Our local paper — the venerable San Francisco Chronicle has started to feature the work of the excellent Victor Davis Hanson. This is a big step forward, as the Chron’s lefty editorial page now gets a regular infusion — however infrequent — of the anti-Islamofascist perspective. Granted, that the Chron features the likes of like Molly Ivins and Robert Scheer — both “traditional leftists” — much more frequently. Nevertheless, I welcome the move towards more balance and inclusion.

You can count on Hanson — a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — for thoughtful commentary on a wide range of matters.

One of his latest pieces, which ran in the Chron the other day, focuses on the new round of Bush nominations including John Bolton, whom Jason talked about a little bit previously.

John Bolton, the hawk on North Korea, was named ambassador to the U.N. This was not a gesture calculated to show that a contrite United States was now seeking accommodation with the U.N. hierarchy; Bolton is expected, rather, to deploy his tough talk and iron spine to shake up a corrupt institution reeling from scandals. Nor was Paul Wolfowitz relegated to the World Bank as punishment for his neo-Wilsonian stance in the Middle East: He was elevated to the institution’s presidency precisely to inject that same sort of democratic idealism into determining the extension or withdrawal of international loans.

Another recent piece makes the excellent point that the United States ought not to expect — nor strive — to be liked:

Last year the hysteria about the hostility toward the United States reached a fevered pitch. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to our Hollywood elite lamented that America had lost its old popularity. It was a constant promise of the Kerry campaign to restore our good name and “to work with our allies.” The more sensitive were going to undo the supposed damage of the last four years. Whole books have been devoted to this peculiar new anti-Americanism, but few have asked whether or not such suspicion of the United States is, in fact, a barometer of what we are doing right — and while not necessarily welcome, at least proof that we are on the correct track.

It’s nice to have a voice like Hanson’s in our local “paper of record.” Check him out, regularly.

April 29th, 2005 | Economics, Global War On Terror, Liberty, Politics, UN Corruption

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