower the insane to kill, and, presto, their 'considered judgment' and favored 'particular course of action' trump the archaic and evil wisdom of 'white propertied men.'

And that's about it, unless there's a coded reference or an acrostic or something in there that I missed.

Hanson's fit is weird enough, but the way neo-neocon got "everyone on the left" and "dissing white men with impunity" out of it -- that's just surreal. And then there's Ole Perfessor Glenn Reynolds' endorsement of it:

The Obama presidency has certainly been clarifying. Which is probably why gun sales are up.

To recap, some nut thought a professor's smack talk about the Founders owning slaves had something to do with Reid and Pelosi; this stimulated another nut to rage about the left's alleged insults to whitey; and this stimulated a third nut to cite Obama and cheer the rise in gun purchases. It's like a game of Telephone in an insane asylum.

Earlier today I was mildly disappointed that Commentary's new "What Is the Future of Conservatism in the Wake of the 2012 Election? A Symposium" was subscriber-only. But now I feel like I just read it for free.

UPDATE. "The white man has been oppressed ever since Django was unchained," explains Halloween Jack in comments. wjts and others point out that Hanson is once again complaining that someone stole equipment from his property and, once again, suggests the theft has something darkly to do with Obama. Soon these guys will be communicating entirely by dog-whistle: "Someone made off with my entrenching tool last night..." "OOGA BOOGA DEFEND WHITEY!"

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED, CRY, CRY AGAIN.

Victor Davis Hanson's on his plinth again, crying "Vanitas!" while the dry ice swirls:

Obama once had mused that he wished to be the mirror image of Ronald Reagan — successfully coaxing America to the left as the folksy Reagan had to the right. Instead, 2012 taught us that a calculating Obama is more a canny Richard Nixon, who likewise used any means necessary to be reelected on the premise that his rival would be even worse. But we know what eventually happened to the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon after November 1972; what will be the second-term wages of Obama’s winning ugly?

Impeachment? Sure, why not -- it's not like they can beat him in elections.

But what would be the MacGuffin? This week at WorldNetDaily:

As many news sites and pundits break down the biggest stories of 2012, one story too big to miss has been resurrected by the website TeaParty.org, a story at least one national pundit believes could send Barack Obama to prison. 

The tea-party site posted a Glenn Beck video from October in which the TV and radio host insisted a case for treason could be built against President Obama for his role in the attack of Sept. 11, 2012, in which armed Libyans captured and killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others at an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi...

A two-month-old Glenn Beck rant. But wait -- WND has more! In another article they say Obama could be impeached for invading Syria -- and Charlie Rangel's on board! Actually Rangel has made common cause with Republican Congressman Walter Jones to warn the President off an intervention, which WND interprets as "NEW IMPEACHMENT THREAT, WITH DEMOCRAT 'INVOLVED.'"

Playing Lafayette to their Founding Fathers is Lyndon LaRouche. Now it's a coalition!

Much as I'd enjoy it, I don't think they're serious. At Forbes Larry Bell tips their hand:

Before I carry this any farther, let me be clear that I believe any chances that President Obama will be impeached range somewhere between nil and none. That ain’t going to happen to the historic first American black president…THE ONE…most particularly when his party controls the Senate and his fast and furious friend is his attorney general. But just for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that these conditions were different, and on top of that, he had ill winds of the liberal media blowing in his face rather than friendly breezes at his back. And what if he wasn’t “cool”…instead, being someone like Nixon, who was the un-coolest guy in almost any crowd?...

So this impeachment thing is going to be like everything else in wingnut world these days: Another excuse to piss and moan about how unfair it all is. Pretty soon they'll be telling us that Obama should have been assassinated by now, but that damned liberal Secret Service keeps protecting him.

SHORTER VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Those desperate Democrats will certainly fight dirty this year. Here's some bullshit about Obama getting bad grades in college. Yes, certainly they will fight dirty, these Democrats, because they are desperate.

HOMAGE TO REVEREND AL. Victor Davis Hanson, deep breath now:

There were several reasons why it was unwise for the attorney general of the United States to praise Al Sharpton at a convention of Sharpton’s organization, “for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill,” in the midst of the Trayvon Martin case (“I know that many of you are greatly — and rightly — concerned about the recent shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young man whose future has been lost to the ages”), even as Sharpton has been quite actively inflaming an already tense situation...

...but the main one is, the bigots who aren't going to vote for this Administration anyway will be mad at you.

I once voted for Sharpton for the Democratic nomination for Senator from New York. It is one of my most cherished electoral memories. Sharpton has made mistakes, God knows, but he does indeed speak out for the voiceless and stand up for the powerless, something you'd never catch Hanson doing on a bet. Based on his long-term record, if I see Sharpton is on a case, I don't assume it means another Freddy's Fashion Mart; I assume it means that someone the powerful don't give a shit about is in trouble. Life experience and my Christian upbringing dispose me kindly toward such people.

Anyway, if he's good enough to train NYPD recruits, he's good enough for me.

As for Sharpton "actively inflaming an already tense situation," I suppose Hanson means this:

Al Sharpton urges Trayvon Martin supporters not to "tarnish" his name with violence 

..."We are not in the business of revenge. We are in the business of justice," said Sharpton, speaking at a convention for the National Action Network, his civil rights group. "We must make the justice system work. Otherwise the movement is for nothing. To go outside the justice system is to achieve nothing."

These people are such lying assholes that if they said something bad about Satan, I'd give Satan the benefit of the doubt.

DERP DE DERB. Over the past day or so, several of John Derbyshire's former colleagues at National Review have posted on his dismissal. As you might expect, whether they approve or disapprove of his defenestration, they all agree that  political correctness is the real crime here.

"Unfortunately the entire vocabulary of racist slurs has been cheapened, and few anymore insist that no one of any race should use any racial slurs," says Victor Buster Poindexter David JoHanson. By this Hanson means black people saying "nigger," which always enrages conservatives, who consider it yet another unfair advantage enjoyed by African-Americans. "There was a time not too far in the past," Hanson reminiscences, "when the black community attempted to stop the use of the N-word in rap music, on radio, and in movies..." It's interesting that Hanson interprets the politicians and public figures who made a stink about this once upon a time as "the black community" -- when such people speak up instead about, say, a black kid getting murdered, Hanson considers it "demagoguery."

Mark Steyn, among others, seems to believe Derbyshire being fired by a rightwing publication is P.C. censorship by liberals.

The Left is pretty clear about its objectives on everything from climate change to immigration to gay marriage: Rather than win the debate, they’d just as soon shut it down. They’ve had great success in shrinking the bounds of public discourse, and rendering whole areas of public policy all but undiscussable. In such a climate, my default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion.

Out of his devotion to free speech, Steyn is volunteering to listen the one about the coon in the woodpile. What a hero. He also spreads that bullshit about the liberals trying to silence David Weigel, based on something he read at some guy's blog. As I reminded readers at the Voice, Weigel has indeed been fired from a major publication for his opinions -- that is, for making fun of conservatives.

Similarly confused about cause and effect, Jason Lee Steorts, who approves the separation, nonetheless laments that "there is something thuggish, not to mention insecure, in the mob’s expectation that a head be thrown to it without any discussion of the nature of the offense, and in its refusal to entertain any possibility of forgiveness." Rich Lowry, the new Robespierre, throwing Derb's head to the leftist rabble! Someone should paint that.

The best thing about all this is, I can offer these idiots valuable advice and there's no chance in hell that they'll take it. So I will:

Let's say there was some truth to the idea that liberals are mau-mauing you -- using their Svengali influence over black people to make you look like racists. What would the smart reaction to that be? It would be to act like a normal human being; that is, to blow it off, to make nothing of it, and to rely on your impeccably non-racist example to show the world what these awful people say about you is untrue. If it feels tough at times, you could always pray for strength from that God you're always yapping about.

In other words, the smart thing is to actually be, and behave like, the person you are always loudly insisting you are -- unconcerned with race, not even recognizing it, a good friend to all humankind, etc. But the "loudly insisting" part seems more important to you than anything else. It's like you can't help yourself -- anytime you come within range of a racial issue, you have to start talking about it. And you talk rubbish.

Had you been paying attention to, oh, anything when you were growing up, you would have observed that whenever you go on and on about what a [insert positive model here] you are, one result is almost inevitable -- you make a fucking idiot of yourself. You start explaining why, though you buy everything in The Bell Curve about black people being inferior to white people, that doesn't mean you can't treat them as equals, and isn't that what really matters? At which point everyone in the room is giving you the "Springtime for Hitler" stare, and you find yourself wondering yet again why you're always so persecuted by the Thought Police.

I mean this sincerely: You would gain a lot more at this point by giving up than by fighting. You could concentrate on the core strengths of conservatism -- tax breaks for the wealthy and hatred of homosexuals -- and hope for that to win you enough rubes to carry the day.

This might help: Try and forget that Obama is black. Try to suppress that swelling feeling in your gut when you see people cheering for him, or hear the band playing "Hail to the Chief"... oh, but I can see that just my mentioning it has got you drafting another explanatory essay. Well, I did what I could.

LA VIDA ES SUEÑO. Victor Davis Herodotus Maximus Super Hanson:

Since 1980, I can recall five or six illegal-alien drivers who ended up in my vineyard, after veering off the road at high speeds, ploughing through the vineyard, and ripping out lots of mature vines, before ending up several rows from the road. In only two cases did the police find the somnolent, intoxicated (uninjured) drivers still in the cars (both with no license, no valid ID, and no car insurance)...

In addition, I was broadsided on one occasion by an illegal-alien driver, who after running the stop sign and hitting the driver side of my truck, abandoned his car (no insurance, no registration) and fled on foot (I caught him). He had no license, but the arriving officer told me that he had charged him only with running the stop sign (not a hit and run) and would release him. I had to pay the deductible for the damage to my truck by the uninsured driver, and my insurance company later quietly informed me that the local police had filed no report of the accident...

If you're a fan of damned-Mescan stuff, there's plenty more of it in the post.

It seems a suspiciously common occurrence for Mescans to be plowing drunk into Hanson's crops, or into him, or stealing his tools, etc. I hate to give the impression that I disbelieve his stories (or his colleague Michael Austin's claim that he was accustomed to bribe Chicago poll-watchers to let him vote multiple times -- I'm sure it's true on some level), but it really does seem as if Hanson has a vastly greater amount of trouble with Mescans than any white man I've ever heard of.

Not to mention the cops.

Maybe he just doesn't make friends easily?

UPDATE. In comments, Spaghetti Lee asks, "Is Hanson trying to make a political point here or is he just crabbily reminiscing about his life?... liberals and conservatives alike can share stories of life's random indignities, but it seems to be the conservatives who see it all as a giant conspiracy against them personally." aimai answers, "It's not personal--it's in propria persona as a white person. That's what has him so upset. It's not just happening to him -- It's happening to all the middle aged chain saw using vinyard owning classics professors and pundits."

IT'S THE NEW STYLE. Every once in a while I come across some young rightnik and wonder what he's been up to. James Poulos we last considered here in his role as interlocutor for a Jonah Goldberg video fart-fest, from which no one could come out smelling good. Well, Poulos has been spreading his seed, lately with this article in Foreign Policy. I found it so unobjectionable that I had to wonder whether I'd misjudged him and everything else. So I went to his First Things blog:

With the recent death of Steve Jobs we should applaud the expansion of the use of technological i-devices he provided, in that we are more and more connected. But out of wedlock births seem to be on the rise nonetheless.

Okay, I feel centered now. (Update: Poulos didn't write this one, apparently; someone named John Presnall did. So hereafter I'm changing the proper names. Poulos actually quit PMC over a year ago. Maybe he's gone legit! I'll look into it.) Presnall isn't like those total internet madmen you shy your kids away from when they come stumbling down the bandwidth -- he's more like parfait crazy; there'll be a sweet, foamy layer of stuff about the problems of constant, empty connectedness in the internet world, and then suddenly BAM, flash mobs, technocrats and JOE PATERNO:

Meanwhile, people die. These dying people still care about sports—even college sports. They may be stupid in their concern, but the immense amounts of money that college sports generate for the apparatus of colleges and universities gives prestige to such important things that the tenured genii of the future provide for humanity. Or at least that is what I saw on the commercial advertising the greatness of any given particular school during the typical televised football game. The TV ads showed multicultural pictures of scientists dressed in lab coats and safety glasses.

All this reminds me of Pascal’s observation regarding the dress that the nobility must don in order to maintain their authority—their nobility is secure in their purple and ermine, i.e., sterile white lab coats with beakers in the laboratory background. ...

You know -- oh wait, gotta get this in:

But I am a product of all his “higher education” nonsense, and as a teacher I am pressured to perpetuate it.

Yeah, thanks, Professor. Postmodern conservatism, like postmodern anything else, is a great racket -- while Jonah Goldberg is attempting things that resemble arguments, however superficially, and embarrassing himself in front of anyone who can grasp their inferiority to other actual arguments, including those held by Ralph and Alice Kramden, Presnall doesn't have to bother -- he can just throw up signifiers of discontent with our lousy liberal society, where an accused child rapist enabler proceeds naturally from scientism-multiculturalism. Or is it vice-versa? Whatever.

Or maybe they're all doing that. Come to think of it, Victor Davis Hanson may be the granddaddy of the postmodern conservative mash-up. Curse these tenured radicals!

DORKUS MALORKUS SPEAKETH. Attend Maximus Super Victor Davis Hanson as he sayeth the sooth! Well, it's soothing if you know how to take it. As is his custom, VDH bids us ware the Ides of March, then Delphically describes an America recognizable only to old cranks who spend their evenings with a glass of port and a volume of Heroditus open (in a place where visitors can easily see it), wailing that we are just like old Rome in her decline, except for our endless wars, which are great (though we really should be spending less money on them, and more plebes' lives).

VDH is full of stories, but sometimes he wanders:

Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last.

And this at the height of the Reagan era! We were told in those days that the kids had all become little Alex P. Keatons, high on trickledown and entrepreneurial as fuck. So either Maximus Super speaketh bullshit, or in '85 his young charges, having grown up under Governor Reagan, got an early whiff of the fraud and were opting out. (Or maybe they thought, "Jesus, if he can teach at a state school, I could be a fucking Dean!")

VDH also Sphinxes out some riddles:

Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet?

Answer "what's morality got to do with it, cloth-ears?" (rather than the correct "You got me there, Senex Gloriosus!") and VDH will not let you pass, but will block the hallway and forcibly regale you, no matter how badly you say you need the bathroom, with his proposed solution to our nation's low, mean state: Tax the Poor ("Their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich") and restore "a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess," presumably by throwing non-Christians to the lions.

On and on it goes, with awkward modern correlations ("the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians") and stretches of senile dementia ("In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos" -- what?). You may wonder how he gets published. Well, they can't all be bellowing goons like Chris Christie or Mr. Reasonables like David Brooks -- sometimes the avatars of the New Feudalism must have a schoolly look, so that the half-educated may look upon them and think, aha, the rage I feel when I see impertinent minorities and nubiles on TV is not just a gut reaction, but the judgement of history!

HE WAS A CRUEL MAN, BUT FAIR. Victor Davis Hanson defends the Dick Cheney biography. I have not read that book, and thus have no opinion of it, but I can still enjoy the wonderful bits in Hanson's defense. First, relating to Cheney's advocacy of waterboarding:

I opposed those techniques, but we still do not have the complete record of the information that came from KSM et al. — though National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair has since said “high value” information came out of it — and by now we have forgotten the sense of impending attack and mayhem that followed after 9/11.

It was the 00's, man -- everyone was doing anti-terror, and experimenting with torture.

From Hanson's list of Cheney's admirable qualities, this is my favorite:

...he retains a natural comfort with the middle classes that comes from his own upbringing in Wyoming.

Though its association here with the monstrous Cheney adds some piquancy, the general notion that someone should be applauded for "comfort with the middle classes" is depressingly common. I'm generally more impressed by how someone relates to poor folks. I supposed that's just my Christian upbringing, which I understand is now referred to as socialism.

Finally, the punchline:

He had a lot of Democratic friends — remember how little acrimony he showed with Lieberman in the 2000 debate...

Now, really, how can you top that?

OF COURSE THEY HAVE A STRATEGY...


...namely, fuck things up and then blame the black guy. Not that the black guy doesn't deserve blame, too, but I doubt things will be improved by President Rick Perry, who will upon inauguration give the last $32.98 in the Treasury to Thurston Howell III and ask America to pray for money.

I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog to "What -- Me, Weimar?"

UPDATE. Victor Davis "Buster" JoHanson looks at the stock tumble and sees, instead of the predictable result of a botched budget bill, this:

Only a private sector confident that of long-term government predictability and encouraged by a national culture that applauds manufacturing, energy and food production, and private health initiatives and reform can see us of this mess.

Pure lickspittle poetry, this. "Applauds manufacturing!" Our national culture is more accustomed to wave good-bye to manufacturing, and the jobs that go with it, as they are off-shored to increase the wealth of the "private sector" (which in Hanson's imagination comprises the rich sociopaths speeding us unto neo-feudalism and himself, their loyal gentleman farmer friend). I don't see how we could make such people any more "confident" without building them statues and renaming America Pottersville.

BLACK PRESIDENT DONE STOLE MAH CHAINSAW. All Victor Davis Hanson's National Review posts are pretty much the same stew ladled from different parts of the pot -- e.g., Anthony Weiner blah blah John Edwards blah blah RobertByrdJosefStalinSaddamHussein blah narcissists Versailles Washington. Or: Boeing blah blah Petraeus-Bush blah Van Jones blah Geithner Defense of Marriage.

He goes a little further in this essay, about some recent robberies in his neck of the woods. One guy snatched Hanson's chainsaw. ("Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting.") Another pulled copper wire out of his pump. And a house down the way was relieved of its major appliances. Hanson is in California farm country, and I must say his sad tale made me happier than usual to be living in Harlem, where such offenses are not so bunched up.

Hanson has been inspired by these misfortunes to generalize:

I think the public would react in two different ways to the above occurrences — and such a dichotomy explains a lot why the nation has never been more divided.

(I never did figure out what the second way to which he alluded was; maybe one of you can explain it to me.) A majority of his fellow citizens, Hanson says, will know that the robbers wanted money for "drugs, excitement, or to buy things like an iPhone or DVD" rather than food. Which may well be, though as he later complains of California's rotten economy, I'm not sure how he knows this -- oh, wait, Mexifornia blah blah gangbanger blah blah La Raza; I see what he's getting at.

After all, Hollywood, pop music, the court system, and the government itself sympathize with, even romanticize those forced to take a chainsaw, not the old middle-class bore who bought it.

The remedy to address theft would be not more government help — public assistance, social welfare, counseling — but far less, given that human nature rises to the occasion when forced to work and sinks when leisured and exempt. I don’t believe my thieves have worked much; instead, they figured a day’s theft beats tile setting or concrete work beginning at 5 AM.

Here we see the casual connection between these three robberies and Hollywood, which spurred them on, his link suggests, with Bonnie and Clyde. (I'd be stunned if the crooks knew anything about this 44-year-old movie; I guess Hanson felt a reference to rap music would give the game away.)

Also, illegal immigrants are using up Hanson's emergency room services.

The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

Yes, the producer and the parasite -- the basis of all the Going Galt stuff though, as Hanson is here in full victim mode, we are not getting the traditional threats that he will actually leave, alas.

The same is true of unions, pensions, and compensation…

…if everyone is on food stamps (actually computerized government plastic credit cards designed to avoid the old stigma of pulling out a coupon), are there still food stamps?…

This liberal notion of being careful of what you wish for extends to energy…

If you're an aficionado of this sort of thing, you can see what's coming next:

Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host.

blah blah cap and trade blah blah Guantanamo blah blah solar panels. You'd hardly know that the Democratic governor of Hanson's home state is actually battling the Democrats in his legislature to scale the budget back, using the traditional tool of the veto rather than putting on a tricorner and raging in the town square. But Jerry Brown is prosaically trying to fix California's budget, whereas Hanson is -- I would say poetically, were it not an insult to poetry; might I say doggerelly? -- trying to exponentiate race and class resentments which may be useful in future elections.

We've lately seen others among the brethren use minority crime stories to rile their readers against the black President, but Hanson goes to much greater lengths than they have to conceal his purpose. Is it possible that he's embarrassed?

UPDATE. Commenter MikeJ breaks down VicDave "300" Jo's POV: "He's just upset that we don't allow the hoplite farmer class to keep slaves around to guard the chainsaw from the persians."

THE FORGOTTEN MAN. Libya is doing strange things to the brethren. Dan Riehl comes out against the neo-cons!

Below is how Kristol, Kagan and Co. began co-opting the Reagan legacy in 1996 for neo-conservatism. Call it human rights, or democracy, in some ways, the foreign policy of the neo-conservative below - one I doubt we can afford going forward - has more in common with today's Left as described by [Stanley] Kurtz, than it does with Reagan's. In a sense, some number of intellectuals from the Left broke with them years ago. Unfortunately, their intellectual tradition seems to have landed them in the very same place all these years later. Sure, the politics are different given the D vs R divide. But that's simply the window dressing. The foundational principle is inherently the same - and progressive - one could argue, its merely expressed differently purely for political purposes.

Guess what word doesn't appear once in the peroration? "Bush." Which makes sense, because when W was the neo-con of the hour, Riehl was writing stuff like this:

It's unfortunate, I don't think I've ever seen such a lack of leadership in Washington as we are seeing today. Senator's and Representatives who proudly stood up to take what now appears to have been only a purely political stand by supporting and voting for a war they evidently never had the courage to see through. But not Bush. Foremost among many, he seems almost alone now, determined to stay the course.

Mistakes? Misjudgments? Certainly, though if one takes history apart, his are no more significant, or costly than so many of nearly all Presidents who have gone before. His crime is not so much what he has done, but what he will not do - turn away from a pledge he made to America post 9-11.

Riehl's got the right idea. While guys like Victor Davis Hanson are tying themselves into knots trying to explain how Obama's bullshit is different from Bush's, Riehl's just making like Bush never existed. And why shouldn't he? His audience is just as eager to forget.

UPDATE. Riehl's Bush defenestration process can be observed in an earlier post:

If we want to invoke 20/20 hindsight as argument, the single greatest threat to America when Reagan entered office was the Soviet Union. When he left office, that huge and dangerous enemy was destroyed - a thing of the past. Whatever his reasoning, and I've never second guessed it before this, Bush can not say the same for al Qaeda. Instead of focusing more exclusively on Afghanistan and the Pakistan border area, he widened the war to Iraq. I supported it then and still do.

In other words, mistakes were made, and Riehl continues to endorse them while admitting they were mistakes. Because why not? It's not like anyone's paying attention, and if one day a Republican is dropping the bombs, Riehl can say he was for it both before and after he was against it.

EGYPT ME, EGYPT YOU. Al Jazeera, whose live feed you can see here (thanks Skinny John!), is reporting that Egyptian cops are beating up reporters. And they're on their way up to the Al Jazeera studios in Cairo. ("I will stay on the air as long as I can... until we are forced off the air.")


It's almost curfew time, so this should be interesting.

UPDATE. I'm so old I remember the Iranian Twitter revolution -- which achieved little concrete political change, though it did lead in an uptick to avatar modification -- so I'm not making any calls on this. I do notice that some conservatives are worried that the uprising, should it take, may not be to America's liking*. But the mainstream play for conservatives is to act enthusiastic about it, as they did with the Orange Revolution and the Cedar Revolution. Remember those? Many medals were given out then for supportive blogging! But the world seems not to have gotten much freer because of them.

UPDATE 2. State media reports Army's been ordered into the streets to put down the protests, says AJ. Just saw a bunch of protestors flip over an armored personnel carrier.

UPDATE 3. *At National Review, Michael Rubin really wants it both ways: "A reader points out that while Biden’s 'Mubarak is not a dictator' comment is risible, the vice president was correct that Mubarak should not step down, because what comes next — a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship — could be worse." There's a man who knows how to spread his chips!

And would you believe it, the situation reminds Victor Davis Hanson of In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Stop Loss. And Michael Moore! It's become a major Hanson tic. He'll be applying these topics to world events at his rest home, assuming perhaps unfairly he's not in one already.

UPDATE 4. "GOOD NEWS," says Atlas Shrugs, "EGYPT ARRESTS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADERS." Apparently Mubarak is cleverly engineering just who will chase him out of the country and take over. Probably he's working with the most pro-democracy faction. What a patriot!

Good continuing coverage at Mother Jones.

BY THE NUMBERS. Victor Davis Hanson has a long complaint against Julian Assange. Here are some of his key points:

•  Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ."
• "Climategate."
• "Hollywood agents, producers, and financiers," and their product, Redacted and Rendition. [What, no Lions for Lambs?]
• "Harvard or Yale tenure committees."
•   George Soros.
•   The "let-it-all-hang-out Sixties."

His conclusion is that Assange is a narcissist, a term of disapprobation normally saved for Barack Obama, but his point, such as it is, is that WikiLeaks is like a lot of other things he doesn't like.

It doesn't matter whether it's a genuine domestic issue, or the actions of the foreign leader of a stateless group which have been denounced by the Obama Administration, or a lampshade or a hobby-horse. The Mad Libs never change, because the subject doesn't matter nearly as much as the intended audience, which apparently finds certain words as reliably funny as audiences of Hollywood comedies find swearing geriatrics and blows to the crotch.

SHORTER VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We white people must rise up against our black, Mexican, and homosexual overlords.

UPDATE: For aesthetic reasons, I left out a few of Hanson's other honkey-oppressors, which include Muslims, of course, and college professors who are not Ann Althouse and Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

Hanson's pumping the bilge extra hard today. In the midst of a typical peroration about how everything Obama does disgusts him, he delivers this classic line:

Obama’s awkward efforts to appear hip have resulted in Jon Stewart calling the president of the United States “dude” and a general diminution in the dignity of the office.

Yeah, imagine if Hanson caught Obama doing something like this:



With white women, yet!

DO YOU SEE THIS? LOOK ON HER, LOOK, HER LIPS/LOOK THERE, LOOK THERE! Jesus, Victor Davis Hanson is still talking about Obama's bowing:

If multilateralism was the objective, it came out instead as obsequious deference. Whereas Bush's backrubs and Carter's frontal kisses were reflective of American casualness and too much informality, the bowing seems for some reason a far more bothersome gaffe. And as with Obama's apologies, what we thought was a one-time slip turns out to be a systematic pattern that reflects an apparent worldview.

And that's not all. You see how he's lifting his left leg as he walks here? He appears to be mincing, which is a gesture toward the homosexual lobby. Note too that he rubs the White House dog with his left hand, not his right, a coded insult to dog-loving Americans. Consider also the slight lift of his thumbs here, as he points. Try the gesture yourself. Does it not feel more insecure to you than the sturdy, thumbs-clenched pointing done by Republican presidents? Clearly he is worried about the polls. Notice also he is not quick to take a hand offered in friendship, as casual, informal Americans are.

Oh well, at least he's not always thinking about tits, like some people do.

Hanson's interpretations of those details to which he is directed by the Morning Memos, though, I believe are all skewed more or less the same way they would have been if Obama had spent all 10 months of his Presidency doing the robot, if Breitbart were stalking the Southern Poverty Law Center instead of ACORN, and if the unfortunate emails had come from the Brookings Institution instead of the University of East Anglia. He is not working from intuition or inspiration, but from a template.

We are all prone to interpretation, but Hanson has of late made a habit of pushing it very hard -- to wit: "'Punishing KSM' means giving the liberal community a world platform for legal gymnastics designed to repudiate the past administration and demonstrate that community's 'tolerance'" -- without bothering to explain to us why we should share his conclusion. At the same time he insists that "the public has finally caught on that the president's tough rhetoric and soaring oratory don't match reality," "there is a certain roughness and crassness that infuriates the public," etc, justified only by the news that most, rather than an enormous number, of voters approve of his performance during a contentious struggle over health care and a bad economy at the holiday season. And, of course, the indignation of other rightwing bloggers.

The most charitable view is that Hanson is just rehearsing for an actual election season. It would just be sad to imagine he really believes he's seen the tide turn in the first quarter when the opposition is still holding a lead. They all do this, of course, but Hanson's a classicist, and presumably knows about hubris.

THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM. While the joy-poppers are boycotting the NFL, Victor Davis Hanson is boycotting everything:

...I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or popular culture?...

Take Hollywood protocol -- make a big movie, hype it, show it at the mall multiplex. But I went to one movie the last year. Maybe three in the last four years. There is not much choice here -- car crashes, evil white men killing the innocent, some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups...

I think he's talking about Transporter 2.

Ditto music. I don’t know the name of a single rapper. Don’t follow rock anymore. Don’t want to. I like a Mark Knopfler or Coldplay...

Add in television. I haven’t watched a network newscast in 10 years...

I used to be a big fan of PBS and PR, but no more. The laudable shows are far outweighed by the race/class/gender agendas...

Next confession: I have not watched a single NFL game–including the Super bowl–for more than 10 minutes during the last decade... Ditto the NBA. I have not watched a complete game in 15 years... I watched 2 baseball games on television the last 3 years... Just a dozen selfless players, who keep quiet when they score, give credit to others when they pitch a shut-out, or pass rather than shoot could help things...

Baseball, ruined by hotshot pitchers! Vanitas! Christy Mathewson used to insist the scorers add a run for the opposing team, so people wouldn't think he'd gotten a swelled head.

Being a bit of a crank myself, I generally applaud non-joiners, holdouts, and antiquarians. But to go on for over 2,200 words about all the things he hasn't seen and won't see suggests, despite his insistence to the contrary, that Hanson is proud of it. He's proud as an observantly religious man might be that he scrupulously avoids the near occasion of sin, and has done so long and faithfully enough that he can truly say he's untempted.

The religious guy has a God to which his abstinence brings him closer. What has Hanson? The old things, which are lovely, and this:

...I have tried to remain more engaged than ever in the country’s political and military crises, which are acute and growing. One’s distancing from the popular culture of movies, TV, newspapers, and establishment culture makes one perhaps wish to overcompensate in other directions, from the trivial to the important.

Bear in mind that Hanson also eschews major news media, so we may assume he gets such political information for his "engagement" as he has from his colleagues at Pajamas Media and like-minded souls. Now it's clearer that he's not just avoiding things in which he has no interest, but also things in which he professes a keen interest but finds unaccommodating. He's bragging on the selectivity of the sources from which he draws his conclusions and writes his columns.

And why shouldn't he? When you know, ahead of time and for a fact, what's crap and what isn't, why waste time with the former? All new movies are PC, all new music is noise, all the athletes are thugs, all the prizes go to undeserving minorities, and the MSM lies. Go with what you know: Suetonius and Fox News.

Homer nods but the Ole Perfesser links, and commenters rush to assure Hanson that they, too, have taken leave of the hurly-burly:

When I read reviews of movies, I have no desire to see them. They sound so superficial, politically correct, and narcissistic...

My psychological withdrawal is being matched now by a material need to go Galt...

Just last night I was watching “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” with my grandson, a movie advertised as a “family-friendly laffer (sic).” And even in this moronic 90 minute bore the Hollywood liberal bias was evident...

The American who loves his country is, must be, alienated from American popular culture in the Obama era...

My sentiments exactly. The only exception was the TV show Battlestar Galactica until its third season began when it went off the rails....

I also used to love listening to “Prairie Home Companion”, but not in the last two years, ever since Garrison Keillor became so bitter and deranged...

With my Study of Sparta and the real meaning of a republic, I have since gotten rid of anything dealing with America since it is all a Masonic Kabbalistic lie...

Bonus: A comment by Frank Miller, for those of you so steeped in loathsome pop culture that you know who he is.

This suggests an interesting vision of a future for conservatism. I wonder if David Frum has looked into it?

TRAWLING THE BACK CATALOGUE. Michael Rubin at The Corner:

Obama Still Flailing for the Clenched Fist?
Iran’s Alef News and Jahan News are reporting that the Obama administration sent the Iranian government another letter in the past couple days, reportedly with regard to the three detained Americans. The newspapers report that the Iranian government has yet to respond.

Maybe they should try sending them a cake in the shape of a key.

(See also Hanson, Victor Davis: "I think we are going to collectively sober up and realize that we just did what we always said we would never do: bargained for the release of hostages from terrorists." Sometimes, despite all evidence, I think he's trying to be funny.)