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“Years ago,” Victor Davis Hanson tells us in his latest column, “[President Barack] Obama invited the Russians into Syria, empowered dictatorial Syria, berated Israel nonstop and all but ignored the violence of Iran’s surrogate terrorists: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
“But after Oct. 7, Israel retaliated to the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians with all-out war against Hamas and Hezbollah — rendering these once-feared terrorists nearly impotent.” And then, hauling us before a present historical tribune, he notes, “The 2024 anemic Democratic campaign and the Trump Electoral College and popular-vote victories — combined with record defections of Hispanic and African American voters from the Democratic Party to Trump — proved a resounding rejection of the Obama legacy and his surrogates’ left-wing visions.”
This is, to be sure, fairly rough handling, but then history is a rough handler, and Hanson’s view of Obama’s “lost mystique” likely is both prescient – Hanson is an historian – and historically accurate.
“The Obamas,” Hanson writes, “ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia. Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third term, ‘phone it in’ administration. Or, as a wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term: ’If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in . . .’”
American presidents from Obama through President-Elect Donald Trump’s second term in office owe Benjamin Netanyahu a great deal. He has, through his military campaign against the enemies of Israel, reshaped American policy in the Middle East – for the better. Hamas is on its last legs. Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon is but a shadow of its former self. Iran is tottering. Syria, without the Assads, father and son, at the helm, has dissolved into its former condition as a collection of antagonistic and sometimes warring tribes. For Netanyahu, war against enemies bent upon the destruction of Israel has been diplomacy by other means.
Past American administrations should be grateful to him. But, as Hanson points out, Barack the puppeteer and his puppet Biden would be grateful only for a peace that is no peace and the destruction of Netanyahu’s political career. All the obstructionists to a rational policy in the Middle East have now been considerably weakened – including Netanyahu’s American political critics, Biden and Obama – both of whom have lost luster in the face of Netanyahu’s Churchillian assault on the enemies of Israel. Churchill served notice to a doubting world in June 1940 that Britain “shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!”
Asked what he would do if the Obama-Biden administration should withhold armaments necessary for an Israeli victory over terrorists financed by Iran, Netanyahu said, “We will fight [against our enemies] with our fingernails.”
Political analysts who secretly admire America’s turn to the left under Obama-Biden now are concerning themselves with the possible “autocratic” regime of a returning President Trump during the next four years. The following four years will be, they promise us, autocratic if not dictatorial. This is mostly campaign buncombe that had been a conspicuous failure in the recently concluded 2024 elections. The rhetorical product of Democrat presidential hopeful Vice president Kamala Harris did not sell. Nothing could be more obvious.
Writing of the Obama era, which includes Biden and Harris -- Hanson tells us, “Their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation — hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare and weaponization of the government.”
Leftist socialist rhetoric has become a dead bell. It no longer summons and activates either the national imagination or the spiritual ethos of the general public. Only the establishment of gulags for wealthy entrepreneurs can at this point save Democrat-quasi-socialists. When last heard from, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was proposing a 100% expropriation of the wealth of obscene American billionaires. And if the filthy rich, relying upon the safe haven of constitutional property laws, refuse to go quietly into Sanders’ good night, well then – Get thee to a gulag!
In politics, Hollywood entertainment and pop-cultural analysis, the truth usually follows – it rarely precedes – the eulogies, but here Hanson has set our feet on a historically righteous path.
