Historian Mocks Obama For Supposedly Promising to ‘Lower the Seas and Cool the Planet’

Trump apologist and historian Victor Davis Hanson took exception in a new op-ed to the Academy Awards, which he called “a monotony of hate” in which Hollywood stars “ranted on cue about the evils of President Donald Trump.”

As though there was a director orchestrating the performances. As though they were not speaking from their hearts. Because if somebody dissents from Donald Trump it can only be because they’re being paid to do so.

Hanson claimed “Such cheap rhetoric is easy” (as a Trump guy, he should know) and suggested that the confusion over an award due to the error of an accounting firm at the end of the show somehow invalidates their critique of Donald Trump’s many character defects.

Try to connect those dots if you can. And yes, this guy went to college. And somehow graduated.

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

However, the most outrageous claims Hanson makes, showing he knows more about ancient Hoplite warfare than he does about current events, were directed at President Obama:

“Former President Barack Obama nearly doubled the national debt, never achieved 3 percent economic growth in any of his eight years in office, and left the health care system in crisis. But he did manage to lecture Americans about the evils of the Crusades, and promise to lower the seas and cool the planet.”

The first part is repeating something Donald Trump said at a campaign rally on October 28:

“Obama is the first president in modern history not to have a single year of 3 percent growth.”

He is also the first president in modern history to be opposed by a political party promising to make him a one-term president and to obstruct every single action he took or proposed.

In fact, as CNBC explained back in December, “Obama’s biggest parting gift to Trump may be the economy”:

Donald Trump is heading to the White House with a pledge to revive the U.S. economy and put millions of Americans back to work.
 
Based on the latest economic data, much of that goal has already been accomplished by President Barack Obama. That includes Friday’s employment report that showed the unemployment rate had dropped to a nine year low of 4.6 percent.

President Obama presided over record private sector job growth, and not only was the economy Obama’s biggest gift to Trump (unlike the mess Obama inherited from Bush) but Trump has done all he can to take false credit for all Obama did.

President Obama brought Americans’ economic confidence to the highest level since Ronald Reagan. And Republicans have sainted Reagan.

What Trump – and Hanson – should be saying at this point is, “Thanks, Obama.”

The rest is just pissy hyperbole from a man who, like his hero Donald Trump, has clearly lost touch with the world of facts. As Investor’s Business Daily said in February, “Trump’s Progress On The Economy Lags Reagan, Bush II, Obama.”

For example, President Obama did not leave his health care system in crisis. The Republican-controlled Congress has done everything it can since the ACA was implemented, to destroy it. A historian should know to check his sources, but here Hanson is blinkered by ideology.

The crusades were evil, a dark moment in history, as a historian like Hanson should know, and President Obama was correct when he said at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast:

[D]uring the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Terrible deeds were committed in the name of Christ during the Crusades and Inquisition. Slavery and Jim Crow were justified in the name of Christ. These are facts. They are beyond dispute.

If Hanson doesn’t like them, he should just say so, rather than mocking the president for saying them. Apparently, he prefers a president who just lies about everything but says stuff he likes.

Sad.

And President Obama never promised to lower the seas or cool the planet. C’mon Hanson. Now you’re just acting like a petulant child.

Under Obama’s administration, however, carbon emissions did drop by 12 percent. Trump, on the other hand, promises to let fossil fuel companies run amok, bringing further ruin to our environment, and thus, our health, and the health of our families and children and all our descendants.

Along with a corresponding inability to deal with these issues thanks to the administration’s “less for more” Trumpcare that will leave millions of Americans uninsured.

Really, when a historian starts prattling on like this, it’s time to reconsider his value as a historian because his facts are instantly suspect.

Hanson mocks Obama for his efforts in battling climate change even as we watch Trump’s man Scott Pruitt remove the word “science” from the EPA mission.

So when Hanson mocks Obama for wanting to care for the environment upon which every one of us depends for our very lives, what he is really doing is mocking him for caring.

And that’s just shameful.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.