Uncommon Knowledge with Daniel Hannan
(Scott)
Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Daniel Hannan. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Daniel Hannan, once more once, after a brief introduction.
I’d never heard of Daniel Hannan before I saw a brief interview with him on Fox News last year. In the face of the government juggernaut led by President Obama, Hannan encouraged Americans to stand up and be Americans.
Hannan had caught the attention of Fox News because his video takedown of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the European Parliament — of which he is a Conservative member — had gone viral. “The truth, Prime Minister,” Hannan said to Brown’s face, “is that you have run out of our money.”
“It’s not that you’re not apologizing,” Hannan continued. “Like everyone else I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on willfully worsening our situation…..” Oh, and also this: “You are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.” The video is now approaching three million views. You can watch it on YouTube here, or on Power Line here.
Andrew Ian Dodge provided informative background on Hannan here. I inferred from Dodge’s report that Hannan supported Obama during our presidential election campaign, which was disappointing. Hannan had in fact earlier expressed his support for Obama here. (Hannan subsequently admitted he had erred.) Listening to Hannan addressing Brown last year, however, I wondered: Where is our Daniel Hannan?
Hannan has now written The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America. The new book provides the occasion for Peter Robinson’s recent interview with Hannan. To introduce Hannan, Peter pulls another, equally pointed quote from Hannan’s speech. Speaking as an old-fashioned Churchillian friend of America and of liberty, Hannan is a man to whom attention must be paid. Through our arrangement with the Hoover Institution, we are pleased to present the interview in its entirety.
Broder’s ‘Iran War=Votes’ Column Originated With Daniel Pipes, Via Sarah Palin And Elliott Abrams
David Broder’s column yesterday, in which the once-respected journalist suggested that, “as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war [with Iran], the economy will improve,” has already come under a hail of criticism, on a number of counts.
In regard to Broder’s economic claims, Rudy DeLeon, Senior Vice President of National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, and who has many years of experience on defense issues both at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, offers this correction:
Defense spending can’t generate an economic recovery. When FDR mobilized the country to become the great “arsenal of democracy,” he was starting from the bottom. There was little shipbuilding, aircraft, or combat vehicle production in place. FDR’s economic mobilization was from the bottom up.
Obama inherits a budget already at $ 700 billion in actual spending for defense. It only supports the jobs already in place. So Broder’s claim about a defense budget bonanza is just wrong.
Broder’s misconceptions about the salutary economic effects of mobilizing for war aside, there’s also his troubling suggestion that President Obama prepare to attack Iran for the political benefits he might realize.
Marc Lynch tracks the path of this argument back to Elliott Abrams. Responding in August to Jeffrey Goldberg’s long piece about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, Abrams wrote:
The political side of all this is equally plain. Obama will, by all accounts, suffer a tremendous setback in November and may well be defeated in 2012. Should Iran acquire the Bomb in the next two years — the timetable Jeffrey suggests — Republicans will have an even stronger case that Obama has weakened our national security. The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one.
While Abrams’ piece may represent the moment when the neocon “bomb Iran for votes” argument entered the “serious” foreign policy conversation, however, the trail doesn’t end there.
Back in February, speaking to Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Sarah Palin similarly suggested that President Obama could impress people like Sarah Palin if he “decided to declare war on Iran“:
WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama will be to defeat in 2012?
PALIN: It depends on a few things. Say he played — and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day — say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided really [to] come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do, but — that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years…
WALLACE: But you’re not suggesting that he would cynically play the war card?
PALIN: I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying if he did, things would dramatically change. If he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and our allies, I think people would, perhaps, shift their thinking a little bit and decide, “Well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he’s — than he is today,” and there wouldn’t be as much passion to make sure that he doesn’t serve another four years.
Typically, Palin was fudging the truth here. She didn’t get the idea from Buchanan, as his piece condemned the idea, which originated, as far as I can tell, with neocon activist Daniel Pipes.
Five days before Palin’s interview, Pipes had written:
Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.
After Palin’s interview, Pipes immediately claimed credit, noting “It’s nice to have a major political figure endorse my idea.”
And now it’s been endorsed by “the dean of the Washington press corps.”
Britain’s brand of tea: Margaret Thatcher and Daniel Hannan
One of the great things we admire about Great Britain is one of their greatest conservative leaders of all-time, Margaret Thatcher. The “Iron Lady” was not for turning. Steadfast in her conservative principles, Thatcher took to the House of Commons to give one of her all-time famous speeches, “No! No! No!” against the federalization of Europe and against England losing it’s autonomy. Today is the 20th anniversary of that very speech.
Uncommon Knowledge with Daniel Hannan
(Scott)
I’d never heard of Daniel Hannan before I saw a brief interview with him on Fox News last year. In the face of the government juggernaut led by President Obama, Hannan encouraged Americans to stand up and be Americans.
Hannan had caught the attention of Fox News because his video takedown of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the European Parliament — of which he is a Conservative member — had gone viral. “The truth, Prime Minister,” Hannan said to Brown’s face, “is that you have run out of our money.”
“It’s not that you’re not apologizing,” Hannan continued. “Like everyone else I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on willfully worsening our situation…..” Oh, and also this: “You are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.” The video is now approaching three million views. You can watch it on YouTube here, or on Power Line here.
Andrew Ian Dodge provided informative background on Hannan here. I inferred from Dodge’s report that Hannan supported Obama during our presidential election campaign, which was disappointing. Hannan had in fact earlier expressed his support for Obama here. (Hannan subsequently admitted he had erred.) Listening to Hannan addressing Brown last year, however, I wondered: Where is our Daniel Hannan?
Hannan has now written The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warming to America. The new book provides the occasion for Peter Robinson’s recent interview with Hanann. To introduce Hannan, Peter pulls another, equally pointed quote from Hanan’s speech. Speaking as an old-fashioned Churchillian friend of America and of liberty, Hannan is a man to whom attention must be paid. Through our arrangement with the Hoover Institution, we are pleased to present the interview in its entirety.
Kim Priestap: Daniel Hannan Describes Reagan’s Greatness
So inspiring. Go read it. Daniel Hannan and Ronald Reagan both inspire me.
Daniel Hannan defends the tea parties
Grief against the tea party is not just within American shores. The British media, the liberal lemmings that they are, report on the false premise that the tea party is a racist, eccentric group, out of the norm, and irrelevant. Of course, we conservatives know otherwise.
Daniel Hannan came in staunch defense of the tea parties, in various US and British media, as the more moderate and reasonable party as opposed to the democrats. Hannan sounds better than some of the republicans in DC!
J Street Co-Founder Daniel Levy: the Go-To Guy for the Hate-Israel-First Media
Daniel Levy is the archetype of a media-friendly Middle East analyst. He has a pedigree of far left-wing government activism that allows journalists to label him a “veteran diplomat.” He’s available to turn convoluted geopolitical struggles into simplistic conspiracies, valorizing Walt and Mearsheimer while ginning up outrage toward shadowy neoconservatives. He’ll advocate all the proper bien pensant positions – Iran and Hamas should be coaxed, Israel should be pressured, and politicians who agree with that should be admired – in exquisitely pseudo-sophisticated terms. He’s even somewhat of a journalist and media figure himself, with a personal blog and a presence on the Huffington Post.
Even more importantly, journalists covering Levy’s anti-Israel talking points can write that he comes from a Jewish organization, since he co-founded and continues to sit on the board of advisors of J Street. Instant credibility! And so he ends up everywhere.
J Street itself has just wrapped up quite the week, what with all the admitting they’re foot soldiers in Soros’s anti-Israel army after lying about it for years and then trying to get ahead of the story by lying about it some more. Most of the criticism has focused on co-founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, who did not exactly fall on his sword and instead tried to hamfistedly change the subject. But it’s probably unfair to blame him for all of J Street’s failings, from rigging polls to being more anti-Israel than the Saudis to expressing fake confusion about Hamas’s intentions.
Per Eli Lake’s first story, Ben-Ami seems to have been the one who did most of the “misleading” about J Street’s fundraising, from furtively squirreling away Soros’s cash to opaquely raising 50% of the group’s 2008 money from a single foreign source.
But per Lake’s second article, when it came time to shuttle Richard Goldstone around D.C. and peddle his endlessly inaccurate and venomously biased libels around the Hill, J Street delegated the task to one of the adults in the organization. It was J Street co-founder, advisory board member, and international socialite Daniel Levy “who accompanied the judge to several of the [10-12] parleys” with Congress. It was also Levy’s New America Foundation that hosted a high-caliber lunch for Goldstone with “a group of analysts and Middle East wonks.”
The Goldstone tour wasn’t the first time that Levy willingly served as a channel for de facto Hamas propaganda. He’s been a tireless advocate of pro-Hamas diplomacy, and sees the Iranian proxy as an integral part of Palestinian civil society. A few years ago Noah Pollak took him out to the woodshed for historical revisionism that seemed jarringly anti-Israel and borderline anti-Zionist.
If sometimes it seems like Levy doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending, it’s because he kind of doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending. You can be confident on that point because he said so himself – quite definitively – at last May’s Fifth Al Jazeera Forum. Levy was on a panel with Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor-in-chief Abdel Bari Atwan, NAF Strategic Program Director Steve Clemons, surreal Hamas apologist and one-stater Allister Sparks, and accused terrorist Basheer Nafi.
I’ve obtained a transcript of Levy’s remarks. They conclude with him asserting that it’s “natural” for Gazans to want to attack Israelis on account of the ostensibly unbearable situation in the Strip or something, and with him nonetheless urging Palestinians to hold off on their genocidal campaigns because those aren’t very strategic or disciplined.
But the most ideologically pointed part was just before those musings. Levy quite explicitly revealed that he thinks that Israel’s creation was a “an act that was wrong.” Quote unquote. For good measure he added that “there’s no reason a Palestinian should think there was justice” in Israel’s founding. Gamely, he also implied that had he been a diplomat in 1948, he would have been so overwrought at the incineration of six million Jewish souls that he would have deemed the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland “excused.” Generous!
I’ve put the full quote, in all of its prevaricating nuance, at the bottom of this post. Begin reading it for the risible claims of Hamas pragmatism, and stay around for the spectacle of a “pro-Israel” activist dismissing the moral basis for Israel as misguided and historically fleeting. In the middle, don’t miss how the only flavor of Zionism he’s willing to support is a kind that exists only in his mind.
In fairness, you can’t blame him for the “natural” violence stuff too much. There aren’t a lot of places you can argumentatively go after something as blunt as “an act that was wrong.” Once you’ve embraced the anti-Israel version of Middle East history – where the revival of the Jewish State was an ethically injudicious colonialist overreaction to the Holocaust rather than a centuries-old legally-codified international movement – you can’t then forcefully insist that Jews have an ethical right to live securely in the Holy Land. Because those two things mean the opposite of each other.
No wonder J Street wants to redefine “pro-Israel” to justify their rhetorically creepy “we beat up Israelis for their own good, and it hurts us more than it hurts them” campaign. The group’s directors are beholden to major anti-Israel donors. They have political skin in anti-Israel diplomatic gambits. And their personal feelings about the Jewish State leave them no room for speaking out in defense of Israel’s ethical legitimacy, legal basis, or strategic importance. So they end up shilling for Hamas in Congress. At least that’s consistent.
Anyway, to preempt the inevitable claim that Levy was taken out of context, here’s the extended quote:
One can be a utilitarian two-stater, in other words think that the practical pragmatic way forward is two states. This is my understanding of the current Hamas position. One can be an ideological two-stater, someone who believes in exclusively the Palestinian self-determination and in Zionism; I don’t believe that it’s impossible to have a progressive Zionism. Or one can be a one-stater. But in either of those outcomes we’re going to live next door to each other or in a one state disposition. And that means wrapping one’s head around the humanity of both sides. I believe the way Jewish history was in 1948 excused – for me, it was good enough for me – an act that was wrong. I don’t expect Palestinians to think that. I have no reason – there’s no reason a Palestinian should think there was justice in the creation of Israel.
WaPo Offers Up Gauzy Review of the ‘Tropical Reign’ of Hawaii Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye
King Kamehameha’s got nothing on Sen. Daniel Inouye (D). The former may have united the island kingdom of Hawai’i in 1810, but the latter’s been a reliable vehicle of federal taxpayer pork for the Aloha State for more than 50 years.
That, in a nutshell is the thrust of "Tropical reign," today’s Style section front page profile of the 86-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate:
More than any other statesman in the history of these volcanic islands — more than Kamehameha the Great, who united them into a kingdom in 1810, or Gov. John Burns, who led the political revolution that established Democratic Party rule here in 1954 — Inouye, 86, has ruled over Hawaii.
As the federal funding he has provided has grown, his political opposition has waned. Hawaiians have voted for Inouye for 56 years, first for territorial representative in 1954, then for Congress in 1959. In 1963, he became the nation’s first Japanese American senator. His uninterrupted stretch of service in the country’s most exclusive chamber is the second-longest in history behind the recently deceased Robert Byrd, whom Inouye replaced as the Senate’s senior member and president pro tempore in June. That position, ceremonial though it is, puts him third in line to succeed the president.
To be fair, Inouye, a Japanese-American World War II war hero, is an interesting subject for a profile piece. But while the September 2 commemoration of the 65th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri was where the Post’s Jason Horowitz opened his 63-paragraph story, the vast bulk of the profile was devoted to Inouye as a sort-of de facto boss figure in Hawaiian Democratic politics in Hawaii and steady source of federal spending on the island.
On both counts there are bound to be critics, especially for a politician with over 50 years in office, yet Horowitz presented Inouye as a man with virtually few enemies or detractors:
In the 20 years after the loss [of Inouye's bid to be Democratic majority leader], Inouye has focused on bringing money back to Hawaii with an intensity that has exponentially expanded his local power. In his 1992 reelection campaign, allegations of sexual misconduct received remarkably little traction in the political establishment or local media.
"In Hawaii, there is what is called a reservoir of aloha, a buildup of goodwill," said Rick Reed, the 1992 Republican Senate candidate who tried to make the allegations an issue and now sells cars and writes nonfiction in Washington state. "And for a lot of people, Inouye had that."
("I’m happy that most of the people believed in me," Inouye said when asked about the lack of a commotion over the allegations.)
Photo of Inouye greeting Marines aboard the USS Missouri via Marco Garcia for the Washington Post.
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias
Daniel Hannan to America: Get Off the Road to Serfdom and Actualize the American Ideal!
Last week, European Parliament member Daniel Hannan promoted his new book,
One never knows what to expect from a man who is known for being
Hannan highlighted the political mores shared by both the United Kingdom and the U.S., acknowledging the tremendous traditions of both countries that have “helped to keep the torch of freedom lit” in the world. A self-proclaimed “Jeffersonian” in his democratic philosophy, he related often to his love of our American system of constitutional rule of law, which he referred to as the “American ideal,” the ideal system of government. Stressing the importance of the U.S. Constitution, he added that the unique American system has worked better than any rival in history.
Hannan offered several points of what he calls “an absurd comparison” between the respective governments of both the U.S. and the EU: the 7,200 words of the U.S. Constitution compared to the EU constitution of 78,000 words, the inherent freedom of the individual of the U.S. versus the solidified power of the European super-state, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” triumphing over the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The major difference, according to Hannan, is the necessary dispersal of power to individuals and local governments for a more federalist, democratically representative body of diverse states rather than consolidation leading to less pluralism, diversity, and competition and overall a less prosperous model of government. The difference between what Hannan calls “your future” (the current state of Europe) and our own country is that there is a distinct attempt to change the American republic into something that it isn’t.
When asked why he has so much confidence in the people, Hannan replied, “Because all other alternatives put ‘the experts’ in charge.” He pointed out that the U.S. is built upon the tradition of rule of law and the sound authority of the Constitution. The U.S. political philosophy is then established by honoring these principles. He closed with a word of hope, saying, “Honor the vision of your founders … and respect the Constitution.” By doing this, he said, we can in fact “actualize the American ideal.”
Daniel Hannan frequently travels to the U.S. and is no stranger to The Heritage Foundation. He paid his first visit in 2005 as a member of a
Aaron Buchhop is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit:
The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
Daniel Hannan warns America of creeping socialism in speech at the CATO Institute
On September 29th at the CATO Institute, Daniel Hannan, spoke about his new book,The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America. He urges Americans to be mindful of all the attributes that made America great: federalism, the rule of law, and limited government. He warns that these characteristics that make America so unique, can be gone in a whim as it has in Europe. Hannan notes, as all of us do in the tea party movement, that the democrats are pushing us towards a European-style socialism and we better make a difference in the upcoming elections.
