Too Much Pork for Just One Fork

A few scattered thoughts on the calliope music emanating from Victor Davis Hanson’s head:

(1) Hanson on energy policy: “Strike a deal on energy: allow drilling in Anwar and off the coasts in exchange for tougher mileage standards on trucks and SUVs.”

Call it a regional pet peeve if you must, but I’m of the mind that if you don’t know that ANWR is a bloody acronym, you should forever be prohibited from referring to it in the context of a “serious” policy discussion — if we expand the definition of “serious” to include statements (e.g., “tougher standards,” etc.) that are so completely dislodged from reality that one might as well ask for a pony.

(2) Hanson on immigration:

“Put aside worry for the moment about guest workers and amnesties and just close the border now—through more fencing, more agents, more employer fines, and offering a verifiable ID system.

Introduce a spending freeze. Since the revenues are soaring, the current deficit is a result of government spending exceeding the rate of inflation.

I really don’t know what to say here. Those two paragraphs actually appeared in that order.

(3) Hanson on Israel and Jimmy Carter:

Unlike blacks in his own Georgia of the 1950s, Israeli Arabs vote and enjoy civil liberties, perhaps a million of them, with another 100,000 plus as illegal aliens. In fact, they enjoy rights not found in other Arab countries, inasmuch as Jews treat Arabs inside their own country not just better than Arabs treat Jews (they ethnically cleansed 500,000 from the major Arab capitals in the 1960s), but in the sense of civil liberties better than Arabs treat Arabs.

There’s something beyond grotesque, I would submit, in the suggestion that cheap, exploited day laborers from Israeli-occupied Palestine are to be regarded merely as “illegal aliens.” There’s also something dishonest in the assumption that Carter’s “apartheid” analogy merely refers to the status of Arabs living within the internationally-recognized borders of the Israeli state. Then again, Hanson probably believes the territories have been “liberated” rather than “occupied” in the first place, just as he congratulates Israel for barely surpassing — if even that — the appalling record of civil liberties established by the United States’ other regional allies.

(4) Hanson on World War II:

To me it was summed up when Democrats alleged that “We took our eye off Afghanistan by going into Iraq”. My Lord!—this is a country that fought Italy, Japan, and Germany all at once, and was in an inferno on Okinawa while racing eastward past the Rhine, while bombing Berlin, while slogging up through Italy, while igniting the Japanese mainland.

OK, Victor. Your priapism is duly noted. But can we dispense once and for all with the suggestion that America’s experience during World War II — that is, total mobilization against an array of nations that were themselves absolutely mobilized for war — pre-authorizes us to wage several half-baked, disconnected, poorly-theorized adventures simultaneously?

As for the question of when it was “summed up,” to me it was summed up when the President announced “Mission Accomplished,” or when he claimed not to spend that much time thinking about Osama bin Laden, or when he joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction, or when he claimed that the United States doesn’t torture anyone. When was it “summed up” for the rest of you?