In trying to crucify President Obama for failings that do
not amount to a hill of beans, Victor Hanson made a mountain of that quasi hill
using the double-trick technique of talking from both sides of his mouth, and of
projecting into the President what he sees in his own extreme right wing idols.
Hanson did all that in his column: “Obama's Newspeak” which also came under the
subtitle: “The meaning of words, and history itself, are malleable when It
comes to our president and his record.” It was published on February 13, 2014
in National Review Online.
The author takes the approach of describing the world of
Obama as he has imagined it, and has constructed it in his own mind. To do
this, he borrows ideas from George Orwell's two novels “1984” and “Animal
Farm.” As in those novels, America
is becoming Orwellian, says Hanson, because under President Obama, a vast
government effort is underway to deceive and control the people. And he lets it
be known that this is done by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while
rewriting the past.
Fair enough, but where is the evidence, Victor? Here is one:
“The president reminds the people that the U.S. has produced a record level of
new oil and natural gas.” That is true, Vic. Do you have the numbers? Will you
disprove that claim? No, I will not “but didn't Obama radically curtail leases
for just such new energy production on federal lands?” Yes, he did but oil and
gas are not restricted to federal lands; they are found in other places too.
And know this, my friend, no matter what the government does
(any government not just America 's,)
the oil companies will manage the extraction of oil and gas the way they see
fit. Obama or no Obama, those companies were going to proceed in the way that
they did during the last 5 years, 10 years even 100 years. They always – that's
always – keep in the ground what they believe ought to stay there, and they
extract what they feel should come out when they determine it is time to bring
it out.
Victor Orwell Hanson probably knew all that but he still
wished to stick it to the President. What could he have done to accomplish
this? You can see it; he deploys his most formidable writing trick. Borrowing
an image from Animal Farm where the edicts were changed by the pigs to suit the
requirements of the day, Hanson writes: “Have the edicts on the barn wall been
changed again, with the production of new oil and gas suddenly going from bad
to good?”
Do you see the trick used here, my friend? The Orwellian Victor
Hanson mentioned something that happens in Animal Farm – which is that the
edicts were changed to change reality – and he used this analogy to make
believe that in claiming the production of oil and gas went from bad to good,
also changes reality. With this, he has managed to put out a lie simply by
asking a question without having to stick his neck out challenging the claim
made by Mr. Obama to the effect that the production of oil and gas has
increased. Good writing but deceptive and dishonest.
Now, with the exception of the promise that he will close Guantanamo Bay Guantanamo except that people of the Hanson
stripe inside the Congress and outside of it have been the ones to block the
project. To claim otherwise is to make George Orwell turn in his grave.
As to the economic projections, anyone that is old enough to
remember the Primary debates that took place between George H. W. Bush and
Ronald Reagan on the subject of economics, should recall that they brought out
such memorable terms as “Voodoo Economics.” And yet, it was this voodoo that
Bush helped implement when chosen to be Vice President to Reagan's Presidency,
and it was this voodoo that gave the Reagan name the sterling quality he now
enjoys.