An Excess of Bile

Why, one might ask, is Victor Davis Hanson driven to sarcasm, the lowest form of humor, in this attack on President Obama and his policies? One of the things that I like about Hanson, and there aren't many, is that he usually expresses himself clearly. But this article is almost incoherent with Hanson's rage at all things left of Fresno. Why?

A great deal of the right's rage at Mr. Obama, the Democratic Congress, and everything on the left side of the aisle is driven by their fear that they may be shown to have been wrong. Hanson accuses President Obama and the Democrats of arrorgance and of hubris. Yet this is exactly what Hanson himself has been demonstrating for year. The right was so sure that their mantra of low taxes, small government, deregulation, and business domination of the economy would lead to a paradise on earth. Instead, the level-headed businessmen, always brought up in invidious comparisons to government employees and bureaucrats, screwed the pooch. The small businessmen, to whom Hanson attributes the means of economic recovery, let their greed get the better of their sense and sold mortgages to people who couldn't make the payments.

The entire worldview of the right, which is, in its way, a Jeffersonian view, has been shaken. But they can't give it up, and they do so want the next national catastrophe to be the fault of the left, so that people will forgive the right for the Great Depression. So they are actually hoping that the Obama administration will fail. They are hoping for more economic disaster, more foreclosures, more unemployment, more businesses going under. The fact that many of their fellow Americans would suffer greatly is a small price to pay for proving themselves right.