More of Victor Davis Hanson’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism (And yes: He’s still a conservative Maureen Dowd)

Some commenters were mad that I equated National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson with the execrable Maureen Dowd. Only problem is: He keeps making my case for me.

Here he is today, posting at The Corner:

Since January 2009, we have seen plenty of radical Islamists apprehended in the United States while planning mayhem on a massive scale, and even more violence committed by Islamic terrorists abroad in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been a) serially assuring the Muslim world (often literally amid explosions going off nearby) that we are atoning for and hitting the reset button on the insensitive and cowboyish Bush administration that fostered unnecessary tensions, b) making the case that a kinder and gentler United States is apologizing for 200 years of assorted sins, and c) assuring Americans that the days of unnecessary, Constitution-shredding anti-terrorism policies are over (albeit while quietly keeping intact the Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, tribunals, etc.). Why, then, are these darn terrorists, whether domestic or foreign, not getting the new “hope and change” message? (Or are they?)

I might not’ve noticed the post if Mike Potemra, another Corner poster, hadn’t commented:

Imagine if someone wrote in October of 2001, “The Republicans promised us that they would be better at keeping the nation safe. But we just lost 3,000 innocent lives to the terrorists — why are the terrorists not getting the ‘tough on national security’ message?” We conservatives would quite correctly have denounced this criticism as both simplistic and opportunistic – but at least it would have been criticism of an actual, you know, failure. The U.S. under Obama, in Victor’s own telling, has been busting the radical Islamists and breaking up the terrorist plots. I congratulate the president and all the federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials involved, and wish them continued success in doing so. There are legitimate questions to be raised about our current anti-terrorism policy; this approach, I think, is wrong-headed and counterproductive.

Right. Hanson has so committed himself to his arch satire of Obama that he’s satirizing success. At least he didn’t use Latin this time.

National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is just Maureen Dowd with a better knowledge of Latin

If you’ve never heard of Hanson, here’s an excellent and representative example of his writing for National Review’s blog:

Morituri te salutant [Victor Davis Hanson]

The Victory Column and vero possumus megalomania of 2008 have now led to the deification of Obama as our new Caesar, man of letters (who, in the ancient tradition, enslaved a million in Gaul), and to his communications czar’s praising the embattled Mao (her favorite “political philosopher”) for leading China’s Communist legions to glorious victory over those running-dog Nationalists. Add in the classical-column props at the convention and the Moses-like talk about the seas’ receding and the planet’s cooling, and I think this administration assumes we have a Holy Man in the White House. And when you consider the depiction of Fox News as heresy, Rush as the anti-Christ, and the NEA as the medieval church, it all gets, well, sort of creepy.

He does this kind of thing regularly. He’s supposedly an intellectual because he’s written a book about military history (which was hilariously and devastatingly debunked by an actual military historian) but this stuff is really more his stock in trade these days: Every few days, he writes 200 words or so mocking Obama as a “messiah” — and ask yourself when, despite the missteps, anybody in Obama’s crew has ever referred to Fox News, Limbaugh or the NEA in anything approaching religious terms — collects his National Review paycheck and returns a few days later to do the same thing.

It’s all rather Dowdian, his obsession with issues of personality and symbology instead of using his classics education to actually illuminate his readers on the issues of the day. It makes for rather flamboyant reading experience, but I don’t come away feeling like I’ve learned something or heard an argument that I have to carefully consider or respond to. It’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism masquerading as something deeper.