BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The chief tenet of postmodernism
is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to
manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist
president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of
shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove
transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David
Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s
mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a
value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together
and presented as truth to serve the higher moral narrative: a young biracial
idealist searching for his identity in a mostly racist and oppressive America.
To the degree that Dreams
from My Father enhanced that narrative, then all of what was in it was
“true” — even the literary agent’s bio attesting that the exotic author was born
in faraway Kenya.
For the fabulist Obama, the past is a vague mess with shifting narratives
that can serve noble contemporary causes. Take World War II — the old war that
supposedly proves that victory is now an obsolete term, since, as Obama
explained, Japanese Emperor Hirohito capitulated to General MacArthur,
apparently on the deck of the Missouri, in a rare act never to happen
again. Obama’s own grandfather was in the forefront of stopping Nazism, and the
more dramatic the circumstances the better — so who cares whether the Russians,
and not an American unit, liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka?
Indeed, the war is a sort of a vague haze where Nazi death camps become
“Polish” and Pearl Harbor was hit with “the bomb.” If it is useful while
speaking in Cairo to pretend that the Islamic world helped to prompt the
European Renaissance (which benefitted enormously from the flight of Greek
scholars as Constantinople was threatened by the Ottoman Turks) and
Enlightenment (which ignited a Romantic interest in freeing Greece from Islam),
then so be it. If Córdoba had few, if any, Muslims during the Spanish
Inquisition, who cares, if we wish to hold up the Muslims there as beacons of
tolerance in comparison to murderous Catholics?
No American has any idea whether recess appointments, executive privilege,
executive orders, or filibusters are to be considered good, bad, or indifferent,
since Senator/President Obama has damned and embraced them all. I vaguely
remember that at one time Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, and preventive
detention were either of no value or unconstitutional, and trying Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed in a civilian court and prosecuting CIA agents for supposedly too harsh
interrogations were good. But that was all more than three years in the past,
and hundreds of “Make no mistake about it”s and “Let me be perfectly clear”s
ago.
I recall that there were once admonitions that President Obama could not by
fiat enact amnesty or special programs for African-Americans based on race, and
that he could not come out unequivocally for gay marriage. But who knows, since
someone did enact amnesty, set up a special bureau for African-American
education, and use support for gay marriage as a wedge issue in the 2012
campaign.
It is demagogic to suggest that anyone in the Obama administration
deliberately leaked national-security secrets to favored New York and Washington
reporters, so leaks about Predator-drone targeting, cyber war against Iran,
double agents in Yemen, and the details of the Osama bin Laden mission were not
really leaks at all, or, if they were, they came from non-administration
sources.
The Obama health-care plan was once different from Hillary Clinton’s in
that it never included an individual mandate, but then it did have a mandate,
then it had a tax instead, and it ended up with a penalty. The only constant is
that names change as circumstances dictate. Barack Obama does not take money
from oil companies, hire lobbyists, approve of earmarks, or raise money from
Wall Street, but somebody with that name did. The new civility is “punish our
enemies.” Voter intimidation is asking for an ID at the polls — it is not
trying to make it more difficult for those in the military to vote. Developing
domestic energy means canceling the Keystone pipeline and putting vast areas of
federal lands off limits to gas and oil production. If the private sector goes
ahead, despite federal regulations and discouragement, with new fracking and
horizontal drilling, then the Obama administration achieved record levels of
domestic oil and gas production.
Someone said something about cutting the deficit in half within four years
and, through borrowing, forcing unemployment under 6 percent, but I am not sure
any more who it was — given that that was 42 months of 8 percent–plus
unemployment and $5 trillion in borrowed money ago.
No one knows what “reset” with Russia was, or is, or will be; it didn’t so
much fail as simply got erased. Nor can anyone figure out whether the dissidents
in the streets of Tehran in 2009 were noble or to be ignored, or why exactly we
belatedly supported the ouster of Mubarak, or what exactly turned Qaddafi from
a monstrous oil exporter who had to be appeased to a really monstrous oil
exporter who had to be removed, or why we had to reopen our embassy in Damascus
as a gesture to the “reformer” Assad, who is now a murderous non-reformer who
must go.
I am sure Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush flip-flopped and did
things that they had said they would not, but there was always the clear sense
that their hypocrisies were adjudicated by some sort of standard. With President
Obama there is neither a reality nor a standard, just words that so often have
no connection to the real world, past or present.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis
Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution and the author most recently of The End of
Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
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