re: "Victor Davis Hanson on Obama, McCain and the Election of 2008"
Hugh Hewitt ("A Blog of Townhall.Com") has posted the transcript of his interview with Victor Davis Hanson.
It's awesome-licious.
Money quote(s);
On the financial crisis:
"(T)he best and the brightest got us into this mess. It doesn’t mean that a Harvard Law degree is synonymous with ignorance, but it doesn’t mean necessarily it’s synonymous with excellence. And we’re seeing people that we’ve put our trust in that were educated, highly-credentialed, certified, and yet they had no common sense. And does this involve Sarah Palin? Well, we saw that when she was debating Joe Biden, he was far more impressive with recall of apparent facts, and he seemed that he had gravitas from his years of experience. He was a law school graduate, she was the Idaho commoner. But the more the debate went on, we found out that it would be much better to have someone with common practical sense who knew a few things, and could talk to the American people truthfully rather than to make up a whole plethora of assertions which in retrospect, almost everything Biden said was false."
On the political climate:
"I ask people, didn’t they hate Reagan the way they hate Bush? Or didn’t they hate Nixon, remember the Watergate, gosh, the Vietnam War, I remember I was walking across as a high school student at UC Berkeley. I went up to visit, and it was just almost a war zone. We’re not having that. But I don’t think that we’re still, it’s not so multi-dimensional with the war, with a cultural divide, with a hatred toward a sitting president, with this complex financial meltdown that nobody can make sense of. And then the sense that America is at odds with almost all the world, and there’s these insidious pressures that are telling us here at home you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’ve got to emulate the EU, you’ve got to emulate Africa, you’ve got to emulate Asia. And it’s almost as if we’re 5th Century A.D. in North Africa trying to resist a tide that we can’t resist."
On democracy:
"I still have faith in democracy that the average person, if he’s given enough time and enough information, will usually come to the right decision. After all, we rejected Carterism for Reagan, and we rejected a series of people, whether it was Mondale or McGovern or Dukakis, or Kerry who had a very different view of where America should be going. "
On the Democratic presidential candidate:
"I think people were mad at Bush, they were mad and confused by the wars and the economic meltdown. And then suddenly, they do not want to vote for Obama, but they feel that they have to to express their dissatisfaction. But that being said, the more they’re starting to learn about all of these various manifestations of…I say manifestations, because we’re talking about FISA, public campaign financing, NAFTA, town meetings, guns, abortion, capital punishment. You and I could go on and on of the things that he’s flipped or moderated or adapted, rejected his former positions because…and the question is why is he doing that? And the fact is he had to go further to the center than almost any modern candidate. He was so far in that coterie of Chicago leftists. And then we find another disturbing pattern is that he only will disown these people when they come to the public attention in sort of a meltdown. So Reverend Wright, he could no more forsake Reverend Wright or give him up unless Reverend Wright is stupid enough to go to Ground Zero at the National Press Club and let the world see what an odious racist he is. Then suddenly, he’s gone. Bill Ayers, this man was e-mailing and phoning Bill Ayers up until 2005 after everybody had known that Ayers had said these ridiculous assertions that he was not going to feel guilty, he was unrepentant. And when did he throw him under the proverbial bus? Only when he ran for Senate, or he was elected to the Senate and he was going to start this presidential run. So there’s a very disturbing pattern that the people themselves intrinsically do not bother Obama. He feels comfortable with them. He only distances himself when he feels that they become a political liability."
On the financial crisis:
"(E)vents are overtaking him. The headlines about Wall Street, Fannie Mae, the whole Washington-New York in pretty much a cesspool, and so what happens is Obama shoots ahead because of the events of the day. And you said it a moment earlier when you said it was time. If we had eight more weeks of this campaign, and the focus on Obama, I suppose, McCain could catch up. But he’s going to have a great deal of trouble catching up unless he decides to be much tougher, to draw distinctions between the Obama of Chicago, the Obama that voted the most liberal Senator in the U.S. Senate, the Obama who had a particular view of the world. It’s no accident when Obama’s wife, I don’t want to pick on his wife, but when she serially says that she has no pride in the United States until her husband ran, or she’s mad at the United States, or this is a mean country, all of that is, is just a reification of the type of people they met, the type of conversations that were going on, the type of worldview they had. And that has to come out, or McCain is going to lose. And he’s going to have to tell people this is the biggest contrast since McGovern-Nixon in ’72, culturally, socially, politically, economically. We’ve got a European socialist who believes in statism and collectivized health care, high taxes, entitlements, and we have somebody who doesn’t. We have somebody who believes in world governance and deference to the United Nations, and utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, multiculturalism, oppression studies, and someone who doesn’t. But if he’s not going to walk the American people through that labyrinth and tell people very simply that if you vote for my opponent, the following is going to happen in your lives. And if you don’t, this is what’s going to happen if you vote for me. He needs…he needed to say in five seconds Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are not the entire problem with the economy, but they were the catalyst that started this, and here’s why, because greedy people on Wall Street piggybacked on the assumption that the federal government would back bad loans. Why did they back bad loans? Because Barack Obama and Barney Frank and this whole group of Democratic apparatchiks, under the guise of political correctness, lent money to people who had no business borrowing it, and who walked away from their obligations. And that caused a chain of events that now we’re supposed to think discredited capitalism. And he needs to tell people how that started."
"The Republican constituency is the guy who owns a hardware store, a paving company, sells cars, because he might make up to $250 or $300K, but to make that $250 or $300K, he’s got to work eighty hours a week, he takes risk, he can lose everything. The man at Goldman-Sachs who takes a thirty, or Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae who takes a $30 million dollar bonus, he doesn’t care if taxes are 50% or 70%. In fact, he feels better when they’re higher because it gives him a psychological cover that he’s liberal, that he’s caring, that he wants the government to do something that he in his own life doesn’t want to do. He doesn’t want to live in the ghetto, he doesn’t want to tutor a kid from the barrio. He doesn’t want to contribute very much money. We saw that with the comparative charities of Biden V. Palin."
"(I)t's been repeated again and again. We saw that with the Clintons when they gave their underwear and claimed them as deductions in the 90s."
On President Bush:
"(W)e’re not going to be able to assess him until later on. I think that his chief achievement was that at a time when everybody thought we were going to be struck in succession by terrorists, he and he alone guaranteed that we would not by the things he was willing to do – FISA, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act. All of these are caricatured now that they had worked, and they’ve stopped terrorism. Had he not stopped terrorism, he would have been criticized for not doing enough. He took out the two most odious regimes in the Middle East. There’s constitutional governments there. And I think that’s going to be his chief, he’s going to be like Truman. He’s going to go out in the 20s approval rating, we’re not going to like him for the next ten years. We’re going to look back in the context that he really did dismantle al Qaeda. They’re not able to repeat these assaults on us. And I think that’s the way to look at it, because I think a lot of our criticisms of what he did, my chief criticism is the increase in domestic spending at twice the rate Clinton did. And I think the reason he did that is he was willing to compromise too liberally with Democrats across the aisle, because he thought that in those critical years, 2003, 2004, 2005, and he was right, they would not pull the plug on the effort in Iraq, and he was willing to sacrifice a domestic agenda in some sense for that."
"I think that there were very few people given the pressures of the office at this particular time and this particular place in history that could have withstood that pressure, and he did."
"I think that he sincerely believes that history later on will justify what he did when history is given the same facts at he was. I think he actually believes that he gets this frightening intelligence every day. He talks to these leaders abroad candidly that tell him horrific things that could happen. He makes these decisions, and he feels either that people share these same anxieties that don’t have the same information, or there will come a time when they’ll be privy to this knowledge, and they’ll see that he made the right decision. But even Saturday Night Live, if you’ve watched those skits the last five years, he’s never portrayed as Machiavellian. He’s always portrayed as sort of somebody that Nancy Pelosi or a Barbara Boxer or a Harry Reid is taking advantage of because he refuses to get down to the same level. He’s not calling people communists in the way that people are calling him a Nazi or worse even."
"And he seems to be cognizant of critical periods in American history, the summer of 1864, the winter of 1776-77, the period in 1950 after we were almost pushed out of Korea. At key points where a lesser person in office would have capitulated to the pressures and the demands of the age, and that he didn’t, and the people of that age, whether it’s a Robert Taft, or it’s a Horace Greeley, we don’t remember those people. We only remember the people who said no, I’m not going to cater to public opinion. "
On the consequences of an Obama presidency:
"I think that if you get Reid together, and Pelosi and Obama, and the people who surround them, the legal team, the people who are going to be in the State Department, the people that are going to be at the Attorney General’s office, maybe right below the radar that the public won’t immediately fathom, I think you’re going to see an intensification of an ideology. They’re going to get further and further to the left. And it’s finally going to reach a critical mass, and people as they did in the Reagan revolution, are going to react. But I think that we’re going to have to go through this catharsis, because rightly or wrongly, people right now are blaming the conservative movement, Republicans, for things that I don’t think they’re culpable for. And I’ve never seen a period in my lifetime where all of the engines of the media, PBS, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New Yorker, the New Republic, all of these things that while they don’t reach as many people perhaps in terms of talk radio or Fox News, they have enormous cultural capital, and they set the tone, and I’ve never seen them all together working in concert to such an affect, that they’re saying George Bush is a Nazi, George Bush is a buffoon, Sarah Palin is a yokel, these people want to burn books, they want to cram down fundamentalist religion or else down their throat, and they’re scaring the people in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime in the United States."
"For all of the pathologies of Bill Clinton, you could see that he understood, maybe it was the process of triangulation under the guidance of Dick Morris, but he understood that welfare had gotten out of control, and that there were political benefits, for whatever reason, of having a balanced budget and a surplus. I don’t get that at all from these people. I get the impression, as you said, punitive. I think they’re going to try to have sort of war crimes trials, that they will have Senate and House hearings about the Bush administration. I am very worried about certain things in Europe. They’re going to be closely aligned with European socialists. I think that they’re going to inordinately defer to the United Nations, which after the reception we saw with Ahmadinejad was quite frightening as well."
On the Global War on Terrorism:
"If you look at what’s happened in Iraq, all the things that Mr. Obama and his associates said would not happen, did happen. The surge worked, and not just the surge, but the change of tactics and the grassroots repulsion at al Qaeda by Sunni peoples, tribes. There was a reconciliation in the government. It’s a constitutional framework. They’re working out oil, they’re working out district representations. Iran did not go in and take that as part of its fiefdom. It’s now isolated. And in fact, Iraq could be as destabilizing to Iran as Iran has tried to be to Iraq. But more importantly, the question was after 9/11, where were we going to fight al Qaeda? We went into Afghanistan and properly so, and we found immediately they had this sanctuary in a nuclear Islamic country where they were untouchable. And it would risk, really, a type of escalation that we weren’t willing to take to go in there, at least overtly as Obama wanted to do. So we went in and we got rid of somebody who had been a long abettor of terrorists in Saddam Hussein, and immediately our enemies announced this is the new battlefield. They flocked to it, and we killed them by the thousands, we discredited them, not only discredited them militarily, but we discredited them culturally, socially, politically, ethically in the eyes of their natural constituency, the Sunni tribesmen, right in the heart of the ancient caliphate. They suffered a terrible defeat, they’re disorganized, and during this whole process, they were not able to come over and attack us, which they promised was going to happen in a serial fashion. And yet, and if you look at all of that, the obstacles to that, we tragically lost over four thousand, but this is like trying to conduct the one campaign in World War II in the Marianas or something, where we lost commiserate casualties. So for all the mistakes that were made, and there are mistakes made in every war, it turned out to not only be valuable for our strategic interest in the Middle East, but it had a direct affect in attriting and hurting al Qaeda in a fashion that we had no other theater of operations to do that in. And that’s lost on the American public, I’m afraid."
On the geopolitical impact of the Iraq invasion:
"(W)e know that Mr. Qaddafi called the Italian prime minister and said just what you said, that he didn’t want to end up as did Saddam Hussein. And remember, it didn’t happen just after the invasion. It happened about six weeks after the capture of Saddam Hussein, and that had a powerful effect on a similarly-minded dictator when he saw the fate of Saddam Hussein. That’s when he made the decision."
"(T)he problem was that all this came in a context where George Bush was a unilateralist preempter, had done nothing good but make the world hate us. And yet when you look at the world and you don’t listen to the BBC or read Le Monde in Paris, you start to see that a billion people in India appreciate free trade with the United States, that China is not necessarily anti-American, that Russia, to the degree that it fears us, it’s because that we’ve stood up to them in a way that I don’t think Obama will. So I don’t get by this idea that because there’s people in the Middle East and Europe that don’t like us and they’re far more vocal, that this is a referendum on the morality of the United States. I don’t want to be liked by people necessarily in the Middle East. I don’t really necessarily want to be liked by people in a Paris salon. And to the extent that George Bush is not liked by those people, it’s not necessarily a bad thing."
On Iran's nuclear program:
"(A)s Obama says, it’s a game-changer if Iran were to get a nuclear device. What does that mean, a game-changer? That’s intolerable. What he’s not telling you is that if I choose to make sure that they don’t have a nuclear device, then that means that basically the United States is going to have to impose an embargo or a Naval blockade because the Europeans will still try to profit to the 11th hour, or even a military strike. I, Barack Obama, must be hated by people in Berlin. There’s no more Victory Column great extravaganzas for me. There’s no more fawning interviews with Der Spiegel. It’s going to be hatred from those people. I’m going to be a unilateralist pre-empter, and I’m going to do that, and all the people in the Muslim world and the Arab world that love me and fawn over me are going to hate me as worse than you know what. Okay, I’m willing to do that for a principle. Do you think he’s going to be willing to do that, or John McCain?"
"(W)hen he feels emboldened enough to go to the United Nations just a few blocks away from the Wall Street meltdown, and for the first time not just say the Israelis are culpable, but Jews in general, and talk about in Hitlerian terms an international Jewish banking conspiracy. It’s what he basically was saying, and he felt not only would he get applause, but there would be liberal people in the United States, as happened, that would take him out to dinner in congratulations for that speech. So I’m very worried. I’ve never seen this level of anti-Semitism, I’ve never seen this level of appeasement among our elites. And he’s basically really read the Western mind. He’s basically said do you want a nuclear Iran to threaten you? Do you want a missile that can threaten Frankfurt? Because that’s what I’ll do unless you are nice to me, unless you call off George Bush and Dick Cheney, and then we can live together. And then once we get into that mindset, it’s going to be very easy to obtain that goal."
On appeasement:
"(I)t reminds me so much of the 1930s when Hitler was making these absolutely atrocious statements and making a fool of himself at Nuremberg. And what did the people in France and England say? They’d say you know, the Prussian Junker class is really running Germany, and these are the old Hindenburg-Ludendorff people. Or they’d say the industrial is corrupt and these people are really running Germany. They wouldn’t, this man is not typical. And what they didn’t understand was that these people thought they may, but they found out that A) he was either useful, or B) he was far smarter than they were, or C) and most likely of all, that Hitler was an expression of the resentments and the anger of a whole humiliated German nation in the way that Ahmadinejad has sized up the Iranian people’s frustrations, and how they can be manipulated in a way that’s even more effective than the mullahs themselves."
"(W)ho wants to face that awful reality that this man is unstable, and there’s a slight chance that he might welcome a nuclear exchange, because then he could tell the Islamic world that the downtrodden Shia, of all people, destroyed the Zionist entity when the Sunnis could not, and that they are now with, in martyrdom in Heaven. So there’s that fear that you might be dealing with something that right after Afghanistan, Iraq, this financial problem. Who wants to deal with it? It’s the same mindset that after going through the horrors of World War I, you weren’t going to ask the French people to say look, you didn’t do that in World War I. You really didn’t win. Now you’ve got a bigger problem with Hitler. They were not up to it. And it’s very hard to do. I have empathy in some ways for the liberal left, because you’re trying to say to them okay, Iraq is a mess, Afghanistan is a mess, in your way of thinking, the economy’s a mess, and you know what? There’s somebody out there who does not believe in the world court of the Hague. He’s not going to believe in the United Nations, and you can’t just do a Milosevic on him. It’s a very fundamental problem, and he wants to destroy the survivors of the Holocaust. And we have to deal with him. We either have to get the Europeans and the whole world to stop commerce completely with him. And if we can’t do that, we have to blockade his country and shut off his trade. And if we can’t do that at the eleventh hour, we’re going to have to use some type of military option. And boy, once you do that, you sort of negate the whole idea of peace and conflict resolution studies, dialogue"
"(W)hat we don’t want to do is have a war with Iran. And the only way you’re going to guarantee a war with Iran is if this man gets a hold of nuclear weapons, and he has guided missiles, and he starts pointing them not only at Israel, but he starts to dictate the oil production levels, or the type of governments with large Shia minorities in places along the Gulf, or he’d start to tell Germany that he wants more favorable trade policy. And given what the Europeans have showed the last eight or nine years, it’s really, it’s very depressing, because it’s a very amoral foreign policy that’s based entirely on local and regional self-interest and real politick. And Ahmadinejad has sized up Europe as no other person has in years. "
On misplaced moral equivalence:
"(T)here are people in the United States who would like to see, for a variety of reasons, radical Islam defeat the United States. And they live in the United States. But I don’t think that necessarily they’re in the Obama campaign. I think the people in the Obama campaign really do believe that all of the problems in the world today are caused by either a lack of communication or a bellicose stance by the United States. And what’s scary about that is in a pattern of moral equivalence, they don’t see anything exceptional about the United States. They don’t think our Constitution, our multiracial Maritocratic society is any different than Indonesia or Brazil, and that’s scary."
On the civil-military disconnect over the successes in Iraq:
"(F)irst of all, they’re a little astounded that people don’t recognize the extent or the degree of their achievement in Iraq. I mean, they not only went over there into a foreign landscape, they understood Islam finally, they figured out the tribal system, they did reconstruction. And then what’s never remarked upon, they went into the allies of Baghdad and Fallujah and Baquba, and tried to help people who were suffering, and did that simultaneously while fighting hand to hand against some of the most wicked people in the world, and defeated them on their own terms and their own turf. And it was an extraordinary achievement. And I feel that to the extent that they don’t get credit for that, they harbor, the proper word’s not resentment, but they feel a yearning. Why don’t people recognize us? Why do they keep saying that Iraq was the worst decision, it was a mistake, it was terrible, that you go over there, and you see what they’re doing, and you just don’t get the impression that their the Wehrmacht terrorizing people. I think that Obama said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is killing innocent civilians so that we’re putting pressure on the government. We’re not doing that. There’s never been a more careful, more scientific, more surgical military than our own. And they did a wonderful thing in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they did the near impossible, and that message is totally lost on the American people."
"(T)he surge worked, yes. The Anbar awakening worked, yes. Change of tactics was necessary, yes. Petraeus was a savior, yes. But please remember that in 2003, ’04, ’05 and ’06, there were unknown Americans who went out with the wrong tactics, the wrong type of knowledge, and they still defeated the enemy, and they killed some very, very evil, powerful people. And their absence today allowed this to happen, and we want to remember them."
More on the geopolitical consequences of a successful invasion of Iraq:
"(A)fter 2003 in that brilliant three week campaign, and up until December, then we had a deterrent effect, and you saw that with the Cedar Revolution and the events in Lebanon, and Libya, and Pakistan. And then when the criticism mounted and we were told that we were Hitlerian and we were losing, then it had the opposite effect. And now we’re starting to see a restoration of the prestige of the United States, especially when people look at the U.S. military, vis-?-vis the NATO allies. Remember what Obama and others said, Kerry and Obama, that Afghanistan was the good war, Iraq was the bad war. That was the multilateral war, the allies were there, NATO was there. It was all the right war, that was where bin Laden…and we’re finding out that Iraq was more solvable, and that the U.S. military was far more capable than its allies. And the problem with Afghanistan, in some cases, is Pakistan, it’s insolvable, and also the nature of our allies in NATO. They’re not really allies as we usually use that term."
On the culture wars and self-censorship:
"I’m more confident about our military because of the type of people in the military. The Petraeus mindset is encouraging. But what I’m worried about is, this was a war with a Western enlightenment and the forces of medievalism, if I could use that term, not that the Medieval period was necessarily all bad. But nevertheless, look at all the things in enlightenment. Publish a novel, not just Salman Rushdie, but Jewel Of Medina. We’re self-censoring ourselves. If you think of films, Obsession or Fitna, you can’t even do a film in Europe. How about journalism? We can…Jonathan Chait can write an article in a wartime entitled why I hate George Bush in the New Republic, but you dare not make a cartoon mocking Islam. We’re talking about religion. We’re all worried about whether Sarah Palin burned a book. How about the Pope? All he did was quote, I think it was a 14th Century Byzantine treatise, a letter to an Islamic sultan in the Ottomans, and all of a sudden, people started dying. So if you look at the classic genres of the Enlightenment, in journalism, in religion, novels, film, we in the West are self-censoring ourselves because we’re either afraid or we’re so indoctrinated with the culture of multiculturalism that we feel that no other culture can be any worse than the West. And that’s what I’m very worried about. We are afraid as Westerners to say look, look at the globalized world, look at constitutional government, look at capitalism, look at the stunning advances in technology in medicine. Whether you like it or not, it came from, only came from a paradigm that was political, economic, social, freedom, individualism, secularism, rationalism, constitutional government that came out of Europe, Greece, Rome, the Christian Church, et cetera. And if we’re not going to defend and articulate that, that’s what I’m worried about, and we’re not doing it."
On the hollowing out of Western civilization in the U.S. (and why there's reason for hope):
"(E)ach generation is a link in a large chain. And it just takes one generation to give up or to age or decline or to become incompetent, and suddenly the whole civilization is lost. What I’m worried about is, because of our educational system, we don’t a critical mass of individuals who’ll say I’m a Westerner, of all races, all religions, it doesn’t matter, but I’m a Westerner in the way I think, I’m an American, and I’m unapologetic about it. And it has given us not colonialism, racism. Those are the sins of mankind. Look at Islam. Look at China today. But I gave you the remedies for that. And only did this paradigm do that. And we don’t have people in the universities, in politics, in journalism and in the media who are willing to say that."
"I hope that we have more people like Webb and more people like Petraeus. I just don’t see that they’re as common on the landscape as the people who believe antithetically to them. And they’re necessary. But you know, this country, we could have had this conversation in 1861, and all of a sudden, where did Billy Sherman come from, William Tecumseh Sherman? He was a complete failure until he was 39 years old, and suddenly, the right man at the right time. I don’t know where Matthew Ridgeway came, but all of a sudden, everybody thought MacArthur was a genius, and Ridgeway saved Korea. So we always have been saved in our hour of need by people among us that we didn’t appreciate in times of peace. "
"I spend a lot of time as a professor at the Naval Academy and going into Iraq, and then being involved with a security fellow program at the Hoover Institution. There are some absolutely brilliant colonels in the U.S. Army. These are people with PhDs, combat experience, and they’re not just a dozen. They’re in the very hundreds. And I see them of all political backgrounds, but they’re absolutely brilliant. And their influence is expanding beyond the military. And they’re saying and writing things in an American context that are absolutely phenomenal."
On what Sen. McCain needs to say to win:
"(Y)ou may not like George Bush, you may think I’m old, but look, we are in a critical time, and everything that in the past has worked in recession and depression I’m for, and everything that hasn’t my opponent is trying to fawn on you. And we know that in times of war, you need a steady person who has confidence in American exceptionalism, and is willing to be unpopular to get us through this crisis, and my opponent defers too many times to too many people abroad, and he’s not willing to lose that Messianic image of himself to make the hard, tough decisions. He’d rather be liked that do the right thing."
It's awesome-licious.
Money quote(s);
On the financial crisis:
"(T)he best and the brightest got us into this mess. It doesn’t mean that a Harvard Law degree is synonymous with ignorance, but it doesn’t mean necessarily it’s synonymous with excellence. And we’re seeing people that we’ve put our trust in that were educated, highly-credentialed, certified, and yet they had no common sense. And does this involve Sarah Palin? Well, we saw that when she was debating Joe Biden, he was far more impressive with recall of apparent facts, and he seemed that he had gravitas from his years of experience. He was a law school graduate, she was the Idaho commoner. But the more the debate went on, we found out that it would be much better to have someone with common practical sense who knew a few things, and could talk to the American people truthfully rather than to make up a whole plethora of assertions which in retrospect, almost everything Biden said was false."
On the political climate:
"I ask people, didn’t they hate Reagan the way they hate Bush? Or didn’t they hate Nixon, remember the Watergate, gosh, the Vietnam War, I remember I was walking across as a high school student at UC Berkeley. I went up to visit, and it was just almost a war zone. We’re not having that. But I don’t think that we’re still, it’s not so multi-dimensional with the war, with a cultural divide, with a hatred toward a sitting president, with this complex financial meltdown that nobody can make sense of. And then the sense that America is at odds with almost all the world, and there’s these insidious pressures that are telling us here at home you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’ve got to emulate the EU, you’ve got to emulate Africa, you’ve got to emulate Asia. And it’s almost as if we’re 5th Century A.D. in North Africa trying to resist a tide that we can’t resist."
On democracy:
"I still have faith in democracy that the average person, if he’s given enough time and enough information, will usually come to the right decision. After all, we rejected Carterism for Reagan, and we rejected a series of people, whether it was Mondale or McGovern or Dukakis, or Kerry who had a very different view of where America should be going. "
On the Democratic presidential candidate:
"I think people were mad at Bush, they were mad and confused by the wars and the economic meltdown. And then suddenly, they do not want to vote for Obama, but they feel that they have to to express their dissatisfaction. But that being said, the more they’re starting to learn about all of these various manifestations of…I say manifestations, because we’re talking about FISA, public campaign financing, NAFTA, town meetings, guns, abortion, capital punishment. You and I could go on and on of the things that he’s flipped or moderated or adapted, rejected his former positions because…and the question is why is he doing that? And the fact is he had to go further to the center than almost any modern candidate. He was so far in that coterie of Chicago leftists. And then we find another disturbing pattern is that he only will disown these people when they come to the public attention in sort of a meltdown. So Reverend Wright, he could no more forsake Reverend Wright or give him up unless Reverend Wright is stupid enough to go to Ground Zero at the National Press Club and let the world see what an odious racist he is. Then suddenly, he’s gone. Bill Ayers, this man was e-mailing and phoning Bill Ayers up until 2005 after everybody had known that Ayers had said these ridiculous assertions that he was not going to feel guilty, he was unrepentant. And when did he throw him under the proverbial bus? Only when he ran for Senate, or he was elected to the Senate and he was going to start this presidential run. So there’s a very disturbing pattern that the people themselves intrinsically do not bother Obama. He feels comfortable with them. He only distances himself when he feels that they become a political liability."
On the financial crisis:
"(E)vents are overtaking him. The headlines about Wall Street, Fannie Mae, the whole Washington-New York in pretty much a cesspool, and so what happens is Obama shoots ahead because of the events of the day. And you said it a moment earlier when you said it was time. If we had eight more weeks of this campaign, and the focus on Obama, I suppose, McCain could catch up. But he’s going to have a great deal of trouble catching up unless he decides to be much tougher, to draw distinctions between the Obama of Chicago, the Obama that voted the most liberal Senator in the U.S. Senate, the Obama who had a particular view of the world. It’s no accident when Obama’s wife, I don’t want to pick on his wife, but when she serially says that she has no pride in the United States until her husband ran, or she’s mad at the United States, or this is a mean country, all of that is, is just a reification of the type of people they met, the type of conversations that were going on, the type of worldview they had. And that has to come out, or McCain is going to lose. And he’s going to have to tell people this is the biggest contrast since McGovern-Nixon in ’72, culturally, socially, politically, economically. We’ve got a European socialist who believes in statism and collectivized health care, high taxes, entitlements, and we have somebody who doesn’t. We have somebody who believes in world governance and deference to the United Nations, and utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, multiculturalism, oppression studies, and someone who doesn’t. But if he’s not going to walk the American people through that labyrinth and tell people very simply that if you vote for my opponent, the following is going to happen in your lives. And if you don’t, this is what’s going to happen if you vote for me. He needs…he needed to say in five seconds Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are not the entire problem with the economy, but they were the catalyst that started this, and here’s why, because greedy people on Wall Street piggybacked on the assumption that the federal government would back bad loans. Why did they back bad loans? Because Barack Obama and Barney Frank and this whole group of Democratic apparatchiks, under the guise of political correctness, lent money to people who had no business borrowing it, and who walked away from their obligations. And that caused a chain of events that now we’re supposed to think discredited capitalism. And he needs to tell people how that started."
"The Republican constituency is the guy who owns a hardware store, a paving company, sells cars, because he might make up to $250 or $300K, but to make that $250 or $300K, he’s got to work eighty hours a week, he takes risk, he can lose everything. The man at Goldman-Sachs who takes a thirty, or Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae who takes a $30 million dollar bonus, he doesn’t care if taxes are 50% or 70%. In fact, he feels better when they’re higher because it gives him a psychological cover that he’s liberal, that he’s caring, that he wants the government to do something that he in his own life doesn’t want to do. He doesn’t want to live in the ghetto, he doesn’t want to tutor a kid from the barrio. He doesn’t want to contribute very much money. We saw that with the comparative charities of Biden V. Palin."
"(I)t's been repeated again and again. We saw that with the Clintons when they gave their underwear and claimed them as deductions in the 90s."
On President Bush:
"(W)e’re not going to be able to assess him until later on. I think that his chief achievement was that at a time when everybody thought we were going to be struck in succession by terrorists, he and he alone guaranteed that we would not by the things he was willing to do – FISA, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act. All of these are caricatured now that they had worked, and they’ve stopped terrorism. Had he not stopped terrorism, he would have been criticized for not doing enough. He took out the two most odious regimes in the Middle East. There’s constitutional governments there. And I think that’s going to be his chief, he’s going to be like Truman. He’s going to go out in the 20s approval rating, we’re not going to like him for the next ten years. We’re going to look back in the context that he really did dismantle al Qaeda. They’re not able to repeat these assaults on us. And I think that’s the way to look at it, because I think a lot of our criticisms of what he did, my chief criticism is the increase in domestic spending at twice the rate Clinton did. And I think the reason he did that is he was willing to compromise too liberally with Democrats across the aisle, because he thought that in those critical years, 2003, 2004, 2005, and he was right, they would not pull the plug on the effort in Iraq, and he was willing to sacrifice a domestic agenda in some sense for that."
"I think that there were very few people given the pressures of the office at this particular time and this particular place in history that could have withstood that pressure, and he did."
"I think that he sincerely believes that history later on will justify what he did when history is given the same facts at he was. I think he actually believes that he gets this frightening intelligence every day. He talks to these leaders abroad candidly that tell him horrific things that could happen. He makes these decisions, and he feels either that people share these same anxieties that don’t have the same information, or there will come a time when they’ll be privy to this knowledge, and they’ll see that he made the right decision. But even Saturday Night Live, if you’ve watched those skits the last five years, he’s never portrayed as Machiavellian. He’s always portrayed as sort of somebody that Nancy Pelosi or a Barbara Boxer or a Harry Reid is taking advantage of because he refuses to get down to the same level. He’s not calling people communists in the way that people are calling him a Nazi or worse even."
"And he seems to be cognizant of critical periods in American history, the summer of 1864, the winter of 1776-77, the period in 1950 after we were almost pushed out of Korea. At key points where a lesser person in office would have capitulated to the pressures and the demands of the age, and that he didn’t, and the people of that age, whether it’s a Robert Taft, or it’s a Horace Greeley, we don’t remember those people. We only remember the people who said no, I’m not going to cater to public opinion. "
On the consequences of an Obama presidency:
"I think that if you get Reid together, and Pelosi and Obama, and the people who surround them, the legal team, the people who are going to be in the State Department, the people that are going to be at the Attorney General’s office, maybe right below the radar that the public won’t immediately fathom, I think you’re going to see an intensification of an ideology. They’re going to get further and further to the left. And it’s finally going to reach a critical mass, and people as they did in the Reagan revolution, are going to react. But I think that we’re going to have to go through this catharsis, because rightly or wrongly, people right now are blaming the conservative movement, Republicans, for things that I don’t think they’re culpable for. And I’ve never seen a period in my lifetime where all of the engines of the media, PBS, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New Yorker, the New Republic, all of these things that while they don’t reach as many people perhaps in terms of talk radio or Fox News, they have enormous cultural capital, and they set the tone, and I’ve never seen them all together working in concert to such an affect, that they’re saying George Bush is a Nazi, George Bush is a buffoon, Sarah Palin is a yokel, these people want to burn books, they want to cram down fundamentalist religion or else down their throat, and they’re scaring the people in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime in the United States."
"For all of the pathologies of Bill Clinton, you could see that he understood, maybe it was the process of triangulation under the guidance of Dick Morris, but he understood that welfare had gotten out of control, and that there were political benefits, for whatever reason, of having a balanced budget and a surplus. I don’t get that at all from these people. I get the impression, as you said, punitive. I think they’re going to try to have sort of war crimes trials, that they will have Senate and House hearings about the Bush administration. I am very worried about certain things in Europe. They’re going to be closely aligned with European socialists. I think that they’re going to inordinately defer to the United Nations, which after the reception we saw with Ahmadinejad was quite frightening as well."
On the Global War on Terrorism:
"If you look at what’s happened in Iraq, all the things that Mr. Obama and his associates said would not happen, did happen. The surge worked, and not just the surge, but the change of tactics and the grassroots repulsion at al Qaeda by Sunni peoples, tribes. There was a reconciliation in the government. It’s a constitutional framework. They’re working out oil, they’re working out district representations. Iran did not go in and take that as part of its fiefdom. It’s now isolated. And in fact, Iraq could be as destabilizing to Iran as Iran has tried to be to Iraq. But more importantly, the question was after 9/11, where were we going to fight al Qaeda? We went into Afghanistan and properly so, and we found immediately they had this sanctuary in a nuclear Islamic country where they were untouchable. And it would risk, really, a type of escalation that we weren’t willing to take to go in there, at least overtly as Obama wanted to do. So we went in and we got rid of somebody who had been a long abettor of terrorists in Saddam Hussein, and immediately our enemies announced this is the new battlefield. They flocked to it, and we killed them by the thousands, we discredited them, not only discredited them militarily, but we discredited them culturally, socially, politically, ethically in the eyes of their natural constituency, the Sunni tribesmen, right in the heart of the ancient caliphate. They suffered a terrible defeat, they’re disorganized, and during this whole process, they were not able to come over and attack us, which they promised was going to happen in a serial fashion. And yet, and if you look at all of that, the obstacles to that, we tragically lost over four thousand, but this is like trying to conduct the one campaign in World War II in the Marianas or something, where we lost commiserate casualties. So for all the mistakes that were made, and there are mistakes made in every war, it turned out to not only be valuable for our strategic interest in the Middle East, but it had a direct affect in attriting and hurting al Qaeda in a fashion that we had no other theater of operations to do that in. And that’s lost on the American public, I’m afraid."
On the geopolitical impact of the Iraq invasion:
"(W)e know that Mr. Qaddafi called the Italian prime minister and said just what you said, that he didn’t want to end up as did Saddam Hussein. And remember, it didn’t happen just after the invasion. It happened about six weeks after the capture of Saddam Hussein, and that had a powerful effect on a similarly-minded dictator when he saw the fate of Saddam Hussein. That’s when he made the decision."
"(T)he problem was that all this came in a context where George Bush was a unilateralist preempter, had done nothing good but make the world hate us. And yet when you look at the world and you don’t listen to the BBC or read Le Monde in Paris, you start to see that a billion people in India appreciate free trade with the United States, that China is not necessarily anti-American, that Russia, to the degree that it fears us, it’s because that we’ve stood up to them in a way that I don’t think Obama will. So I don’t get by this idea that because there’s people in the Middle East and Europe that don’t like us and they’re far more vocal, that this is a referendum on the morality of the United States. I don’t want to be liked by people necessarily in the Middle East. I don’t really necessarily want to be liked by people in a Paris salon. And to the extent that George Bush is not liked by those people, it’s not necessarily a bad thing."
On Iran's nuclear program:
"(A)s Obama says, it’s a game-changer if Iran were to get a nuclear device. What does that mean, a game-changer? That’s intolerable. What he’s not telling you is that if I choose to make sure that they don’t have a nuclear device, then that means that basically the United States is going to have to impose an embargo or a Naval blockade because the Europeans will still try to profit to the 11th hour, or even a military strike. I, Barack Obama, must be hated by people in Berlin. There’s no more Victory Column great extravaganzas for me. There’s no more fawning interviews with Der Spiegel. It’s going to be hatred from those people. I’m going to be a unilateralist pre-empter, and I’m going to do that, and all the people in the Muslim world and the Arab world that love me and fawn over me are going to hate me as worse than you know what. Okay, I’m willing to do that for a principle. Do you think he’s going to be willing to do that, or John McCain?"
"(W)hen he feels emboldened enough to go to the United Nations just a few blocks away from the Wall Street meltdown, and for the first time not just say the Israelis are culpable, but Jews in general, and talk about in Hitlerian terms an international Jewish banking conspiracy. It’s what he basically was saying, and he felt not only would he get applause, but there would be liberal people in the United States, as happened, that would take him out to dinner in congratulations for that speech. So I’m very worried. I’ve never seen this level of anti-Semitism, I’ve never seen this level of appeasement among our elites. And he’s basically really read the Western mind. He’s basically said do you want a nuclear Iran to threaten you? Do you want a missile that can threaten Frankfurt? Because that’s what I’ll do unless you are nice to me, unless you call off George Bush and Dick Cheney, and then we can live together. And then once we get into that mindset, it’s going to be very easy to obtain that goal."
On appeasement:
"(I)t reminds me so much of the 1930s when Hitler was making these absolutely atrocious statements and making a fool of himself at Nuremberg. And what did the people in France and England say? They’d say you know, the Prussian Junker class is really running Germany, and these are the old Hindenburg-Ludendorff people. Or they’d say the industrial is corrupt and these people are really running Germany. They wouldn’t, this man is not typical. And what they didn’t understand was that these people thought they may, but they found out that A) he was either useful, or B) he was far smarter than they were, or C) and most likely of all, that Hitler was an expression of the resentments and the anger of a whole humiliated German nation in the way that Ahmadinejad has sized up the Iranian people’s frustrations, and how they can be manipulated in a way that’s even more effective than the mullahs themselves."
"(W)ho wants to face that awful reality that this man is unstable, and there’s a slight chance that he might welcome a nuclear exchange, because then he could tell the Islamic world that the downtrodden Shia, of all people, destroyed the Zionist entity when the Sunnis could not, and that they are now with, in martyrdom in Heaven. So there’s that fear that you might be dealing with something that right after Afghanistan, Iraq, this financial problem. Who wants to deal with it? It’s the same mindset that after going through the horrors of World War I, you weren’t going to ask the French people to say look, you didn’t do that in World War I. You really didn’t win. Now you’ve got a bigger problem with Hitler. They were not up to it. And it’s very hard to do. I have empathy in some ways for the liberal left, because you’re trying to say to them okay, Iraq is a mess, Afghanistan is a mess, in your way of thinking, the economy’s a mess, and you know what? There’s somebody out there who does not believe in the world court of the Hague. He’s not going to believe in the United Nations, and you can’t just do a Milosevic on him. It’s a very fundamental problem, and he wants to destroy the survivors of the Holocaust. And we have to deal with him. We either have to get the Europeans and the whole world to stop commerce completely with him. And if we can’t do that, we have to blockade his country and shut off his trade. And if we can’t do that at the eleventh hour, we’re going to have to use some type of military option. And boy, once you do that, you sort of negate the whole idea of peace and conflict resolution studies, dialogue"
"(W)hat we don’t want to do is have a war with Iran. And the only way you’re going to guarantee a war with Iran is if this man gets a hold of nuclear weapons, and he has guided missiles, and he starts pointing them not only at Israel, but he starts to dictate the oil production levels, or the type of governments with large Shia minorities in places along the Gulf, or he’d start to tell Germany that he wants more favorable trade policy. And given what the Europeans have showed the last eight or nine years, it’s really, it’s very depressing, because it’s a very amoral foreign policy that’s based entirely on local and regional self-interest and real politick. And Ahmadinejad has sized up Europe as no other person has in years. "
On misplaced moral equivalence:
"(T)here are people in the United States who would like to see, for a variety of reasons, radical Islam defeat the United States. And they live in the United States. But I don’t think that necessarily they’re in the Obama campaign. I think the people in the Obama campaign really do believe that all of the problems in the world today are caused by either a lack of communication or a bellicose stance by the United States. And what’s scary about that is in a pattern of moral equivalence, they don’t see anything exceptional about the United States. They don’t think our Constitution, our multiracial Maritocratic society is any different than Indonesia or Brazil, and that’s scary."
On the civil-military disconnect over the successes in Iraq:
"(F)irst of all, they’re a little astounded that people don’t recognize the extent or the degree of their achievement in Iraq. I mean, they not only went over there into a foreign landscape, they understood Islam finally, they figured out the tribal system, they did reconstruction. And then what’s never remarked upon, they went into the allies of Baghdad and Fallujah and Baquba, and tried to help people who were suffering, and did that simultaneously while fighting hand to hand against some of the most wicked people in the world, and defeated them on their own terms and their own turf. And it was an extraordinary achievement. And I feel that to the extent that they don’t get credit for that, they harbor, the proper word’s not resentment, but they feel a yearning. Why don’t people recognize us? Why do they keep saying that Iraq was the worst decision, it was a mistake, it was terrible, that you go over there, and you see what they’re doing, and you just don’t get the impression that their the Wehrmacht terrorizing people. I think that Obama said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is killing innocent civilians so that we’re putting pressure on the government. We’re not doing that. There’s never been a more careful, more scientific, more surgical military than our own. And they did a wonderful thing in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they did the near impossible, and that message is totally lost on the American people."
"(T)he surge worked, yes. The Anbar awakening worked, yes. Change of tactics was necessary, yes. Petraeus was a savior, yes. But please remember that in 2003, ’04, ’05 and ’06, there were unknown Americans who went out with the wrong tactics, the wrong type of knowledge, and they still defeated the enemy, and they killed some very, very evil, powerful people. And their absence today allowed this to happen, and we want to remember them."
More on the geopolitical consequences of a successful invasion of Iraq:
"(A)fter 2003 in that brilliant three week campaign, and up until December, then we had a deterrent effect, and you saw that with the Cedar Revolution and the events in Lebanon, and Libya, and Pakistan. And then when the criticism mounted and we were told that we were Hitlerian and we were losing, then it had the opposite effect. And now we’re starting to see a restoration of the prestige of the United States, especially when people look at the U.S. military, vis-?-vis the NATO allies. Remember what Obama and others said, Kerry and Obama, that Afghanistan was the good war, Iraq was the bad war. That was the multilateral war, the allies were there, NATO was there. It was all the right war, that was where bin Laden…and we’re finding out that Iraq was more solvable, and that the U.S. military was far more capable than its allies. And the problem with Afghanistan, in some cases, is Pakistan, it’s insolvable, and also the nature of our allies in NATO. They’re not really allies as we usually use that term."
On the culture wars and self-censorship:
"I’m more confident about our military because of the type of people in the military. The Petraeus mindset is encouraging. But what I’m worried about is, this was a war with a Western enlightenment and the forces of medievalism, if I could use that term, not that the Medieval period was necessarily all bad. But nevertheless, look at all the things in enlightenment. Publish a novel, not just Salman Rushdie, but Jewel Of Medina. We’re self-censoring ourselves. If you think of films, Obsession or Fitna, you can’t even do a film in Europe. How about journalism? We can…Jonathan Chait can write an article in a wartime entitled why I hate George Bush in the New Republic, but you dare not make a cartoon mocking Islam. We’re talking about religion. We’re all worried about whether Sarah Palin burned a book. How about the Pope? All he did was quote, I think it was a 14th Century Byzantine treatise, a letter to an Islamic sultan in the Ottomans, and all of a sudden, people started dying. So if you look at the classic genres of the Enlightenment, in journalism, in religion, novels, film, we in the West are self-censoring ourselves because we’re either afraid or we’re so indoctrinated with the culture of multiculturalism that we feel that no other culture can be any worse than the West. And that’s what I’m very worried about. We are afraid as Westerners to say look, look at the globalized world, look at constitutional government, look at capitalism, look at the stunning advances in technology in medicine. Whether you like it or not, it came from, only came from a paradigm that was political, economic, social, freedom, individualism, secularism, rationalism, constitutional government that came out of Europe, Greece, Rome, the Christian Church, et cetera. And if we’re not going to defend and articulate that, that’s what I’m worried about, and we’re not doing it."
On the hollowing out of Western civilization in the U.S. (and why there's reason for hope):
"(E)ach generation is a link in a large chain. And it just takes one generation to give up or to age or decline or to become incompetent, and suddenly the whole civilization is lost. What I’m worried about is, because of our educational system, we don’t a critical mass of individuals who’ll say I’m a Westerner, of all races, all religions, it doesn’t matter, but I’m a Westerner in the way I think, I’m an American, and I’m unapologetic about it. And it has given us not colonialism, racism. Those are the sins of mankind. Look at Islam. Look at China today. But I gave you the remedies for that. And only did this paradigm do that. And we don’t have people in the universities, in politics, in journalism and in the media who are willing to say that."
"I hope that we have more people like Webb and more people like Petraeus. I just don’t see that they’re as common on the landscape as the people who believe antithetically to them. And they’re necessary. But you know, this country, we could have had this conversation in 1861, and all of a sudden, where did Billy Sherman come from, William Tecumseh Sherman? He was a complete failure until he was 39 years old, and suddenly, the right man at the right time. I don’t know where Matthew Ridgeway came, but all of a sudden, everybody thought MacArthur was a genius, and Ridgeway saved Korea. So we always have been saved in our hour of need by people among us that we didn’t appreciate in times of peace. "
"I spend a lot of time as a professor at the Naval Academy and going into Iraq, and then being involved with a security fellow program at the Hoover Institution. There are some absolutely brilliant colonels in the U.S. Army. These are people with PhDs, combat experience, and they’re not just a dozen. They’re in the very hundreds. And I see them of all political backgrounds, but they’re absolutely brilliant. And their influence is expanding beyond the military. And they’re saying and writing things in an American context that are absolutely phenomenal."
On what Sen. McCain needs to say to win:
"(Y)ou may not like George Bush, you may think I’m old, but look, we are in a critical time, and everything that in the past has worked in recession and depression I’m for, and everything that hasn’t my opponent is trying to fawn on you. And we know that in times of war, you need a steady person who has confidence in American exceptionalism, and is willing to be unpopular to get us through this crisis, and my opponent defers too many times to too many people abroad, and he’s not willing to lose that Messianic image of himself to make the hard, tough decisions. He’d rather be liked that do the right thing."
posted by Consul-At-Arms at 6:32 AM
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