On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Ronald Reagan asked of the Allied forces who had given their lives, "Where do we find such men?" A good question. Alas, it is also a question that tends to recur when observing a very different caliber of man. Take, for instance, National Review blogger Victor Davis Hanson. Where do we find such a man? Here he is, yesterday:
It works like this: The ghetto resident, the denizen of the barrio, the abandoned and divorced waitress with three young children, can all chart their poverty and unhappiness not to accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality or drug use, or simple tragedy, but rather exclusively to a system that is rigged to ensure oppression on the basis of race, class, and gender—often insidious and unfathomable except to the sensitive and gifted academic or community organizer.
So Obama combines the age-old belief that the state is there to level the playing field (rather than protect the rights of the individual and secure the safety of the people from foreign threats), with the postmodern notion that government must recompensate those by fiat on the basis on their race or class or gender. Remember all that, and everything from the Professor Gates incident, to the dutiful attendance at the foot of Rev. Wright to Van Jones become logical rather than aberrant. Michelle Obama could make $300,000 and she will always be more a victim than the Appalachian coal miner who earns $30,000, by virtue of her race and gender.
This--one of Hanson's riper outpourings--appeared in Pajamas Media, not National Review (does the magazine know that it only gets Hanson's more cursory efforts?). Anyway, it is refreshing that Hanson is so willing to give the world a window into the deepest recesses of his mind.