Tuesday, April 9, 2019

The World Doesn’t Care About Groupthink

Victor Davis Hanson
Among the political classes, both being slurred or slurring others of like kind in disgusting fashion is no big deal. Apparently, it is just the usual foul water that such kindred fish always swim in.

Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley  
. . . "In turn, Democrats gave up their suspicions of big money, as they canonized liberal Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their wealth was okay, since the creators of it were progressives and dressed like Woodstock hipsters as they spread their billions freely among progressive think tanks, foundations, and political campaigns. 

From Too Little to Too Much Oil  
Less than 15 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that we’d reached “peak oil,” or that the U.S., and indeed the world at large, had already extracted more petroleum than what remained beneath the ground.

"Then, in unheralded fashion and quite silently, American frackers and horizontal drillers made such a term entirely obsolete. The U.S. went from a superpower hobbled by an insatiable need for imported oil to the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and, soon, the likely largest exporter of fossil fuels. In the same vein, the Middle East and especially the Persian Gulf transmogrified from being the nexus of American foreign policy to nearly irrelevant in U.S. strategic thinking. If Saudi Arabia was once accused of virtually running American foreign policy, it is now seen at the other extreme as a minor medieval bother. A few thousand people in obscurity in the fracking industry, without government grants and without the media fawning over them as they had green legends such as Al Gore, literally changed the lives of millions of Americans at home and their country’s status abroad." . . . (Emphasis mine, TD)  

The Old New Nazi Slur  
Antifa on the campuses, it appears.
"Between 2006 and 2008, George W. Bush was reduced by the anti-war Left left to a veritable Nazi. Op-eds, documentaries, plays, and novels fantasized without apology about his assassination. Mainstream politicians including Senators Robert Byrd, John Glenn, and Al Gore compared the Bush administration to Brownshirts, Fascists, and Nazis. Indeed, so hated was Bush by his critics that that they stooped to accuse him of plotting near genocide during the government’s often incompetent response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005 that virtually destroyed large swaths of New Orleans. No slur or smear was too low to throw against the president.
"Now this world of Nazi boilerplate has been turned upside down. In the age of Trump, Bush has been rehabilitated as a sober and judicious centrist by even his left-wing critics, in part to use him as an establishment club to batter the sometimes crass Donald Trump." . . .



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