Two Stories, One Story - Or, Chuck and Vic Strike Again!

Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson are, with Mark Steyn, in my triumverate of pundits whom I will read no matter what.   Here's Krauthammer on the hypocrisy of the Obama 2012 campaign, which self-evidently seeks to divide Americans along race, gender, class and ethnic lines, only four years after he ran as the "great uniter," the great healer of divisions:

The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone. 


What to do? Try fear. Create division, stir resentment, by whatever means necessary — bogus court challenges, dead-end Senate bills, and a forest of straw men.


Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo-ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6–3, the majority including that venerated liberal, John Paul Stevens.

Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one. Are Stevens, Carter, and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black?

And here, in a nearly perfect statement, is Hanson, writing on the nearly sociopathic attitudes of Obama cabinet secretaries like Hilda Solis, Tim Geithner, Stephen Chu, and Eric Holder:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1 percent, which already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90 percent — to pay more for what he calls “the privilege of being an American.” Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children’s camp costs as a dependent-care deduction....

Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green companies like Solyndra, First Solar, and Solar Trust of America — the Teapot Dome scandals of our times. Chu infamously quipped before assuming office that he wanted U.S. gas prices to reach European levels. Apparently Chu wanted to force a decrease in fossil-fuel burning — although he later confessed that he does not drive a car....

The common theme with these cabinet secretaries is loud, uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry — and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite different ones for the rest of us.

What do these two stories have in common?

They.   Think.   We're.   Stupid.

God, do I despise these people.