Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online compares the United States to George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Given the political sympathies and self-interest of the present mainstream media and cultural elite, when the Obama administration came into power in 2009, we crossed out prior, out-of-power edicts and wrote new establishment versions in their place — as if no one would ever quite know the difference, or would soon forget if he did. Many of us at the time wrote about the nearly Orwellian change in liberal mentality required to accommodate Obama’s many contradictions.
Rich people were suddenly not all bad blue-stocking Republicans, but also hip, valuable Silicon Valley progressives in flip-flops who, with some reluctance, outsourced and off-shored.
In our past eight years of historical revisionism, huge political contributions — like the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies given by multi-billionaire financial speculator George Soros — were now helpful for democracy if only they were given to left-wing causes.
Once-liberal public campaign-financing laws and limits on fund-raising applied to all candidates except Barack Obama, who became the largest recipient of campaign cash in election history.
Drone assassinations were suddenly, in 2009, no longer proof of Bush’s efforts to kill the innocent abroad, but sophisticated tools in the Obama’s sober anti-terrorism tool kit. Radical Islamic terrorism simply vanished from our collective minds. …
… No sooner did the progressive media and bureaucracy establish new barn-wall rules than Obama got set to leave office, soon to be replaced by a President Trump. Now the leftist project must scramble to hit reverse and start all over from the beginning.
On the lighter side, after 2016, expect that the sight of a president golfing in sports attire and shades will be proof of his indolence and privilege, not necessary downtime as it was for an overworked and harried Obama.
