What Bush Needs

The ever readable Victor Davis Hanson has a great article over at National Review. He argues that Bush is expected to do the impossible in the next four years. Considering the great strides made by the post-Sept. 11 United States, the rest of the world is largely ungrateful:

[C]ountries such as Pakistan are more likely to demonize the United States as the great disrupter of traditional culture rather than praise it as a free trader, financial-aid giver, and provider of expertise that is pulling them out of the Dark Ages. So George Bush will be damned at home for outsourcing and destroying American jobs and damned abroad by newly upscale foreign elites for destroying their old (and now unwanted) way of life.

Hanson continues that such hatred and hypocrisy is not limited to the Middle East,

Europe offers a similar paradox. Our Western cousins have chosen a path far different from our own, on almost every social, economic, and military issue. Throughout this war Europeans have snickered that over-the-top Americans blast their way across the globe, leaving needless wreckage in their wake, in their Team America-like search for mythical jihadists. But ask the Dutch, who, as thanks for crafting the most liberal society in Europe, are now living in fear of a jihadist assassination campaign. Or talk to the Spanish — whose appeasement after the Madrid bombing earned them an Islamist plot to obliterate their Supreme Court judges. France — in its old blow-up-Greenpeace mood — claims that it only supports the use of force in extremis, but then almost immediately exploded the tiny air force of the Ivory Coast on news that nine of its soldiers were killed, prompting thousands of Africans to hit the streets in anti-Gallic rage.

American elites do not escape Hanson's criticism either,

But perhaps the greatest paradox is here at home, where our world has been turned upside down. Much of what the media reported about the campaign was false — from suspicious exit polls and biased projections to forged documents. Grassroots populists got out the Republican vote; mercenary workers did less well for the Democrats. There was no new youth landslide vote, much less a novel dynamic 18-to-24-year-old Kerry surge. The Hispanic vote was neither huge nor overwhelmingly Democratic. The Republicans were swamped by Democrat fat cats in raising outside 527 soft money, designed to circumvent liberal reformist law. Blogs, talk radio, and cable news were not only more influential, but often more intellectually honest than CBS, NPR, and the New York Times. The former represented blue-collar America, the latter the sophisticates of the Ivy League and East Coast. Such is our strange society in which democratic populism is now defined by pampered New York metropolitan columnists, billionaire heiresses, financial speculators, and a weird assortment of embittered novelists, bored rock stars, and out-of-touch Hollywood celebs.

Really a great read.
- posted by Base10 @ 6:38 PM