Why yes, it was fun Photoshopping an “I Like Ike”-style button late Monday night to promote Victor Davis Hanson’s exceedingly unlikely California gubernatorial candidacy, for a post in which Roger Simon wrote:
A case in point is our current governor Jerry Brown — elected on the hint that he (not the Republicans) was able to fix things, because he could reason with all the unions, the entrenched fiefdoms clinging to their perks and pensions. He was our “Nixon in China.” Or so he implied.
What a lie. He has done nothing of substance, not even approaching what Andrew Cuomo is attempting in New York. California has been left aborning, headed to be that failed state, our own Portugal.
Jerry should resign in favor of Victor Davis Hanson. Of course, he won’t. Jerry himself is a prime example of that therapeutic culture, a perfected version of its own inverted soul. Called a zen governor, he is no more zen than Donald Trump. He’s just another Hollywood hustler — only his hustle is politics. You just act groovy and say the right things and everything’s cool — only it’s not. Not anymore.
I’d vote for Victor if he ran. The problem with our culture, and our state, is that he won’t.
And after California chose Brown over Meg Whitman — by far the worst of the two choices available, if only given his track record in the past, I doubt very much that someone as sophisticated and erudite as VDH could actually win an election here. It brings to mind Adlai Stevenson’s legendary, though possibly apocryphal exchange with a fellow liberal during his presidential run in 1956:
A woman called out to Adlai E. Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”
Stevenson called back, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
I would never say such a disparaging thing about Americans as a whole; but at least at the moment, it seems sadly applicable to the once Golden State and the prospects of an increasingly dystopian future, as one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers described last month, using their rather colorful and more than a little PG-13 in-house language.
As for the rest of the US? Well, that brings us to Power Line’s John Hinderaker, who asks, “Does America Have A Future?”
The answer is: maybe. If the Obama administration and the Reid/Pelosi Congressional Democrats have their way, your children are doomed. But that doesn’t have to happen. Paul Ryan shows the way:
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Don’t miss this three-minute video — as Mollie Hemingway writes at Ricochet, “Never has a budget discussion been so riveting.”
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